BIG KISS, BYE-BYE, by Claire-Louise Bennett
To provide an account of the main events of “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye,” the third book by the British writer Claire-Louise Bennett, is in certain respects a straightforward business. The novel concerns a fairly brief period in the life of its female narrator, a writer of fiction who seems to have had a certain amount of critical success. (Like the women at the center of Bennett’s two previous books, “Pond” and “Checkout 19,” the narrator-protagonist is unnamed.)
In the aftermath of the inconclusive breakup of a relationship with a much older man called Xavier, she moves from an apartment in a coastal city to a house in a remote part of the countryside. Like Bennett herself, the narrator grew up in England but now lives in Ireland, for reasons she doesn’t go into.
The closest thing the novel has to a central incident comes when the narrator receives, via the London publisher of her first book, a letter from Terence Stone, one of her former A-level English teachers, who has learned of her writing career, and with whom she commences what seems to be an affable if — on her side, at least — somewhat fraught email correspondence.
This exchange brings up, in turn, memories of another teacher at the same school, with whom she had some kind of sexual relationship. (“I had dealings with Robert Turner, as you might know,” as she puts it to Stone.)
What else happens? In a sense, not much. She obsessively details the logistical difficulties arising from Xavier’s arranging of a biweekly delivery of fresh flowers. She examines the fault lines of that relationship; he is many years her senior, and she is no longer sexually attracted to him, though she still feels great tenderness for him. The reader can’t help tracing those fault lines back to her “dealings with Robert Turner,” though the narrator never explicitly raises such an idea.
In fact, there is much in the text that is not made explicit, with the vivid exception of the narrator’s consciousness, in whose eccentric depths we spend the novel immersed. This is part of the book’s perverse brilliance, its sense of good old-fashioned modernist fun.
The extreme subjectivity of the first-person narrative is such that we are given few points of orientation. It’s well over halfway into the novel before we learn that Xavier is a retired private banker who has lost most of his once-considerable wealth, though we are left to wonder how. The effect of this is a kind of intimate disorientation, like looking so closely at a familiar face that you lose the sense of what you’re seeing.
Similarly, it is not until the book’s final quarter that we are given any clear evidence of its setting — and even then, this is done in such a way that a reader unfamiliar with Ireland might well miss it. In one passage, the florist tells the narrator that “she had put my Eircode into the map and ‘All there was was trees.’” (Eircode is Ireland’s national postcode system.)
“You aren’t near anything,” the florist tells her — a coded reference, perhaps, to the narrator’s existential condition, and to the novel’s concern not just with the logistics of flower delivery, but with the even more vexed logistics of human intimacy.
All of this might make “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” sound somewhat inert, but it is no more inert than consciousness itself, with its odd and ceaseless leaps and circularities. Bennett’s prose has something of the energy of Samuel Beckett’s trilogy. (Bennett wrote an introduction to “Malone Dies,” that trilogy’s central volume, when Faber & Faber reissued it earlier this year.)
Like Beckett’s lonely and dyspeptic codgers, Bennett’s narrator has about her a brittle dreaminess; she obsessively circles around the past in a manner both drifting and oddly determined. And if, when “Wide Sargasso Sea” comes up in the email exchange between the narrator and her old English teacher, the reader feels nudged to think of Jean Rhys, it’s a comparison that is neither unreasonable nor unearned.
In one long and especially exhilarating passage, the narrator commands an imagined lover, presumably the septuagenarian Xavier, to kiss her. “Because, after all,” she writes, “you are a very captivating man indeed, and I must forthwith feel the failure of your kiss upon my lips, stuttering unmistakably throughout me, and you must and will feel it too. It will be a most terrible kiss, sluggish and lathery. … Walk across the room now old man and kiss me — let’s put an end to this.”
The novel contains many such moments of almost febrile power, rendered in prose both gorgeous and a little unnerving. To call “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” entertaining would be to do an injustice to its discomfiting depth, but reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.
BIG KISS, BYE-BYE | By Claire-Louise Bennett | Riverhead Books | 224 pp. | $29
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