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