Over the past few decades, one particular question has played out across numerous books, films, and essays: Can men and women be friends? That debate can seem awfully quaint. The concern has now hardened into a much gloomier one: Can men and women even get along? Recently, the retrograde gender politics of the right have influenced young men through podcasts, websites, and other “manosphere” content. Meanwhile, the increase in education and economic autonomy for women has shifted dating norms and expectations, and many people (regardless of gender) are disappointed by app-based courtship. These developments have, for some people, called into question the future of heterosexuality itself.
Into the fray slips the British-born writer Claire-Louise Bennett with her third book, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. Set in the period after a breakup, the novel contains moments of sharp analysis that appear, at times, to endorse this fatalistic vision, termed “heteropessimism” by the writer Asa Seresin in an influential 2019 essay. Heteropessimism is an attitude, Seresin wrote, “usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.” It has animated a number of works examining heterosexual relationships in recent years, including novels such as Sarah Manguso’s Liars, essays appearing in publications such as The New York Times and The Paris Review, and pop songs from musicians such as Sabrina Carpenter.
Bennett is a writer of great linguistic inventiveness; her previous books, the short-story collection Pond and the novel Checkout 19, use surprising wordplay to evoke their narrators’ unique ways of interacting with the world. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye offers something else, too: a subtle riposte against gender pessimism. Its protagonist—unnamed, like those in Pond and Checkout 19—is a writer who has recently ended a doomed affair with an older man, Xavier. So far, this sounds familiar. But Bennett is up to something odder and pricklier.
The plot, like those of Bennett’s other books, can meander; at times it is confusingly opaque. The narrator has a post-breakup correspondence with Xavier and exchanges emails with her former high-school English teacher, Terence Stone, who has recently reached out to compliment her writing. She also recalls sexual encounters with a former—and perhaps different?—lover. Scenes slide from the first to the third person, as though the narrator is dramatizing her own story for the reader’s consumption. Early in the novel, she contemplates an imminent move to the countryside. (The location isn’t entirely clear, but it seems to be in Ireland, where Bennett lives.) “I will be glad when it’s all done,” she writes. “I can’t get on with anything. Time feels abstract. The days indistinct. It could be any month at all. It’s very windy tonight.”
As in Bennett’s other works, vagueness manifests in the book’s sentences, which have a habit of interrupting themselves, thoughts popping in and out with the regularity of a real-life interior monologue. In the book’s sex scenes, however, the opposite occurs: Two bodies grasping at each other create coherence. “Wrapped my leg about his body, dug my heel into the small of his back,” Bennett writes in a sentence that leads to one of the more accurate depictions of sex from a female perspective that I’ve read in fiction: “Go in, I said, and go in deep. Go in and get as much of me as you can.” This is as much a dare, a provocation, as it is a sigh of release or a moment of submission. Sex in this book, as in life, is rarely a one-dimensional experience.
About halfway through, the novel interrupts itself again, the prose turning essayistic as the narrator contemplates the final scene of the film The Piano Teacher, during which Erika Kohut—the masochistic piano teacher of the title—stabs herself in public following the end of a humiliating affair with her younger student, Walter. “This is a symbolic act, not a fatal one,” Bennett writes. It is done “in order to save herself—it is as if she is lancing a mutinous boil. It represents a transition, a leaving behind of voyeurism and fantasy, and an unflinching readiness to move into another more integrated realm.” It feels significant that this film, as well as the novel it’s based on, by the Nobel Prize–winning author Elfriede Jelinek, has recently enjoyed something of a revival in popularity in English-speaking literary circles, in part because of its bleak view of relationships between men and women. When the narrator watches The Piano Teacher’s final scene, she goes through a kind of symbolic transition too, attempting to get out of her head and move into a more “integrated” domain.
This domain appears to involve more action and less monologue, which is where the novel moves as well. The narrator joins her friend Maeve for a hike up a local hill. As they walk, they discuss then-President Joe Biden and “the hypocrisy of US foreign policy,” as well as what the narrator terms “America’s deep conservatism and their ongoing fear of socialism.” The narrator tells Maeve “about how the CIA, or maybe it was the FBI, funded major exhibitions of abstract expressionist artwork in Europe at the beginning of the Cold War.” Their talking points are almost parodically clichéd, however true they might be. As the two women continue their walk, their conversation maintains its focus on the United States, as they discuss “Roe versus Wade and Ernest Hemingway,” until they come across an American couple also hiking up the hill.
The narrator and her friend seem slightly embarrassed at the possibility of being overheard—seeing the couple perhaps reminds them that Americans are not simply an idea on a page or in a newspaper headline, but actual people. The couple turns out to be blandly inoffensive, and after their brief encounter, the two women change their topic of conversation, moving on to dating and the narrator’s experience using dating apps. “Texting and stuff is a complete waste of time,” the narrator muses.
The focus of this very long scene is notable. Even on this hill in Ireland, current events in the U.S. are an inescapable part of everyday conversation. And it’s not just the news—the United States’ political and cultural obsessions, including fixations on tradwives and girlbosses, the manosphere, and, yes, heteropessimism, are heatedly discussed around the globe on social media. But out in the real world, the sudden appearance of an American couple demonstrates how abstract these conversations can become. Bennett’s book seems to question whether scrutinizing every new gendered archetype or behavior, in the disembodied way social media encourages, is productive. What happened, simply, to living? To experiencing life itself?
An actual relationship, Bennett seems to argue in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, matters more than the sociopolitical environment it exists in. She is better for having broken up with Xavier. But she is allowed to mourn the person, and the relationship—the companionship, his sweetness. Bennett’s novel probes the ways our experiences of love and sex are simultaneously influenced by both generalities and particularities: by societal trends and by ourselves as individuals. Our intimacies are connected to politics, and yet are also profoundly more specific, more real. “We are in the dark,” Bennett writes of the shadowy, wordless experience of two people connecting. “We are together in the dark.”
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