Claire-Louise Bennett’s Misanthropic Breakup Novel

And the narrator, despite her waning attraction, continues to call and write to him. She is recalcitrant as a rule. This is a woman who, by the second page of the novel, has e-mailed the manager of the hotel restaurant where she and Xavier meet to explain “how disappointingly lacklustre the cakes and sandwiches were.” She finds it gets “tiresome” to spend fifty euros at the florist, where Xavier has set up a weekly account so that she can select her own arrangements. Many passages are devoted to lambasting the garish bouquets she receives from him and her publisher. She finds their “unbidden arrival into [her] precarious world intrusive, presumptuous, and increasingly disorienting”—and this isn’t a bad gloss for how she generally finds the existence of other people. Her relationship with Xavier, in some respects movingly private and sweet, is also a comedy of miserliness. His calls always arrive at the worst possible time; she resents when he tries to understand her. From their early days, the narrator has known that she will be beside Xavier when he dies, “whether relations between us are felicitous or dire.” Yet as to whether their relationship can bear actual intimacy—not sex, but the tentative voyage into another person’s reality—Bennett seems dubious.

“Do you like cats? That’s a bit like asking me do I like people.” Unlike most of us, the narrator of “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” has the grace to admit that most people can’t win with her. She hates when Xavier calls her “domestic,” but she’d hate it equally if he said the opposite: “I didn’t see why he had to say anything.” A person can scarcely appear on the page without her being immediately annoyed by their mild antics. The men with whom she’s shared beds generally remain unnamed and indistinct, and her liaisons with them share a flavor of paralysis garnished with irritation. About a periodic e-mail correspondence with her onetime A-level English teacher, Terence Stone, she is relentlessly ambivalent, finding it touching one day and infuriating the next.

The barb in her exchange with Stone concerns another former professor, Robert Turner, with whom, she tells Stone, she had intense and distressing “dealings” as a student. It turns out that she was in love with Turner, and over the course of a degenerative illness Turner stopped recognizing her. She’s angered when Stone refers to an outburst she suffered during this relationship as “minor”; she concludes that Stone’s dismissal represents a too common hypocrisy and a fear of scandal. This launches her into a blistering interior monologue on politeness: if one admits something awful, she thinks bitterly, “you feel like oik in fact, and you are, you are an oik, a blundering oik who might well upset the apple-cart.” For all of Bennett’s attention to life’s orderly, sensual pleasures—flowers, meals, gardens, and weather—her narrator insists that she “can’t endure pleasantness.” “It seems warm and accepting and sincere, but it isn’t at all, it’s absolutely thin,” she continues. “You come to the sheer edge of it very quickly, and there’s nothing then, you’re on your own.”

The book’s alienated mood cracks in a single recollection of ecstatic intimacy that arrives on the heels of the narrator’s rant against Stone. One rainy afternoon, she takes refuge with a lover behind a façade in the Square Mile; in privacy from the street he thrusts her up on one leg against a column. When he touches her crotch and finds it soaked through, her narration collapses into a breathy, stylized monologue: “that’s let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, now he knows, knows very well . . . what it’s all for and how far back it all goes.” This is the only moment in the novel in which she wills herself closer to someone, despite her years of tender bickering with Xavier. “I was afraid of his eyes, and I was afraid of his fingernails even, because what if I got lost in them,” she recalls, “see the wheat fields and the slack bicycle chain and the oil getting everywhere and his poor forehead . . .” Bennett’s language becomes painterly here, drawing attention to its own brushstrokes and colorwork, as if she doubts that the scene will convey its own crucial excitement. The lover is never identified, but all of the scenes that concern Turner are marked by similarly fervid, elliptical narration; we might assume that the man pressing her up against the column is him.