The Brooklyn Rail

What’s become of the epistolary novel now that a narrator can get in touch with whomever they’d like in an instant? The form once allowed for passionate expressions that might’ve been stifled in public, in a room. Now, a contemporary character is more likely to feel overburdened by remote language, and more likely to long for what’s immediate and sensate.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s second novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, is full of both immediate sensations and remote transmissions, and its narrator’s attention vacillates between these two very different ways of knowing. Knowing herself, knowing her exes, knowing men who have hurt her, knowing her own belongings. At the start, she announces to the reader that she’s moving to a shed in the countryside, and that she’s not telling her former lover, a well-off man in his seventies named Xavier, where she’s going.

There’s some pleasure and some fear in disappearing herself. She’s no longer attracted to Xavier, and he won’t accept her platonic friendship. And, when she’s around him, she’s conciliatory, reactive; she lives in relation to him. In the countryside, on the other hand, “the days are whole”; she makes risotto and occupies herself with repetitive tasks.

Still, she thinks of Xavier often, and she even feels she has a “divine appointment” to be with him when he dies, if not until then. Her thoughts dwell on their lost intimacy and their most recent exchange, an email in which he described her book, which she’d published and which he’d read, as “some sort of HELL.” It’s one of many emails, scanned letters, missed connections, and retold stories Bennett incants and cants like a present-day, hyper-connected Marguerite Duras.

The most fraught of these correspondences are with men who incense her, and who threaten to speak so confidently that she can’t hear herself think. There’s Xavier, who the narrator has been close with for many years. There’s Terence Stone, her former English teacher, who stumbled on her book in a library and typed up his congratulations, which he then scanned and forwarded to her publisher, who forwarded it to her; the two of them then began a halting exchange, riffing on each other’s literary references to the color green. There’s Robert Turner, her former philosophy teacher, with whom she had “dealings” as a minor, and with whom she’s no longer in touch, except indirectly, through Terence Stone. There are also her friends, with whom she goes on hikes and long walks and relates these less straightforward relationships, mulling them over.

On one of these hikes, the narrator and her friend pause at the top of a hill to take in the view, the ostensible point, which she describes as “dull and discouraging.” “Everything is just there and you look at it and the quality you are most aware of is the stubborn thereness of it and it becomes frustrating,” she writes.

Bennett’s volume of work so far—her first novel, Checkout 19; a collection of frenetic stories, Pond; and some expressionistic essays on contemporary art—all set out to trouble the stubborn thereness of more opaque modes of writing. Her narratives aren’t linear, and her point-of-view is mutable; in both Checkout 19 and Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the narrator shifts from “I” to “we,” and in the newer novel, she incorporates imagined lectures and distorted retellings of earlier events.

In interviews, Bennett explains the politics of her experiments; language and formal structures flow from power, so why not try to begin with the raw material of the subconscious, the expressive voice? In Checkout 19, a kaleidoscopic künstlerroman, she brought her working-class upbringing to life. In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, she endeavored to make sense of her most intimate and encompassing relationships with men.

What’s consistent; what’s stable? Regardless of genre, Bennett’s voice is always both blunt and searching. And, like a Lydia Davis narrator, she consistently fixates, rephrasing, turning a scene or a dream over and over. Over and over, like the imperfect tessellations of a Louise Bourgeois drawing, which Bennett wrote about in an essay on the impossibility of telling a straightforward story about pain, which is habitual, which is diffuse.

What else is consistent: Bennett’s focus on her narrators’ immediate impressions, or her own immediate impressions, isn’t solipsistic. In Checkout 19, she surveyed her literary influences, and in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, she brought her teachers’, her friends’, and her exes’ voices, writings, and influences, to the page.

With so much material to parse—so many letters-within-letters, scans attached to emails, allusions within allusions, dreams within lectures, and conversations within conversations—how can the narrator properly mourn her relationship with Xavier while keeping her own autonomy, her own voice, in mind?

She could analyze endlessly, but there’s no one clear view of what they experienced together, like a site at the top of a hike. There was only, at some point, the act of lying beside each other in the dark, “over and over again,” inducing “profound and enfolding feelings of love and care and fidelity, quite naturally.” In the end, Bennett doesn’t seek to interpret this. She seeks to lay her narrator’s contradictory memories beside each other, as they are.