The novel is in the form of a production diary for Shine On, Harvest Moon, the fictional musical being created about the life of vaudevillian Nora Bayes.

The show founders through out-of-town tryouts in Boston and Philadelphia along with a surprise run in Washington, D.C. as the major players continue to jockey for position and power.

Writing for Playbill magazine, Peter Filichia noted possible parallels between characters from Smash and real-life counterparts, including: The novel's analogs to Funny Girl star Barbra Streisand and her husband at the time, Elliott Gould, Filichia finds a much less direct comparison and he finds amusement in Kanin's description of director Larry Gabel as "ruggedly attractive, intense, lean, and the opposite of flaky ... fastidious, always beautifully groomed and dressed".

[3] Writing for the Associated Press, Gregory Ryan cited Kanin's "crisp style" and his ability to "catch[] the flavor of the various cities that [the musical] plays in" before opening in New York to conclude that although Smash is flawed it "should give many people hours of fun reading".

Initially he found that the novel was "one of those scandalous, soapy bestsellers that was [sic] all the rage in the Jackie Collins era--the ones with a gratuitous sex scene every few pages--and Kanin seemed to be filling in the blanks in some kind of a trash-fiction version of MadLibs".

[7] Just a week later he had revised his opinion upward, saying it had improved by focusing on the mechanics of mounting a show but questioning Kanin's decision to present long conversations in the form of script pages.