The Smash-Up

by Ali Benjamin

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593229651
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/23/2021
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Ali Benjamin is the author of the young adult novel The Thing About Jellyfish, an international bestseller and a National Book Award finalist. Her The Next Great Paulie Fink was named a top children’s book of the year by Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, the New York Public Library, and the Los Angeles Public Library. Her work has been published in more than twenty-five languages in more than thirty countries. Originally from the New York City area, she now lives in Massachusetts. This is her first adult novel.

Read an Excerpt

“What happened?”

Everyone asked the question, had been asking for over a year. They asked while watching the news, that shitstorm of headlines, jump-cut footage of marches and speeches and hand-Sharpied cardboard, an endless swirling blizzard—a siege, really—of protests and counter-protests, action and reaction, people screaming at each other in the street, neighbor vs. neighbor, friend vs. friend. (Or too often: friends no more. We were in new territory. People were learning they had limits.)

What happened? Reporters asked it in small-town diners over $7.50 lunch specials, BLTs cut into neat triangles, Heinz bottles perched like microphones on scratched formica tables.

What happened? People asked each other in church basements, community centers, gyms, coffee shops, living rooms where they came together to weep, process, scribble on postcards, plan the revolution.

What happened? Parents snapped off NPR mid-story, not wanting to answer questions from the backseat. College students climbed flagpoles, ripped down stars and bars. A giant inflatable chicken appeared behind the White House lawn, some sort of protest that no one entirely understood. Everything was some sort of protest now.

Editorial Reviews

12/07/2020

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, Bränd, 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 Bränd 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. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/01/2021

Two years after the 2016 presidential election, the Frome household is splintering. Husband Ethan is perplexed by his wife's behavior. Zo is rarely at home, and when she is, she's either compulsively ordering new household items that they don't need or hosting her women's protest group, All Them Witches. Life in the small Berkshires town where they moved from Brooklyn 15 years ago isn't exactly stimulating. Ethan ferries their hyperactive 11-year-old daughter, Alex, to the precious, expensive school they can barely afford and lusts after their live-in babysitter, Maddy the millennial. But just when you think you know where this narrative is going, Benjamin flips the script expertly. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings are on TV, the women's group is ready to erupt, and Ethan's former business partner Randy is calling him nonstop about some #MeToo lawsuits piling up against him. He asks Ethan to help him out—otherwise those residual checks the Fromes are living on will cease. VERDICT In her fantastic adult debut, YA and middle grade author Benjamin (The Next Great Paulie Fink) skewers her subjects but still preserves their humanity. New York expats, middle-aged Gen-Xers, disaffected millennials, conniving school moms, exasperating children with improbable names—all get the gimlet eye in this timely, witty novel.—Liz French, Library Journal

Library Journal

2020-10-14
A hypertopical, semisatirical, Ethan Frome–inspired portrait of a family on the edge.

Sixteen years ago, Ethan and Zo Frome (short for Zenobia) fled Brooklyn for life in the “quiet nowhere” that is Starkfield, Massachusetts, and now, as they settle into middle age, it's becoming clear to both of them that their lives have not worked out as they planned. When we meet them, in 2018, against the backdrop of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Zo is consumed with her women’s group, All Them Witches, which, since Trump’s election—though neither political event is named explicitly—has met in the Fromes' living room “to make posters and write postcards and process the dumpster fire that is the news these days.” And though Ethan is, in his own estimation “one of the good guys,” who respects women, of course he does, he cannot help but find this off-putting, the way it is both sexless and distinctly middle-aged. When they met, Zo was a promising documentary filmmaker, and the guerrilla marketing startup he co-founded was on the cutting edge, and now she's rage-buying furniture online, and he's living off checks from a company he hasn’t worked for in years. Meanwhile, their 11-year-old daughter has severe ADHD neither she nor they can cope with, which is part of why they’ve hired 20-something Maddy, who, rather than solutions, brings troubles of her own. (Also, predictable romantic intrigue for Ethan.) Nothing about the characters is idiosyncratic or surprising or especially nuanced—not Zo’s anger, not Ethan’s wistful nostalgia—and the novel can’t seem to decide exactly how heightened it wants to be. And yet the plot is cleverly constructed, and lost-youth longing is intoxicating, and just because the characters seem sent from central casting doesn’t mean they can’t pack an emotional punch.

Enjoyable and well plotted, if slightly contrived.

Kirkus Reviews

An exhilarating ride . . . hilarious . . . there are no heroes here; I got whiplash trying to figure out who I trusted and what I was rooting for, and the sensation was mesmerizing. Benjamin is like an overly chatty but skilled magician . . . a modern and energetic story about a marriage on the skids.”—The New York Times

“Borrow names and plot elements from Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Satirize progressive parenting and education à la Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Then light it all up with the feminist fire ignited by the Brett Kavanaugh hearings—and what do you get? A fun, timely novel that’s unexpectedly full of hope.”—People

“It is not the transposition of that well-trod narrative and its character types that compels; it is the contrast sharpened in the act. . . . Benjamin doesn’t remake Ethan Frome so much as she contends with it. The Smash-Up is an homage and a critique. . . .  An astute commentary on the differences between Wharton’s time and ours.”—Los Angeles Times

“The story’s day-by-day format builds a brisk page-turning momentum. . . . Benjamin has a keen eye and ear for the revealing cultural detail, whether it’s billionaire couples critiquing their children’s school reading lists at parents’ night or someone in their 20s working some questionable side hustles in the gig economy. It’s as if she Marie Kondo’d her scenes to keep only the elements that would bring readers some joy.”—WBUR, The ARTery

“Just when you think you know where this narrative is going, Benjamin flips the script expertly. . . . In her fantastic adult debut, YA and middle grade author Benjamin (The Next Great Paulie Fink) skewers her subjects but still preserves their humanity. New York expats, middle-aged Gen-Xers, disaffected millennials, conniving school moms, exasperating children with improbable names—all get the gimlet eye in this timely, witty novel.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Ambitious . . . With satire and suspense, Benjamin handily encapsulates the incomprehension, sadness, and rage of the Trump era.”—Publishers Weekly

“A hypertopical, semisatirical, Ethan Frome–inspired portrait of a family on the edge . . . cleverly constructed . . . pack(s) an emotional punch.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Funny, withering, and devastating . . . 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?’ ”—Shelf Awareness

“A contemporary reflection on power and sex . . . Benjamin’s immediately engaging writing captures the complicated emotions and biting humor of these bruising times and their impact on relationships.”—Booklist 

From the Publisher