Book of the day: Crush by Ada Calhoun

Ada Calhoun: Updating the epistolary romance novel. Photo / Jena Cumbo

American writer Ada Calhoun’s talent is undeniable. Her books include St Marks Is Dead, an epistle to the long-lost creative and erotic adventurousness of Manhattan’s beatnik Lower East Side; Why We Can’t Sleep, an operating manual for Gen X women facing midlife crises; and the staggering Also a Poet, a
tender and candid memoir examining her fraught relationship with her famous father, the poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl, through her completion of his unfinished biography of the seminal American poet Frank O’Hara.

At first glance, Calhoun’s first novel, Crush, appears to be about crazy romantic fixations. “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.”

But you quickly realise that Calhoun’s Crush isn’t about such limerence at all; it is a thinly veiled account of the actual crush of the author’s 18-year marriage to a self-proclaimed performance artist named Paul (in the novel).

He is immersed in creating art while she toils like a boilermaker on endless journalistic and ghostwriting gigs (including, reportedly, Britney Spears’ memoir) to support him and their precocious only son. The narrator believes she still loves Paul because he cooks and is constant (so she believes), even though he hates kissing (which she loves). She deeply resents the burden placed on her by his life of leisure. The crisis in their marriage occurs when he suggests that she kiss a few other men to regain her “sparkle”. What Paul really wants, however, isn’t for her to attend to her appearance but to consent to an open marriage – technically polycule, polyamory or ENM, ethical non-monogamy.

Like many overworked spouses attempting to earn a living while maintaining a household, the unnamed narrator hasn’t had the time or the energy to even consider the thrill of new erotic experiences. She is exhausted. But Paul is game and even aroused by the thought of his wife’s potential sexual experimentation. The only proviso is that she can’t fall in love.

Like Calhoun, the narrator was raised as one of the only children in a free-love community riven by messy break-ups and painful divorces. And like Calhoun, the narrator is coping with the imminent death of her famous narcissistic father undergoing treatment for late-stage cancer.

The narrator and her lubricious husband agree on the parameters of their polyamory. She can indulge in her desire to kiss other men but she can’t fall for them. Like a trapped Victorian housewife clinging to Anglican values and societal expectations, she has denied herself personal satisfaction. However, lo and behold, she falls deeply, intellectually and spiritually in love with David, a professor at an esteemed university on the opposite coast. They engage in an ardent epistolary love affair, sending messages to one another night and day that escalate in erotic anticipation and literary references.

Naturally, Paul becomes jealous of his wife’s new obsession. After he confesses that he has already indulged in an extramarital tryst, the narrator succumbs to her desire and arranges to meet David at an academic convention. She swears that they will meet only once.

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Who was she fooling? When they finally meet, they spend the weekend in bed having rapturous sex. However, I admit losing it when the sex is described as a levitating, transcendent experience where she becomes one with the universe and knows God.

Hyperbole aside, Crush is a charming diversion if approached as a contemporary updating of a 19th-century epistolary romance novel. Imagine if Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning wrote incessant emails to one another.

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Some critics have called Crush a memoir, though Calhoun insisted, “If even 1% of a book is made up, it’s fiction. You can’t be a little bit pregnant, and you can’t make up only a little bit of your non-fiction. Not everyone agrees. In a memoir, I would never, as one famous memoirist said she would, turn a scarf blue from red if that fitted the sentence’s cadence better. Especially because, in a novel, guess what you get to do? Make the scarf any colour. Make the scarf a snake.”

In Crush, the scarf is a snake, as evidenced by the fact that between completing the novel and its publication Calhoun changed its dedication and left her husband. The crush of the union was poisoned.

Crush, by Ada Calhoun (Viking, $65 hb), is out now.

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