“If you strongly connected with the overarching conceit of “All Fours,” but couldn’t quite relate to that book’s iconoclastic narrator, there’s a new novel for you. While “All Fours” resembles an edgy, provocative A24 movie, “Crush” by Ada Calhoun feels like a brainy rom-com that could have been adapted by the late great Nora Ephron. This literary delight of indirect — if not conscious — uncoupling channels the soul of Laurie Colwin’s “Family Happiness” and Ephron’s own “Heartburn.”... Telescoping away from the sexual tension and intellectual patter that makes this book a delicious escape, one asks what makes novels about divorce and sexual awakening so appealing? There have been any number of reality TV shows and personal essays on the endangered state of matrimony, or monogamy. Some of them were written by Calhoun herself. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Calhoun published the best-selling nonfiction work “Why We Can’t Sleep.”...So why a novel and not a memoir? The answer may be simpler than we think. It’s not enough to document the zeitgeist. If limited imagination and scope are at the root of women’s chronic frustrations, why confine its chronicling to nonfiction? We need new fables and stories to combat the mythologies and fairy tales we’ve grown up believing. Fiction makes space for the bigger stories, larger ambitions, sweeter conquests, and greater justice. “Crush” reveals the sly ways we delude ourselves into accepting what’s good enough and the liberating ways we can recover our joie de vivre as well as our autonomy.” —The Boston Globe