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.
The novel feels vaguely apophatic, as though we were seeing only the luminous rim of a light source that is otherwise obscured ... There’s something compulsive and dreamlike about the novel’s language, which is often deliberately redundant ... At times, the prose recalls not so much Bernhard or Gertrude Stein but a certain type of buggy LLM output known as repetition degeneration ... It’s easy to dismiss Bennett’s novels as language games that are formally clever but too conceptual to be enjoyed in any immediate, visceral sense. But after any extended immersion in her books, one feels bored with the plodding linearity of other novels, with their dutiful backstory and studied beats of narrative 'reflection,' and is eager to return to that raw consciousness of Bennett’s narrators, who circle their subjects restlessly in the hope of stumbling on the unexpected.
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.
