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\n Jessi Jezewska Stevens<\/p>\n
\t Big Kiss, Bye-Bye \t
\n Jessi Jezewska Stevens<\/p>\n
A setup familiar to contemporary fiction and romance ends up defying expectations in the latest novel by Claire-Louise Bennett.<\/p>\n
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Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, by Claire-Louise Bennett,
Riverhead Books, 209 pages, $29<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a typical story. The woman, in the bloom of youth, arrives for dinner. The man, her senior, is already waiting inside. She\u2019s taken care with her appearance (\u201cHe likes to see women dressed up\u201d), though the relationship is in decline. Then comes the twist: she\u2019s written a book\u2014wait for it\u2014a copy of which she attempts to slip into the bag hanging from \u201ca handle on his wheelchair.\u201d Emphasis mine.<\/p>\n
The British novelist Claire-Louise Bennett, author of two previous works of fiction, Pond and Checkout 19, has won critical acclaim for her stylized treatments of the domestic sphere and the writing life. Autofictional source material\u2014a broken oven knob; searching for an apartment as a struggling cashier\u2014is elevated to high drama through baroque rumination. These are solitary books, with umbilical cords fixed to the previous century. The signature, antiquated syntax is tempered with sly colloquialisms (\u201cI do not know fully what drove me to deracinate thick and fuzzy weeds like that every day in the premature heat,\u201d muses a discouraged gardener in Pond, if not the rumor that doing so would be a \u201ccinch\u201d), while literary allusions take precedence over secondary characters. The cashier in Checkout 19 reads the classics at her supermarket post while dreaming of becoming a writer herself; her chosen foil, the working-class British novelist Ann Quin, now deceased, is as alive and dynamic as any acquaintance. The power of this introspective mode lies less in the plot than in long-delayed moments of epiphanic anger: \u201cIt made our blood boil to read that,\u201d the clerk declares upon learning how many British students are pressed to \u201cflatten\u201d their accents. \u201cImagine someone day in day out purposefully making you feel ashamed of the sound of your own voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Big Kiss is a departure in structure if not in style: it has plot\u2014or at least a central relationship. The man in the wheelchair is Xavier, a former \u201cprivate banker\u201d who has become \u201cmore or less bedbound\u201d due to his advanced age. Shortly after giving him her book, the unnamed narrator refuses to kiss him, precipitating an unexpected breakup. The COVID lockdown reinforces the sudden separation, shifting the quasi-lovers\u2019 (they haven\u2019t had any \u201cphysical engagement\u201d for seven years) fraught postmortem of the relationship onto email. Mutual ill will escalates when Xavier messages to say he found her book, whose contents remain unknown to us, to be \u201csome sort of HELL.\u201d The setup\u2014a mismatch of sexual desire\u2014places us in a quandary much more familiar to contemporary fiction than Bennett\u2019s earlier investigations of class, domesticity, and writing. In a cishet context, can men and women ever be reconciled in matters of sex? Can they ever be just friends?<\/p>\n
That the narrator does in fact love Xavier is never in question, which is precisely why his retaliation (the abrupt breakup) hurts so much. \u201cThere was a time when I got lost in kissing him for whole afternoons. But not any longer,\u201d she reflects. \u201cAnd I suppose truth be told that is why he was so unkind about my book.\u201d Sensitive to the fact that age \u201cdoesn\u2019t stop him from hurting and wanting,\u201d she wonders what it might mean to have kissed him anyway\u2014against her sexual, if not her emotional, will.<\/p>\n
Privacy was essential to the couple\u2019s former eroticism. As if aware their relationship would never survive the public eye, for years they met almost exclusively in secret. The separation forces the narrator to take a closer look at this carefully guarded history. Through email correspondence, journals, dream analysis, and conversations with female friends on pandemic-approved hikes and swims, she uncovers a series of contradictions. \u201cI\u2019m the only one who sees you correctly,\u201d Xavier used to tell her, an \u201calarming, narcissistic, controlling\u201d claim. \u201cBut at the same time isn\u2019t that what anyone wants their beloved to believe?\u201d Conscious his behavior runs counter the reader\u2019s\u2014and possibly even her own\u2014romantic rubrics, she hedges: \u201cI don\u2019t care too much about getting carried away and making a fool of myself. The alternative is to die of boredom.\u201d Besides, his d\u00e9mod\u00e9 behavior is related to qualities that she finds \u201crepulsed me, and, naturally, turned me on.\u201d Even at his most offensive, Xavier often \u201cjust said what most people think but wouldn\u2019t dream of expressing.\u201d As a result, he \u201cwas wrong, and he was right.\u201d<\/p>\n
This early impartiality delegates indignation to the reader. More uncomfortably, it can leave us in doubt of the heartbroken narrator\u2019s ability to generate any herself. Once, a younger, nimbler Xavier terrified her by climbing into her home through an open window, echoing a previous trauma: years before, a different ex broke in with violent intentions, forcing the narrator to hide, petrified, behind the couch in nothing but a dressing gown. \u201cI bet you looked cute,\u201d Xavier says, with monumental tone-deafness. \u201cI bet I didn\u2019t.\u201d He concedes, \u201cIt\u2019s kind of understandable that you don\u2019t like surprises.\u201d<\/p>\n
Xavier\u2019s most comical and persistent misfire is to constantly send flowers. The motif becomes an extended Dalloway-ian subplot, as for years unwelcomely ostentatious bouquets arrive on our peripatetic narrator\u2019s ever-shifting doorstep. She once suggested he open an account at the florist, so that she could \u201cgo into the shop and choose the flowers [her]self.\u201d Xavier loves idea; it makes him feel like a \u201crich man again.\u201d Her refined, inexpensive selections, however\u2014she has strong opinions on floral minimalism\u2014are a disappointment. Afraid she\u2019s holding back, he\u2014or is it the florist?\u2014sets a minimum amount: \u201cIt became quite stressful and time-consuming having to make it come to fifty euro every time I went in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Psychoanalysis hangs like a sword of Damocles over the narrator\u2019s reassessment of the relationship (\u201cToday and yesterday I used A Very Short Introduction to Freud . . . to bludgeon a great many flies . . .\u201d), most notably with her appeals to the \u201cdark sexual fantasies\u201d of Michael Haneke\u2019s film adaptation of The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. In the film version of this famously transgressive portrait of female sexual repression, Erika, a forty-year-old Viennese pianist, sadomasochist, and virgin, has her request to be sexually humiliated rejected (humiliatingly) by a much younger male lover. Afterward, she stabs herself in the shoulder, rendering herself incapable of performing. Bennett\u2019s narrator finds the scene triumphant: \u201cI do not perceive in Erika\u2019s actions defeat or destitution\u201d but \u201ca galvanized determination to face up to herself.\u201d To release herself from fantasy. The parallels to Xavier\u2019s own sexual humiliation are obvious\u2014though the genders are reversed.<\/p>\n
One night, coming to terms with her own demons, the narrator dreams of smashing a scorpion with yet another book. \u201cThe scorpion is a really powerful symbol,\u201d says a friend. The narrator agrees: \u201cDid that mean Xavier is a scorpion?\u201d And is this novel the lethal weapon, a way to finally get him\u2014or at least what he symbolizes\u2014out of her head?<\/p>\n
Unlike the stark gender- and age-based asymmetry that critics such as Noor Qasim and Namwali Serpell have noted as a hallmark of contemporary romance\u2014novels marked by legislative malaise, negotiations of power, female self-harm, and heteropessimism\u2014in Bennett\u2019s latest, these now-expected dynamics go slack. The age difference is stretched to such an extreme that Xavier is flawed, but undeniably vulnerable. As a result, the question of who has exploited whom, and of how to treat one another in love (or heartbreak), becomes an open one, even if its answers remain painful and ambiguous.<\/p>\n
A starker directionality to the couple\u2019s relationship might have led Big Kiss toward more violent romantic implosions, like the piano teacher\u2019s decision to stab herself. Unlike Erika\u2019s dagger, however, or Xavier\u2019s juvenile insults (\u201csome sort of HELL\u201d), Bennett\u2019s anger-laced affection carries the novel beyond self-defense or -destruction. Spoiler alert: sometimes neither party gets what they want, and so the knife is replaced by that much more tender murder weapon, the long-awaited goodbye \u201ckiss.\u201d<\/p>\n