Glid[es] in an elegant but wispy and uncentered way between memories, philosophical maunderings and embellishments of imagined interactions ... I could not gain any purchase on this novel, which has unearned confidence in the poignancy of what seems like a very tedious relationship. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is about casting off old things. But that only works if there’s something of substance to cast off in the first place.
Not much [happens] ... In fact, there is much in the text that is not made explicit, with the vivid exception of the narrator’s consciousness, in whose eccentric depths we spend the novel immersed. This is part of the book’s perverse brilliance, its sense of good old-fashioned modernist fun ... A kind of intimate disorientation, like looking so closely at a familiar face that you lose the sense of what you’re seeing ... All of this might make Big Kiss, Bye-Bye sound somewhat inert, but it is no more inert than consciousness itself ... Bennett’s prose has something of the energy of Samuel Beckett’s trilogy ... Exhilarating ... The novel contains many such moments of almost febrile power, rendered in prose both gorgeous and a little unnerving. To call Big Kiss, Bye-Bye entertaining would be to do an injustice to its discomfiting depth, but reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.
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 ... 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 ... 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.
An entrancing and exacting examination of the persistence of memory ... Bennett’s prose is full of utterly original imagery ... The narrator’s intense introspection can become mind-numbingly repetitive at times, but it is all part of the woman’s almost dispassionate assessment of the profound effects her past relationships have had on her.
To attempt to describe the plot of a Bennett novel is a delightfully doomed venture ... They share a discursive narration that slides between the deliciously forensic and the deliberately opaque ... Doesn’t lament frustrated intimacy so much as revel in the ungovernable force of personal preference. Some novels convey a pretense of collaboration with the reader or salute a familiar world; Bennett’s neither achieves this nor condescends to attempt it. We are the audience for a formidable one-woman show ... Bennett allows the reader to sit in the house with her, without any love, it seems to me, but also without unctuousness or hypocrisy. And what an engrossing house it is.
In probing these strange and difficult relationships, Bennett displays her characteristic aversion to identikit templates of feeling and desire that distort the real emotional complexity of our attachments and aversions to other people, and especially those people who have most profoundly shaped our inner lives. It is no coincidence that the novel’s most experimental prose appears in its visceral and unerringly convincing depictions of sexual feeling ... The patience of some readers will no doubt be tested by the same incidents and observations being retold multiple times across the book ... If Bennett might seem at first blush a more quietly innovative writer than the novelists with whom she is inevitably compared, this is not to her detriment, but inseparable from the extraordinary subtlety and emotional detail of the psychological portraits her fiction paints.
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 ... Bennett’s anger-laced affection carries the novel beyond self-defense or -destruction.
Bennett’s plots, like her sentences, double back, cut themselves off, short-circuit: they always seem in the process of beginning—or beginning again—whether you’re encountering them on the first page or somewhere in the middle ... Bennett’s narratives dramatize all the unexpected shocks and detours of what’s often ultimately uneventful. These are novels of disproportionate letdowns ... Bennett’s narrators do not live so much as thrive in rooms not quite of their own.
Themes of relationships and communication might seem at odds with Bennett’s quest to shuck off the self and write from somewhere deeper, but therein lies the magic of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye ... Fertile new ground for the author, and her prose is ideally suited to exploring them. Shape-shifting and splendid in its disregard for conventional wisdom and contemporary minimalist tastes, it weaves rococo abundance and brazen mundanity into something as porous and unknowable as the narrator’s inner world. Claire-Louise Bennett is a true original, working at the brink of what language can do.
Bennett is particularly adept at capturing the doomed logic of this relationship that cannot be but that will not leave her be ... A careful probing of the elusiveness of human connection and an unsettling portrait of the heart as the loneliest of hunters.
The stretches of dialogue between our woman and Xavier are the highlight of the book ... But if you want to know more, you might be out of luck. On each person we get hints, references, circlings back, so we see how these men have affected the narrator but not always why ... What does all of this amount to? A mixed bag, as you might expect — and as Bennett might have intended
It’s unclear if we’re meant to read the relationship with Robert as abusive or simply disappointing ...
The narrator’s narrow concern with her own feelings is the book’s strength and also its weakness. In the wake of #MeToo, it’s compelling to read a book about a woman reassessing an obviously abusive love affair that, rather than calling the man out, remains concerned most of all with observing her mental and bodily life with nuance and exactness. But I found myself longing for the world to be allowed to intrude on the exquisite moment-by-moment observations ... I wish Bennett had found a way to raise the stakes on this.
Across all her books, Bennett has been interested in privately stowed boxes and the girl or woman who keeps them ... This list bears out the brilliance of Bennett’s sentences, each one a master class in how language gives rise to thought and memory, and how its repetition revises both. Green devours and demands more green, and each sentence is a box in which to collect it ... At other times, the reader might find her posture slouched into the cloaked silhouette of a juror: Bennett, on the stand, tells us something once and then, a few pages or words later, instructs us to disregard it, cross it out, revise the transcript. But of course the reader is holding the transcript—it’s called Big Kiss, Bye-Bye—and Bennett is a fastidious editor. Every one of the narrator’s rippled repetitions, stuttered variations, or flat-out contradictions has been handled with care.
Both intimate and introspective, this novel’s interiority and deployment of a strong stream of consciousness narrative amplify the narrator’s loneliness and losses. Bennett’s descriptive prose attends more to her narrator’s emotional state of mind rather than a plot or actions, as it combs the divide between memory and experience.
