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Claire-Louise Bennett’s latest novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, is the author at her most subdued
\n\n\n\nClaire-Louise Bennett’s first novel, Pond (2015), was a minor sensation when it was published, widely admired for its style and tone, and for the way that it rendered inanimate objects, well… not exactly animate, but shimmering, highly charged by the extraordinary force of the narrator’s attention. Fragmentary vignettes were intimated by a writer living in the Irish countryside (one whose circumstances closely resembled Bennett’s), with a lyrical voice that was psychedelically lush with descriptive excess; musing on subjects such as a broken knob on her oven, the search for a flip-flop or the merits of porridge, she performed a wild consciousness that seemed to prowl around its habitat. After Checkout 19, a 2021 novel centred on youthful becomings, Bennett’s third work of fiction, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, returns us to a world that resembles that of Pond, though it could be considered as describing its underworld or shadow realm. Now objects and situations seem to darken or curdle under the narrator’s attention rather than being electrified by it, creating a book that is, I think, harder to love.
\n\n\n\nThough similarly fragmentary in structure and featuring a familiar-sounding voice, this is Bennett’s most subdued book. Feverish prose occasionally breaks through, but her baseline tone is terse and flattened, quite literally signalling a lack of sparkle: ‘[M]y glass of prosecco was flat. I asked him if his prosecco was flat and he said he didn’t think so, and it didn’t look flat – mine looked very flat.’ The narrator, who is in the process of moving house, is preoccupied by a correspondence with her former schoolteacher, and ruminations on a long affair with a much older man named Xavier, from whom she has recently become estranged. Xavier does seem very old by the time the novel opens, mostly because he is repeatedly referred to as ‘very old’, but this relationship is hard to fathom not so much because of what seems like a vast age-gap (40 years?), but because of the way it is so often written in registers of irritation or horror: ‘Come here and take hold of me with your old hands and your old mouth. Reach out of your obscene godforsaken darkness into my plush obscene depths and grope your way along.’
\n\n\n\nBut Xavier is one of a triad of older men who are refracted across the narrator’s consciousness, and it is not always possible to tell who she is really addressing. The correspondence with her teacher, a grandfatherly man named Terence Stone who taught her English at A-level, brings up powerful memories of a philosophy teacher named Robert Turner, with whom she mentions having ‘dealings’. Those ‘dealings’ remain obscure, but old obsessions and wounds are enflamed by the letters, and these and other nameless figures, such as ‘the coward’, flicker through the narrator’s mind, in fantasy and in memory, leaving us to speculate on the ‘true’ nature of these relationships.
\n\n\n\nThe novel keeps turning, switching tone. There is a fragment from a lecture about violence, there is Bennett’s signature shift in pronoun, from ‘I’ to ‘we’, but also to ‘you’ and to ‘she’. At one point, as the narrator begins to teeter into near-ravings about her correspondence with Stone, I suspected that the book might be an autofictional experiment in unreliability or even madness. ‘Green’, she writes to him, is ‘lagoon is guilt is enchantment is mildew is vile is rampant is the colour of my ink yes, the colour of my ink, change, yes, instability, yes, life, life, yes, death, yes. Death.’ The novel keeps spinning on its carousel of facets, the narrator performing differently for her many different addressees, yet always setting us back in that dulled-down realism. Here Bennett’s immense skill with literary estrangement is recalibrated to produce a nauseous relationship to the world, and an uprooted character who suddenly seems at home nowhere.
\n\n\n\nBig Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett. Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover)
\n\n\n\nFrom the October 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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