I never knew how sensitive I was until I started to write. Anything less than 100% praise will send me off-kilter; someone I was dating at the time said an essay of mine was “insular,” and once, on a family vacation, my mother said that the characters in a short story were “unlikeable” and the whole thing was “trying too hard to be funny.” It would have been better for her to abandon me years earlier so I wouldn’t have to hear that. I sulked internally, lest I ruin the vacation — plus, you’re not allowed to be too mad at someone paying for your meals.
The narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s excellently earnest second novel Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, feels similarly — incensed by a former lover’s comment that reading her recent book was “some sort of HELL,” she spends most of the book (reasonably) holding a grudge and pacing back and forth, deciding whether or not she should email him. She’s just moved from the city to the country, and there’s something freeing in his not knowing her current location. Plus, they haven’t talked in months; when she read his critique, “My throat froze over.” No kidding.
Xavier, the 75-year-old critic, is charming but controlling, a private banker who used to jet to the Caribbean and smuggle coke into Ibiza. His and the narrator’s relationship is chaste, unromantic but deep enough that her thoughts orbit around him. He urges her to cut off her friends, but opens an account at the florist so that she can order flowers on his dime whenever she’s on her period. “Something beautiful really makes a difference to how one feels,” he coos, calling her darling and kindly asking how her writing sessions goes. Toxic on paper, docile in person, they share kind correspondence and lovely dinners. “I’m the only one who sees you correctly,” he tells her, an idea that the narrator disagrees with, but enjoys the intimacy of. Bold to insult someone’s book, then allege it’s only because they know them completely.
Like her contemporaries Sheila Heti or Deborah Levy, Bennett is at her best when narrating the earthy rhythms of life, as trivial as email etiquette or flower bureaucracy. The bouquets he sends her are nice, yes, but they get delivered at an awfully inconvenient time, and his taste isn’t exactly excellent. Why doesn’t she go in and pick them herself? He agrees, and gives her a 50 euro limit, but she picks only a few delphiniums. Xavier calls the florist to ask why the purchase was so little, which she passes onto the narrator, urging her to spend more. Was there even a call, or is the shopkeeper just pretending, so that her regular client will spend more money? Now, kicking herself, she buys huge bouquets — perfect for hosting sometimes, yes — unable to appreciate the burst of life, lamenting the absence of a few stems’ beauty. How ridiculous! Larry David would kill to come up with something like this, and amongst Bennett’s calmer, more interior writing, this scene erupts with humor and life.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is more of a writing collage than a novel — apart from the regular narrative, it’s surrounded by around five loosely connected short stories and a short lecture the narrator gave in Montevideo about the final scene in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, integrating sexual liberation, self-harm, and Freud. Some work, like that speech, and others don’t, like the fictionalization (or maybe retelling from a different angle) of Xavier’s refusing to ask for things outright (“Some fresh air would be nice,” he’d say). It puts him — and the narrator — at a remove; when Bennett’s life writing is so candid to begin with, one wonders why include these asides at all.
It’s almost as if each section was written without looking back at the previous one, which, if true, is a thrilling way to approach the transitive act of writing. This births contradictions and shoddy memories; in the book’s first pages, the narrator mentions she’s never had sex with Xavier, then in its final ones, she breathily argues how the phrase “making love” grafts onto their partnership: “That’s why it feels so intense and incredible, and wonderfully exhausting.” She even re-explains why she likes smaller bouquets a couple more times after she initially wrote about the dilemma. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye loops back on itself, like a friend telling you a story you’ve heard before that you’d like to hear again because they’re an interesting speaker. It’s exciting to wonder if Bennett or the narrator has genuinely forgotten this is familiar material, taking a metafictional and outside approach to novel-writing.
If Checkout 19, her previous novel, was cerebral and heady, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is intimately concerned with body politics, sex, and movement. The idea of taking a moment to catch one’s breath on a hike comes up so often it feels like another character; same with multiple men going out in the morning to bring the narrator coffee and croissants. When one spills the coffee, it’s an eruption of the rhythm so visceral you can feel the hot coffee burning your skin. She fantasizes about a kiss so horrible it will bring closure, not romance: “Walk across the room now old man and kiss me — let’s put an end to this,” she pleads. In another fantasy, or maybe recollection of her involvement with a former professor, she holds his erection in the cold rain of London “so the frigid air wouldn’t get at it and make the glorious thing fall to nothing.” She urges him to “go in and get as much of me as you can,” a quick dash against time in the form of a game. At some points it actively combats thought in favor of action — at a professional event, she takes a colleague’s cheek in her hand without thinking, then wonders if this was appropriate. “In the end I don’t care too much about getting carried away and making a fool of myself,” she justifies. “The alternative is to die of boredom, the alternative is to be genial and pass the time, the alternative is to take a spoon to my brain and scoop it out.”
That the narrator remains mad at Xavier was sort of a half-truth — by the middle of the novel, they’re emailing, and after he initially refuses to meet up, they do so. It’s strange; without wine or the promise of sex, both deflate. She insists he always insults her and he blames her writing for misplacing her thoughts. After the narrator attempts to dig deeper, he says, “Don’t take anything I say too seriously, love, I’m just talking.” Then why did you say writing distracts me? What was all that about calling my book “some sort of HELL?” Did you mean anything you said? What do you stand for? “I’m just talking.” Afterwards, he sends her flowers.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is out now.
Great Job Sam Franzini & the Team @ Our Culture Source link for sharing this story.
