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.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye has a recursive, repercussive logic. Scenes repeat. The book moves through set piece and recollection. The narrator compulsively imagines scenarios, hypothetical conversations, prospective encounters ... The novel, like erotic absorption, risks a kind of airlessness, but Bennett’s prose shimmers with a neo-baroque charisma. Her style is various, flexible and distinctive.
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.
