WILLIAMSTOWN — Ali Benjamin’s latest novel was inspired by “Ethan Frome,” Edith Wharton’s classic 1911 novella, which is not to suggest the title alludes to a second Berkshire-based sledding accident. “The Smash-Up” (Random House, 2021) is an intimate portrait of a family in distress and a powerful exploration of how the things we fail to notice can shatter a family, a community, and a nation.
The genesis of the book — Benjamin’s third, her first aimed at an adult audience — came while sledding with her daughter in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. Having read Wharton for the first time in high school, Benjamin is quick to point out: “[Wharton’s] book, which is very different from mine, is an incredibly spare, beautifully quiet love story about a man trapped by his circumstance… [which] culminates in this very dramatic smash-up, [as] they call it in the book.”
Elements Benjamin pulled from the original include the basic plot — a love triangle consisting of an older wife, a younger woman, and man caught between them — and the structure, that of an “imagined tale … bookended on both ends by an unnamed narrator.” That said, the feeling of the two works is entirely different. “The Smash-Up,” set “during one of the most volatile weeks of 2018 — the week of the Kavanaugh hearings” — stands in contrast to Wharton’s stark and isolated story. Perhaps a risky move, but a thought-provoking one intended to reflect “an extremely noisy, polarized time in America.”
Read on for insight from Benjamin as to her process, and consider joining a trio of virtual events — on Tuesday, Feb. 23 hosted by Northshire Books; on Wednesday, Feb. 24 hosted by Porter Square Books; and on Thursday, Feb. 25 hosted by The Mount — to celebrate the launch of “The Smash-Up’ and its connections to the 413.
Hannah Van Sickle: Tell me a bit about your relationship to Wharton, as a writer, and your choice to reimagine this title in particular.
Ali Benjamin: “I didn’t love [“Ethan Frome”] in high school, and I didn’t think much about it until I moved to the Berkshires, and suddenly the landscape of the book was the landscape that surrounded me, particularly in winter time. [Wharton’s] is a very monochromatic book, set in the cruelest winter; it’s colorless in a way.
In the intervening years, I read “The Age of Innocence” and “Custom of the Country” — much funnier, more satirical, and with much more commentary on society [than “Ethan Frome”]. Wharton tends to be poking fun at high society, which is where she was born. [Wharton was born Edith Jones, into the family that originated the term “keeping up with the Joneses”]. I enjoy Edith Wharton, and I love that she was a woman who was out there writing and sharing her point of view; I think that is awesome.
It was sort of this spooky thing: I went sledding with my daughter, in March, after the 2016 [presidential] election. I was furious, all the time. I was furious. All. The. Time. I thought what was happening to our country was an abomination; it was bringing out all kinds of anger in me that I didn’t even realize I had stuffed down. My daughter wanted to go sledding, so I had to tear myself away from the news. We went to Sheep Hill. There were very few sleddable trails left — they all ended in some kind of hazard. If you read the original “Ethan Frome,” you kind of know what that means. So, I started telling my daughter about [Wharton’s book].
‘Let me tell you this story,’ I said. And as I’m telling it, as I’m describing Ethan’s wife Zenobia, I realize that, in the years between high school and now, I had become much more like Zenobia than I ever expected I would be. Suddenly, the whole thing kind of snapped into place: I could do a contemporary retelling, where Zenobia is just really a pissed off mom and wife, and the storm of winter is the blizzard of news that is relentless.
Coincidentally, I have a younger brother, a Millennial, who had spent some time at our house the previous months, during which I had seen a generational difference in how we interpreted things. [I got to thinking]: Zenobia is not just a cruel witch, she is actually quite angry about what is happening out in the world — and [what if] the younger caretaker who comes in is not just sparkling, innocent, and endlessly charming; what if she is a Millennial who is making her way through the gig economy? It felt like a chance to explore not just what had changed between 1911 and 2018, but ways in which I had changed between reading the book in high school and now, [namely] my own understanding of the world and who was the protagonist and who was the villain. It felt like a rich chance to explore both of those things.
HVS: As you revisited Wharton during this process, what stood out to you that had not prior?
AB: When I did go back and reread “Ethan Frome” as a middle-aged mom and wife, someone who is living through an unbelievably dark and volatile time, what struck me — which had not struck me at age 15 — was how binary the women characters were. You had the old, mean hag, sickly and unpleasant; monstrous, really. And you had this beautiful, sparkling maiden who laughed at all of Ethan’s jokes and made him feel good. Yet neither one of those seemed to hold space for a woman who might feel angry, for a woman who might be complex. I wanted to start the book with a binary look at Zo and Maddy, when we first meet them, where each is coming from and why they are where they are. They ended up less different than they might seem at first; that is something that I wanted to explore.
HVS: Both of your previous works have been geared toward young adult audiences. What prompted your shift to an adult novel?
AB: Right from the start, I try to make it clear to readers [through Ethan’s world and Ethan’s head] this is not going to be the beautiful, chaste tale Wharton had written, and it’s not for kids. When I wrote “The Thing About Jellyfish,” I wasn’t necessarily writing a book for kids; I was writing a story with a character whom I could envision, and following it wherever it went. I didn’t know when I wrote it if I was writing a book for adults with a kid main character, or if it was actually a book for kids. ‘Who’s my audience for this?,’ I asked my agent [early on]. It was similar here: I was writing truthfully about the world I saw, and it became obvious. (No kid wants to read about a middle-aged marriage in the Berkshires!) I did not set out to write an adult book; I had this story and I took it and ran with it.
HVS: How do you see the relationship between nonfiction and fiction in your own work; is the former a stepping-off point for the latter, or is it largely an organic process?
AB: I think it’s organic. As I was writing the story of a marriage, what it really is — in a lot of ways — is an argument with myself. A lot of the arguments that Ethan has with Zo, or the unspoken arguments (their differences in world view), and tempering responses to this moment in time, really are this back-and-forth that I’ve had with myself. Are there things plucked from the real world? Everything is really exaggerated. It is satirical in a lot of ways, taking things that I see around me and dialing it up — my own anger about Trumpism, and this rising darkness — to the point where it feels a little absurd. It’s a great way to highlight differences in perspectives and responses and make them a little bit more explicit.
HVS: Is there some cosmic timing happening in your addressing the themes you tackle or are they timeless?
AB: I was writing from inside the chaos. I wrote the bulk of the novel — this period where I was figuring out what I was holding in my hands — before the week of the Kavanaugh hearings. It was only after that it hit me this could be an anchoring piece [of the plot]. It unfolds over a few days, just as the original “Ethan Frome” did. So you can take something that feels sort of vague and amorphous and sort of set it during a specific time. I don’t know if it’s cosmic timing; in a way, it’s fairly recent history, but in a way it already feels like historical fiction. Even as a lot of what I wrote about in the book has since unfolded, and the world feels like it is already in a different place, I couldn’t have known this. And that was a really hard thing about the book in particular — how to end it, and on what note?
I finished it in May of 2020 (but sold it well before the pandemic). I knew it was going to get crazy, and I knew it was going to get a lot worse before it got better, if it got better. But I didn’t know what that meant, what that would look like, how that would feel. So I just tried to be as honest as I could about where we are as a society in that moment, not knowing all that might come later. So is it cosmic timing? I think writing it helped me process some of what I was experiencing during that week, during those years. My hope is that it could help other people process some of that, too. I can also see a scenario where people can’t read something about that week, and the experience of that administration, and the nonstop assault of really dark news.
HVS: How did place — and the Berkshires in particular — figure into your writing of “The Smash-Up?”
AB: Again, in a really dialed-up way. I asked questions that I asked of myself a lot during that time: What is the place of protest in a community that is as isolated as the Berkshires, where decision makers are not driving past? I certainly went to a number of protests, and I wrestled with [the thought]: Is this the best use of my time? Is this the most effective way to enact change? And yet, I also found myself incredibly grateful when I would drive past a protest. I remember driving by Park Square in Pittsfield, and there was a standout against sexual violence. It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there, and yet I was so grateful in that moment for those people.
For those of us who live in what is a pretty sheltered and isolated community, what is the best way to [engage] in more visible [activities] and make a difference? I asked this question throughout the novel, and I think, at the end, I come to what is my own answer about that. There is a fair amount of time (again, pretty dialed-up) exploring something Wharton explored a lot — income inequality. I don’t know how [the Berkshires] compares in terms of national inequality; what I do know is we are a really small community to see [as much inequality as we do]. Ethan and his wife are former NYC residents who moved to the Berkshires for a quieter life … which is me, and an awful lot of people I know … and I explore what that means to some degree.
