The love child of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love” and Carrie Bradshaw’s “Sex and the City” column, Ada Calhoun’s debut novel, “Crush,” tells the promising story of an unnamed Gen X woman whose husband, Paul, suggests she kiss a few other men to regain her “sparkle.” Slay, droned my rotted Gen Z brain on reading this.
Unfortunately, not so. She spends the rest of the book trying not to cheat on him with a hot, nerdy religion professor named David, and feeling bad about it instead. Which is a shame, because although there is nothing inherently objectionable about a novel describing one woman’s extramarital crisis, it does seem a less inspired choice than a novel about one woman’s midlife experience of peacefully forming a fun little polycule.
Nevertheless: We meet our narrator as the sole breadwinner of her house, a successful author contentedly holding down several writing jobs while her husband fails at making art and avoids kissing her for 18 years. “My mother was impressed,” she says, “that I’d built a life where I could have so much, with a man who even cooked.” Divorce is off the table, we are given to understand, because no healthy child has ever been reared in a broken home; besides, she really does love Paul — even though their few meaningful conversations regard seeing other people.
Only occasionally do I feel moved to write a review in the first person, usually when I sense that any critique of the book might be outweighed (positively or negatively) by my own unavoidable biases. Here, I’ll admit I may be too generationally estranged from Calhoun’s worldview to understand where she’s coming from. I don’t deny that in the year of our Lord 2025 women still have plenty of obstacles to overcome. But the ones the narrator in “Crush” is battling belong to someone born in 1910, not the late ’70s. “I wanted to send word to my generational cohort,” Calhoun writes. “Don’t we make our own cages? When we rattle the bars don’t we often find that they are made of cardboard?”
Frequently, I found myself reminding her of the same thing. “Crushes were how you stayed a little bit in love with the world even though you had a husband,” one line goes. “And how safe a feeling it was inside one relationship to imagine other men stacked around protectively, like sandbags.” To which I found myself in the margins writing, Girl, stand UP! several times over. I lived to regret it.
The emotional affair with David starts 40 pages in. The following 100 pages consist of emails so long that six weeks of correspondence totals 182,000 words. These exchanges assuage the illicit nature of the pair’s love by referencing Emerson’s “Friendship.” But also Nietzsche’s amor fati and the 12th-century romance between Abélard and Héloïse.
When at last David suggests meeting in person, she hesitates for Paul’s sake, until she learns, in a deus ex machina for the ages, that Paul has had his own affair. “This news was terrible in so many ways, but in at least one it was fantastic,” she thinks. “I was in love with someone else and yet Paul was apologizing to me.” It’s only hard because Paul’s affair, it turns out, lacks the “holiness” of her own.
Incredibly, that’s not a joke. And this is the rub. “Crush” is set in a post-pandemic world recent enough for our protagonist to reflect on Taylor Swift’s line “about how she used to grind a cold ax for her exes and now she buys their babies presents,” but not recent enough for her to benefit from Sandra Hüller’s infinitely less pious “Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner” speech in 2023’s “Anatomy of a Fall.”
Fair enough — except this oversight is presented as a “spiritual path” rather than straight-up farce. “The community loves sacrifice, and you’ve done that well,” a friend advises the narrator. “But no, it’s not honest. Deep down, I think you want more and that you’re angry. And that you’re right to be.” Is she? There’s a thin line between self-care and narcissism. I am all for badly behaved protagonists having morally questionable sex, but some of the mirth and much of the philosophical heft of Calhoun’s setup goes out the window when it’s presented as a Stendhal-quoting, mildly self-righteous treatise on finding yourself, by a bored, middle-class woman with a functioning bank account and a capable brain who is needlessly complicating her mediocre marriage.
The novel’s intended comedy does land at unexpected moments, such as when the narrator refers to her sometimes pen pal, the actor Tom Hanks, as “an inspiration, like the poet W.H. Auden”; or when she decides that “to Paul I needed to show appreciation. And so I not only continued to sleep with him, but I also took him on a weekend trip.” It’s difficult to tell whether such lines are rare moments of satire or so sincerely unhinged as to be touched by God, but either way, I’d like to buy Calhoun a drink.
“Crush” provoked in me a genuine unease over the astonishingly delusional kind of egotism upon which this contemporary happiness is bred and applauded. “The point was not that I found a man who could please me,” the narrator triumphantly declares at the novel’s end. “The point was that I learned how to accept pleasure.” May that kind of pleasure, as the current parlance goes, never find me.
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