The system of generalized absolute value equations (GAVE) has attracted more and more attention in the optimization community. In this paper, by introducing a smoothing function, we develop a smoothing Newton algorithm with non-monotone line search to solve the GAVE. We show that the non-monotone algorithm is globally and locally quadratically convergent under a weaker assumption than those given in most existing algorithms for solving the GAVE. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the viability and efficiency of the approach.