From the moment you read the first line, “What happened?” you will be drawn into the world of The Smash-Up, a novel by Ali Benjamin, released by Random House last month. The Williamstown author of two bestsellers for young readers (The Thing About Jellyfish and The Next Great Paulie Fink) was inspired by Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and for her first adult novel borrowed its framework to center on the marriage of a modern-day Ethan and Zo Frome. Set in 2018, during the week of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the novel is more than a portrait of a marriage in distress; it is a reflection of the effects of the last four years, when the issues of our day became intensely personal. We spoke with the author about The Smash-Up and…what happened?

What was the inspiration for the novel?

It was just one of those lightbulb things. I had gone to Sheep Hill [in Williamstown] sledding with my daughter and started telling her about this book I’d read in high school, that it involved a big sledding accident. I began thinking about putting the Ethan Frome framework to a novel. The Smash-up is based on the structure of it, the characters, some of the plotting. I picked up a very quiet, spare 1911 novella — and a short one, where there’s a lot of isolation from the world at large — and thought what would happen if I dropped them down into the middle of 2018, when things were incredibly volatile and loud and noisy and no place was isolated from it? What if I started cranking up some of the pressures in this family? Let’s see what they would do.

The Smash-Up is a story about marriage, and it takes place in the Berkshires, where you live. Is any of it based on your life?

Yes, it’s the story of a marriage and tension in a marriage, but not my story. It really is an argument with myself. The arguments the couple have is really me going back and forth about all the issues of the day. There’s kind of this constant conversation with all have in our heads. I am by nature a thinker — or an overthinker, always holding different issues and wanting to see them from all their different sides. But all of it is kind of dialed up in the novel. If you amp it up just enough, there’s a little bit more absurdity to the really hard issues. Dialing it up creates bigger moments and make it more fun to read. There are elements of me as I was trying to find catharsis through the characters and situations I was putting them in during the middle of what was a really stressful time.  I’m telling the story of a couple who lives in this place, but I’m also telling the story of America.

The book touches on so many themes: marriage and fidelity, city vs. country folk, generational differences, and, of course, the political climate of the last four years. Were you planning to include all of these issues as you wrote?

With every book, there’s no way to know what you really have until you’re fairly far along writing it. But as soon as I got the idea, I knew that processing the national landscape would be part of it. I knew that these characters would be experiencing some of those gender divides that were surrounding so many people. I knew there would be generational differences.

The book could be subtitled (and this is a line from it): “Things we don’t know about each other.” That’s a big theme for you. At first we see just one side of each character, and when their other sides are revealed, the puzzle pieces change.

I wrestle with the idea of moving in and out of different selves. A lot of what I’m trying to explore in the book is the way we create our own “we.” There are people who are not part of our we, and that changes at different times and different settings. When Zo has her women’s group at the house, that’s her “we.” Ethan is on the outside of it. He doesn’t have a corresponding group for himself. He doesn’t understand why he’s not part of that we. I think Ethan doesn’t quite understand that he and Zo have been having really different experiences in the world. That’s one of the things about lived experience: nobody gets to know the lived experience that they don’t have. Ethan doesn’t know about his wife’s lived experiences, doesn’t know about those little demoralizing things that have happened to her. So he’s a little bewildered when she is spinning out of control because of her stress. On some level he can’t understand why. But Zo doesn’t understand his lived experiences, either.

This book is evolving over 5 days. Is this what their marriage is, or is this what their marriage is this week? That’s one of the things the reader gets to decide, and I deliberately left it with ambiguity about where they are. Some is up to the reader’s interpretation.

You can’t write about the world as it is without social media finding its way into a story line. How does that figure into your writing?

I do think a lot about the fact we live in an algorithmically driven world. It’s intrusive, but the intrusiveness in novels reflects the intrusiveness in the real world. That’s a tough thing with when writing kids books, though. My first children’s book didn’t have phones, but in my second book they were there. Kids notice when they’re not there, because that’s all they know.

Despite the tension that exists between Ethan and Zo in the book, you seem to be more positive about marriage than Wharton.

I think you’re right. On the other hand, there’s a lot more freedom for women to be independent and be who they are. It’s easier to have a marriage that’s a real partnership now. The options for women when Wharton was writing were not great.

This is one of the first (if not the first) novels to come out where the characters are wrestling with the events of the past four years.

And that’s a risk. It’s a risk for a writer to say, here’s something we all went through and it was so awful for all of us. Hey, want to read about it? My hope is that there is some catharsis to be found, and a little bit of processing.

Virtual author events with other Berkshires-based authors

In conversation with Brendan Mathews
Monday, March 1, 7 p.m.

In conversation with Alexis Schaitkin
Thursday, March 4 at 7 p.m.

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