The Love Letter (ca. early 1770s) | Jean Honoré Fragonard / Public Domain
Crush is a book about promoting a book. Author Ada Calhoun opens the novel (Viking, 2025) with an explanation: The unnamed narrator has always had crushes that have never made her stray from her marriage, a quality that also has served her well in her work as a ghostwriter. A one-sided relationship is just fine, whether she’s making eyes at someone without ever making a move or throwing her energy and talents into supporting a book published under someone else’s byline. She assures us that she is “truly satisfied letting other people take credit.” And the fact that her husband Paul’s “artist’s life,” which involves a lot of dabbling in sculpture and guitar, is also definitely not a source of resentment. “Worth more to me than any amount of money was the knowledge that my husband was a kind, loving father to our teenage son.” They have “great sex,” though they haven’t kissed in years. Paul suggests she kiss a few men. She agrees.
She emails David, an old college friend and “handsome” religion professor. David’s reply is full of praise for her previous book. “In his rave,” she tells us, “I thought I saw a blurring of his affection for the work and for me.”
Calhoun frames the flirtation not just as a literary crush but in terms of book publicity. Blurring personal connections and artistic endorsements, she explains, is what makes the blurb industry run. To get their new book out there, authors tap writer friends to elevate their jacket copy with ecstatic commendations. In praising her work, if only in email, the narrator’s crush is participating in this culture of back-scratching. That is, when David compliments her book, he is really saying he likes its author.
Our narrator finds the prospect of a mutual crush exciting, even though she knows others view these blurred boundaries more cynically. Calhoun describes another writer, Veronica, “burned one too many times by blurbs heralding books as unputdownable when she’d found them to be, in fact, quite putdownable.” The narrator and David fire off a volley of emails to each other that get longer and more amorous as Calhoun’s quite putdownable book progresses.
Crush is marketed as a novel that uses “the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point,” and similarities between the narrator’s father and Calhoun’s—Peter Schjeldahl, the longtime art critic at The New Yorker until his death in 2023—are striking. In Crush, “my father” writes “modernist tomes” and snaps at his daughter and wife. Book tours and celebrity connections are met with disgust: “When I told him about interviews I was doing, thinking he’d be proud he said, ‘Promotion uber alles, huh?’” I imagined an eager little girl stacking up book publicity like cheerleading medals to show her daddy that she is worth praising.
There’s something sad about this entire book. The narrator’s affair may be, as Molly Ringwald promises in the blurb, a “fever dream,” and the jacket copy assures us that the book is both “funny” and “revelatory.” But at no point can the narrator admit that she’s also experiencing what’s known as a midlife crisis—a crippling awareness of the futility of her blurbs, her ghostwriting, her errands, her marriage.
Instead, the narrator insists on her affair’s spiritual import: “In my state of limerence I’d somehow passed mindfulness and intentionality and entered a new state of total presence.” David provides divine inspiration after her separation from Paul, enabling her to take chances, like going on a writer’s retreat. The Scottish forest outside her castle window is “battered by pelting rain—and howling wind.” She goes from Gothic pastiche to cloying almost immediately. But when I want her to be sincere she dodges: “When this time at the castle was over I would return home to an apartment full of ghosts, to no husband, no father, no money, and no limerent either.” “My life has no purpose but to serve others!” I want her to scream. The affair, she tells us, has shaken off her delusions. But in a tragedy Calhoun seems only vaguely aware of, the narrator is simply replacing her old people-pleasing habits with new ones.
Calhoun herself has worked as a ghostwriter, and in her memoir, Also a Poet, she describes the process of writing someone else’s: “I asked for a sample of writing that worked. Then I spent hours mapping the grammar of that sample, line by line, onto each story I’d been told. That book came out on time, and it, too, hit the New York Times bestseller list.” Next time around, she could just use ChatGPT⏤another eager-to-please writing machine.
Mallarmé says that everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book. In Crush, everything in the world exists in order to end up in a blurb.
