I started reading this book because I recently concluded an increasingly rambunctious four years of partying at SU, and it sounded like it'd be interesting to read someone else's accounts of and insights into the same drunken stumbles I made countless times across campus hill. The real impact of the book set in when I realized how much it resonates with my own experiences, and how relevant it is because of that. Granted I'm a guy, was not in the greek system, have not been date-raped, and have not come anywhere near the levels of excess Zailckas describes. Even so, almost every episode she recounts runs in parallel with at least one or two of my own experiences, and judging by how commonplace the sight of un-hinged drunken students is at any college campus, I'm sure that this book could act as a near biography for a lot of people other than the author.
I read some critics who complained that this story didn't need to be written, since everyone knows that college kids drink, or since Koren Zailckas wasn't even in the running for "worst college drunkard" (I wondered if she would mention the frat boys who fought each other with billiards balls in socks my freshman/her senior year at SU, or the countless sirens every weekend as the paramedics pulled up to the latest case of alcohol poisoning). I kind of think that's what makes it so worthwhile though. Here is this universal american college experience that we all uncomfortably relate to, laid out for us to examine a bit more objectively than we could from any other perspective. We aren't meant to "feel sorry" for her, as so many reviewers appear to think. This is not some sappy, teary-eyed Reader's Digest nonsense, it is a critique of the easily accessible social binge-drinking scene, and she is using her own experiences, which she describes numerous time as not being unique, to theorize about the deeper aspects of the issue. I wasn't shocked or surprised by anything I read in "Smashed", that's not really the point. Ms Zailckas does a good job at digging deeply into every sequence of events, pulling out the painful facts of the matter that everybody knows but won't say, and thus cause one to cringe when they are explicitly put into words. It's easy to say stuff like "college is all about drinking, what else is new" but when the experience is presented this way you are forced to come to grips with it and think about it in a more introspective way.
I kept thinking of Tom Wolfe's last novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons", which was an exposé of sorts of the modern college experience. Tom Wolfe had a few fundamental flaws that undermined his entire novel however, whereas Koren Zailckas is able to nail the subject matter. Tom Wolfe failed primarily because he was attempting to write from, about, and to a generation that was removed from him by about fifty years. No matter how accurate his information was, any relevant commentary was neutralized by the fact that he, personally, had no grasp on what he was talking about, and it showed in his ham-handed attempts at emulating modern youth. Here we have unadulterated, nonfiction stories from only about four or five years ago, told firsthand. Koren Zailckas has the perspective to actually present some worthwhile insight on the subject, and through unflinching introspection and dissection of every stage of her drinking career, she is able to pull together an effective and thought-provoking narrative commentary.
The book is obviously focussed on girls and young women, and their particular susceptibility to alcohol abuse, but I think it carries plenty of relevance beyond that demographic. I've seen and been in plenty of the situations she describes, enough that I can now consider them in a different light. I'd reccommend this book for anyone in high school or college , it gives you the objective assessment of alcohol that isn't really possible to achieve on your own when you're getting bombed at keggers and bars every chance you get. An engaging read, and a thoroughly accurate account of modern college society.
