The Smash-Up, Ali Benjamin's first novel for adults, is an eviscerating and hilarious look at the destabilizing effect of 2018's confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on a marriage--not one of political opposites, but of ostensibly like-minded liberals.
Ethan and Zenobia Frome live in small-town Starkfield, Mass. (Benjamin will gesture several times toward Edith Wharton's novel.) Fifteen years earlier, they left Brooklyn so that "Zo could make her films in peace" and "Ethan could write novels, maybe a screenplay or two." It hasn't worked out that way.
After Zo attended the Women's March with some local women, they formed All Them Witches, which meets regularly at the Frome house. Ethan understands their outrage, but he's noticed that Zo's anger seems to be keeping her from her work.
Ethan has been awaiting the money owed to him by Bränd, the marketing firm that he and his college buddy Randy started two decades earlier, but there's a clog in the cash pipeline: as the novel opens, Ethan learns that Randy has been publicly called out for the sort of behavior that would make All Them Witches want to see the man's head on a pike. Worse, Randy is appealing to Ethan to fix the problem.
Perhaps a novel fueled by 2018's emotions-churning confirmation hearings was inevitable; what wasn't inevitable was that the book would be this good. Punching neither up nor down but to the side, Benjamin (The Thing About Jellyfish) takes aim at a contemporary attitude that would have flummoxed Edith Wharton. As one of Benjamin's characters puts it, "When did we all fall so in love with our own opinions?" --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer