Crushed to pieces

A novel that appears to be about romantic fixations morphs into a veiled account of the writer's marriage break-up.

- BY CHERYL PEARL SUCHER

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).