The Smash-Up
A Novel
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3.3 • 11 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Smart, sublime, and wickedly clever, The Smash-Up captures—then transcends—our current polarized moment
“An exhilarating ride . . . hilarious . . . a modern and energetic story about a marriage on the skids.”—The New York Times
Ethan has always been one of the good guys, and for years, nobody has appreciated this fact more than his wife, Zo. Until now. Jolted into activism by the 2016 election, Zo’s transformed their home into the headquarters for the local resistance, turning their comfortable decades-long marriage inside-out.
Meanwhile, their boisterous daughter, Alex, grows wilder by the day. Ethan’s former business partner needs help saving the media company they’d co-founded. Financial disaster looms. Enter a breezy, blue-haired millennial making her way through the gig economy. Suddenly Ethan faces a choice unlike any he’s ever had to make.
Unfolding over fivet urbulent days in 2018, The Smash-Up wrestles shrewdly with some of the biggest questions of our time: What, exactly, does it mean to be a good guy? What will it take for men to break the “bro code”? How does the world respond when a woman demands more? Can we ever understand another's experiences… and what are the consequences of failing to try? Moving, funny, and cathartic, this portrait of a marriage—and a nation—under strain is, ultimately, a magic trick of empathy, one that will make you laugh and squirm until its final, breathless pages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
YA author Benjamin (The Thing About Jellyfish) revisits Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome in her adult debut, an ambitious if schematic novel of middle-aged liberal angst. Having cofounded a successful guerrilla marketing start-up, Br nd, Ethan Frome leaves New York City in the early 2000s for a quiet life in the Berkshires with his wife, Zo. In 2016, Donald Trump's election marks a turning point: "It was good until it wasn't. All of it: The town. His marriage. Their finances. The world." Ethan is a common, though well-drawn, fictional type: an ironic, middle-aged underachiever beset by temptation (here it's the live-in babysitter), yet too decent, or timid, to force the moment to its crisis. Zo, meanwhile, is part of a feminist activist group called All Them Witches and an independent filmmaker who has grown increasingly distant and enraged. With Zo fuming over Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, Ethan becomes entangled, somewhat implausibly, in the #MeToo movement: his boorish Br nd cofounder asks him to help silence a Hollywood actress whose accusations could bring down the company. With satire and suspense, Benjamin handily encapsulates the incomprehension, sadness, and rage of the Trump era.
