Crush A novel

Readers of Calhoun's nonfiction, most recently Also a Poet (2022), will recognize many autobiographical underpinnings in her first novel, raising questions of where fiction diverges from fact. But suspense is the primary draw for this angsty, metaphysical, literature-besotted love story. The brainy, funny, rigorously analytical, and determined narrator chronicles her path to marriage, motherhood, and reconciliation as she supports her husband and son by writing, ghostwriting, and teaching while also running the household, helping her parents, and studiously sublimating desire. The thanks she gets? Her husband says she's "too good" and suggests opening their marriage to flirtations, initiating a time of risky ambiguity and emotional roulette. Their polyamory might not have turned into a total minefield if the narrator hadn't contacted a crush from college, David, "bookish and smoldering," now a religion professor in another state. They begin exchanging wildly erudite and delving texts and emails, and soon their intellectual and spiritual cyber passion wholly consumes them. Calhoun's narrator seeks guidance in a kaleidoscopic array of books, deeply investigating marriage, fidelity, lust, responsibility, and integrity as her epistolary romance races toward the carnal. Crush (such a charged word) interrogates all that we think we know about love and soul mates, commitment and conviction, while tracking the long struggle to fully become oneself and do right.

A happily married wife and mother discovers the crazy joy of a new love. Calhoun's debut novel, following the wonderful memoirAlso a Poet (2022), is chock-full of great lines, both hers and quotations from other writers. At the beginning of the extramarital emotional affair that is the subject of the novel, she observes, "Crushes had always made me feel powerful. This was the opposite. I was lit up, but I wasn't in control. None of my old tricks worked anymore. I was rich in a defunct currency. A trillion zloty and I couldn't buy a stick of gum." While the whole situation begins when her husband, Paul, suggests that they incorporate some flexibility into their marriage, the unnamed narrator's interest in David, "a handsome friend from college," quickly outstrips any planned limits and becomes completely consuming. After six weeks of email correspondence comprising 182,000 words in total, they meet on Zoom with cataclysmic results: "We stared at each other. I thought I might die; the cause of death would be a desire to tousle his hair." Readers ofAlso a Poet will notice that the narrator's cranky, ailing, self-centered father seems an autobiographical element, and will appreciate the satisfying resolution of the relationship offered here. The novel bogs down a bit once the crush has peaked; it gets less funny and creeps toward annoyingly rhapsodic. "Since David and I had started talking, I'd had more new experiences than at any time since babyhood, when I was learning to walk and talk and eat solid food. Loving him had been my liberation. Everything had blown up and everything seemed deliriously possible." But of those possibilities, the one that occurs is exactly what you would expect. Oh, well. That's delirium for you. Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.