Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept.
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.
