I don’t read contemporary novels. The last book I finished was Beneath the Wheel by Herman Hesse, published in 1906: the story of a troubled adolescent in the Black Forest. But I was sent a copy of Crush, and found it smart and fun. Crush is what they call a “summer read,” I guess: a book to amuse you while you repose on a striped towel at the beach, or in your whitewashed Adirondack chair. The prose is confiding, witty, spry, disarming, trustworthy.
The nameless female narrator is married, lives in Brooklyn, has a teenage son. Her life is pleasant, but taxing. She’s a ghostwriter, as well as a nonfiction author. Her husband Paul is a sculptor and a musician, and doesn’t bring in much money.
It all begins innocently when Paul remarks, “I know you love kissing. And I know that’s never really been our thing. What if I said I’d be okay with you kissing another man?”
“What, like an open marriage?” she replies. “That’s insane. No. I’m fine without that.”
“But what if I might even enjoy if you did that?” Paul persists.
On a research jaunt to the British Library, she looks up an old friend, Ryan. They stay up late eating French fries and drinking beer, and finally… her tongue’s in his mouth:
His mouth tasted like beer and salty popcorn. I felt like I had as a teenager, learning what felt good and what felt even better. His body pressed against mine, and I thought, Yes! This! I want this!
Soon afterwards, she gets in touch with David, “a handsome friend from college with whom I’d happily have been locked in a closet.” He’s a professor, a bachelor, whose nickname around campus is “The Monk.” The two of them become frantic correspondents, exchanging emails about philosophy, literature, pop music several times a day. (David compiles the first six weeks of their conversations into a document 182,000 words long.) Together they learn the word “limerence,” a term coined in the 1970s to describe out-of-control obsession. “At peak crystallization, almost all waking thoughts revolve around the limerent object,” reads one definition. She and David become each other’s limerent object.
Much of their conversation is on the subject of love. David supplies this quote from Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore: “The feeling which I had was like that which a man, groping through the fog without knowing his destination, might feel when he suddenly discovers that he stands before his own house.”
As this passage suggests, there are parallels between the ecstasies of romantic love and the bliss of religious mysticism. Both paths transform the universe into a home.
She quotes Leonard Cohen: “The only way to avoid seasickness is to become the ocean.” David explains Nietzsche’s theory of amor fati — the capacity to love one’s own fate.
At times it’s unclear whether this is a love affair or a PhD dissertation.
(Meanwhile, Paul is pressuring our hero to read Polysecure, the Bible of the open marriage movement.)
It’s remarkable how productive the narrator is, once she falls in love: she plays Uno with her son, cleans the house, makes dinner, has a successful career, while simultaneously reading every book David recommends, and sending a torrent of emails his way. It’s as if everyone is chronically depressed, and only when we find romance do we momentarily become functional.
But what will happen to our hero’s life? She lists five possible outcomes: 1) stoic renunciation, 2) elopement, 3) a long-term affair, 4) double suicide, 5) pure sublimation (chastely transforming savage emotions into art). You can torture me, but I won’t reveal the ending. In a sense, Crush is a “suspense” novel, because you can’t predict which option she’ll choose.
One meaning of the title is “being flattened by a heavy weight.” Infatuation can be a burden.
I must confess that I have a personal connection to Ada Calhoun. In 1987, my wife and I started a zine (a tiny self-published newspaper called The 11th St. Ruse, to be exact). Ada, then 14, bought a copy of our newspaper for 25 cents at the Saint Marks Bookshop (in the East Village) and wrote us a fan letter. I’ve been corresponding with her ever since — in fact, I “owe” her a letter at the moment. I’m quoted in three of Ada’s books, including her previous work, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me.
But since I’m not cited in this novel, I think I can be objective.
My friend Sandy, who herself is a Generation X woman who’s fallen in love with someone besides her husband, read Crush and said: “I really liked it, but the main character made herself too holy.”
Can one be too holy?
Join the family! 
