Crush
Feels like a brainy rom-com that could have been adapted by the late great Nora Ephron ... [A] literary delight ... The sexual tension and intellectual patter that makes this book a delicious escape ... Reveals the sly ways we delude ourselves into accepting what’s good enough and the liberating ways we can recover our joie de vivre as well as our autonomy.
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Clever one-liners pop all over these pages as she describes her happy adult life ... Calhoun’s cleverest feat is blowing us along in this whirlwind of desire and possibility ... If you’ve been married or ever lived in an actual physical body, you probably have a pretty good idea of how this works out for everyone involved. But Calhoun makes the ride back down the mountain a lot of fun.
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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 ... 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 ... 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.
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