Late​ in Claire-Louise Bennett’s novel Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the unnamed protagonist goes to Montevideo to participate in a ‘panel discussion about violent scenes from movies’. She had hesitated to accept the invitation:

I avoid as much as possible celluloid depictions of violent behaviour for the reason that it unnerves and depresses me gravely to be confronted by the cruelty that human beings have a perversely inventive and unlimited capacity for. I know very well that evil exists. Some years ago I met a serial killer in fact, though he was simply a carpenter as far as anyone knew at the time, and perhaps this brush with an innocuous looking exponent of unmitigated wickedness is why I generally prefer to expose my consciousness to artistic works that are in collusion with the sublime and the melancholic.

In this mini-lecture, Bennett condenses many of her novel’s preoccupations: aesthetic and ethical disposition; violence, and in particular male violence against women; self-harm, especially but not exclusively women’s; and what she pointedly does not call masochism. ‘The mode of violence that gets beneath my skin and really haunts me is not those destructive acts perpetrated by one upon another, for reasons good, bad or indifferent, but the harm and suffering that one inflicts upon oneself.’

The narrator centres her lecture on Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, in which a repressed piano teacher, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), is pursued by a ‘cocky and dashing student’. She proposes a sadomasochistic scenario, is rejected as ‘repugnant’ and then stabs herself in her shoulder. If The Piano Teacher was generally received as a disquieting, sensational meditation on female masochism, an exposé of a specifically feminine ‘degeneracy’, the narrator registers something quite different: Erika’s act reveals ‘a galvanised determination to face up to herself’. It is done ‘in order to save herself’, not least from her ‘deadly living situation’ with her controlling mother. The (mostly male) reviewers were ready to pathologise the heroine ‘as monstrous and wicked and sick’ because they were happy to imagine ‘a woman going without’, and this, in the end, Erika would not do.

From one angle, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye could be read as an extended inquiry into ‘the harm and suffering that one inflicts upon oneself’, or into the suffering that comes to one via erotic entanglement and obsessive rumination. At the start of the novel, the narrator is about to move from her flat in a seaside town to a woodshed in another place: the places are never quite specified, though an Eircode is mentioned late, in passing. She is, moreover, preoccupied by the rupture of her relationship with Xavier, her much older, semi-ex-lover (in his late seventies or early eighties, in a wheelchair), who has – since their last chaste meeting, when she declined to kiss him – violently protested her friend-zoning him: ‘I will not exchange my LOVE for friendship.’ She refuses at first to see his point – they haven’t had sex in years, why this sudden anger?

The narrator locates herself not so much in place as in time: how long it has been since she was last in contact with Xavier, and how long until her move. ‘Two weeks from now I won’t be living here anymore. I’ll be in the woodshed in L–. Xavier won’t know I don’t live here anymore. We are no longer in touch. It’s been three months since his last email, which I did not reply to.’ Throughout the book, the narrator times herself against such markers. Time and timing are relative, subjectively and compulsively measured. The exigencies of housing, the heart’s fluctuations: these govern the calendar.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye refracts questions of love, sex and communication through several relationships and perspectives. There are sidelong mentions of various affairs (the man who spilled coffee on her best Moroccan slippers, an ex-boyfriend who broke into her flat, ‘the coward’, ‘the German man’). Yet she returns again and again to scenes with Xavier: their conversations and impasses, his obtuseness, his tenderness, his maddening yet endearing quiddity. Her ‘previous publisher’ sends on (via email) a letter from her former A-level English teacher, Terence Stone, which establishes another epistolary thread of communication and rumination. The letter, apparently so ‘lovely’ (as a friend observes), activates other, darker, complex strains, including the narrator’s revisiting of her adolescent sexual relationship with Robert Turner, her philosophy teacher and Stone’s colleague. Through Stone, she comes into discursive if not actual contact with Turner, whom she last saw several years earlier. Contact here is mediated: we are in the realm of missives as well as kisses; of emails sent, unsent and extensively imagined; letters obsessively pondered, sent, scanned and rewritten; texts noted and scrutinised; voicemails archived and lost; notebooks saved and sometimes revisited.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye could be read as a Covid-meets-#MeToo novel. The pandemic hovers in the background: people are just starting to meet up again as the book opens. And we soon discover the gravitational pull of that long-ago affair (what to call it?) with Turner, its ongoing vibrations in her consciousness and body. The last time she saw him – in a cemetery, some years ago – he was, she realised, in the grip of some form of dementia. He doesn’t recognise her, and her plan to confront him collapses into an anticlimax of unexpressed thought and emotion.

Yet to characterise the book in this way (Covid-meets-#MeToo) would be alien to its sensibility. Bennett avoids sociological markers, ready summations, easy identification, hashtag consciousness. She offers a phenomenological realism of hyperextended consciousness rather than a social realism of smoothly narrated and narratable events. Here we have psychology but no psychologism, warm flickers of the social but an aversion to sociologisms. The suppression of place, the frequent elision of full names, is part of that refusal of the mandates of standard realism. An extended lover’s discourse emerges, sustained and replayed in her mind. Xavier ‘said many things that sounded intolerable, but when I thought about them sometime later it seemed to me he just said what most people think but wouldn’t dream of expressing. “I don’t understand why you need to see your friends so often when you love me.” I used to laugh at that. He was wrong, and he was right.’

Their relationship has the quality of a protracted debate. ‘Over and over again we had these spats where we shot down the other’s conception of love.’ The tragicomedy of misunderstanding and misalignment intermittently bursts into open conflict. At one point the narrator distils their volleys into an electric set piece:

You don’t know what love is! – You have no idea what it means to love someone! – You have no heart! – You are a narcissist! – You are entirely unsuitable! – If you really loved me you’d stay away from me! – Love asks nothing! – You don’t know the first thing about me! – I want nothing more to do with you! – You’re insane!

The narrator revisits and reimagines these ‘spats’, modulating at times into the third person as the writer-function moves subtly to the fore, misfiring dialogue transmuting into a more measured, apparently omniscient narration: ‘They endeavour to communicate – he in particular makes a lot of effort, but she is reluctant. She doesn’t see the point. They sit opposite one another and struggle to work anything out. Everything changes when they lie down.’ The shift to the third person emerges out of duress, as another way to handle this difficult material.

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 reader largely remains in her mind, in a mode of unfree association as obsessional loops are replayed and amplified. 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. It intermittently, unembarrassedly calls attention to itself – in its dictional frisson (‘a maraud of big black flies’, ‘that dark innermost space, plethoric and phantasmal’) and in its syntactic command, equally at home in a stately multi-clausal grandeur and a skittery vernacular chop. At times the syntax enacts the pivots and whiplash of consciousness under pressure, of self-revising thought. Of the radio silence from Xavier: ‘I’d hate not to know where he is. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Perhaps it would be really good for me actually.’ This isn’t a flowing stream of consciousness: the stream is riddled with rocks, brambles and unseen yet felt impedimenta.

Bennett is interested not so much in the drama of consciousness as in its dramaturgy: its arrangement, its unfolding and crimping, its susceptibility to being worked on as material, the necessity and the glamour of its being worked on. The reconstruction of scenes appears as an activity. Consider the revivified scene of sex with an unnamed man (whom I took to be Turner):

My clothes might be damp. No, what am I saying, my clothes are quite untouched … Against the column in the financial district. Right up against the column in the shadow of the old stone. The crotch of my knickers, black. The black crotch I take hold of either side and pull across, or perhaps he did that. Perhaps he took hold of the crotch of my knickers. Yes, he did that.

What was it like? It might have been this way. Did it go this way, or that way? Perhaps this: yes that, that indeed. Yes, he did that.

Bennett writes writerly, not readerly, texts. Her work invites, demands, decipherment. It has been heralded (by Anne Enright, among others) as an index of a ‘new modernism’. Bennett herself has pointed to writers such as Leonora Carrington and Sara Maitland, and to post-dramatic theatre, as crucial for her sense of writing as ‘tapping into a sense of being, a magic rather than logic’. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is her third work of fiction. Each of her works undertakes a distinctive prosody. Pond (2015), her first, was a collection of vignettes and short stories. Checkout 19 (2021) was a Künstlerroman, following a working-class girl’s sensual and literary development. Bennett has said that in Pond she was interested in ‘modes of solitude’; Checkout 19 gives us a portrait of the artist as a girl and young woman, reading her way into herself, discovering her vocation as a writer.

In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the protagonist is a writer, and her writing has consequences in the world: winning her a readership and prizes (this tracks with Bennett’s own trajectory), allowing her the rare chance to take Xavier out for dinner, underwriting her hope to buy a home in some not-too-distant future, ending her shifting among rentals and borrowed woodsheds. A woman’s writing is also, significantly, a real irritant for her male lovers: in Checkout 19, a boyfriend destroys the short story the narrator had been writing. ‘My boyfriend liked me being a writer, but didn’t very much like me to write.’ In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, her commitment to writing variously impresses, mystifies and discomfits Xavier, who wants her undivided attention. When he reads her new book, he writes to her that he finds it ‘some sort of HELL’.

But in a book filled with scenes of writing and references to notebooks, to ‘this very journal’ and ‘this page’, we see that writing is also in the first instance a mode of self-contact. Of her notebooks: ‘Are they the past? No, not entirely. I am made of what they contain and I am living now. I am here. I am still here.’ Writing also offers, perhaps counterintuitively, a route to anonymity. ‘It’s better for me to go about things anonymously. I don’t like to be too aware it’s me writing.’ In writing, she seeks a very particular kind of freedom, not least from ‘other people’s ideas about me’: ‘I don’t want the way they see me to interfere and keep me at the surface of things. I need to sink down a bit. I need to disappear, go under, get down to where she is. Then it is she who says I, not me, not me.’ In a typically deflationary, equivocating move, she continues: ‘Something like that.’

Halfway through the novel we are brought back to a moment years earlier, when the narrator first became aware that Xavier (here unnamed) wanted to kiss her. Her response is one of extended, excited and revolted anticipation:

Come on old man, walk across the room. I’m waiting for you. Kiss me. Get it over with. It’s not going to be pleasant and it’s about time we found that out … It will be a most terrible kiss, sluggish and lathery, aphotic and unsteady, forgettable – it will die within moments … Walk across the room now old man and kiss me – let’s put an end to this.

Here she is now, many years later, anguished and longing for Xavier’s presence, if no longer for his kisses – which for a time she had not only tolerated but sought. Eros is a cosmic joker.

Late in the novel, Bennett gives a fuller version of the encounter with Turner in the cemetery. The narrator is now an adult – ‘curious’ and not ‘angry’, she insists.

We weren’t going to tell him off were we? No, that wasn’t the idea. We didn’t even feel like telling him off, did we? No, not really. Sometimes we felt like we should feel like telling him off. More than that. Yes, more than just telling him off actually. Because he had been quite bad. He’d behaved very badly we realised. Yes as time went on we realised just how bad his behaviour had been. We realised it but we didn’t feel irate or anything did we. No we didn’t really. There the feeling was, open and available, and actually quite inviting. We came close to it now and then. We did. We did. But all the same it was not our feeling … Never mind. Feelings that you grow yourself are much harder to tend to.

The inner dialogue, the tergiversations, the incremental refinements and clarifications, the repetitions that insist on emerging micro-distinctions are all characteristic of Bennett’s dramas of the mind in action. Also characteristic is the insistence on the difference between ‘available feeling’ and ‘feelings that you grow yourself’: ‘It was not our feeling.’ Across her work one finds a passionate cleaving to a provisional unknowing, a murky yet generative space of freedom out of which you might discover what you actually think and feel.

The difficulty of this, and her commitment to it, are figured in her work as a protecting of oneself from the demands of social legibility and premature articulation, from the requirement to make oneself available. In Checkout 19, the narrator goes on a short trip and revels in no one knowing where she is: ‘But it became more and more difficult to get that not-knowing and the deeply glamorous feeling that came with it and now it doesn’t exist at all the outcast minutes of the day gently claw at you, over here, over here, and it’s harder to know where you are or what you’re doing and how you really feel about any of it.’ Writing is one means of registering – and of fostering – ‘feelings that you grow yourself’, ‘how you really feel about any of it’.

For much of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye we are within the confines of pressurised consciousness, so the occasional moments of aeration are striking and pointed. It is a bracing, delightful shift when in the last pages of the novel we follow the narrator and her friend Maeve as they go on a hike and talk about everything from ‘American hypocrisy and Bible-bashers and creepy Joe Biden’ to dating apps to her ‘ongoing-going-nowhere situation with the German man’, a lover we haven’t heard of until this moment. This warm, smart, breezy millennial chat is a mode the novel has rarely offered. At such moments the reader snaps back into an awareness that this is an intentionally shaped artefact, a document of stringent partiality. The intimacy of the ‘I’ does not mean total or unmediated access.

The first person is partial here not because first-person perspective is by definition partial, but because any person shows partiality, not least to herself. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye activates and resists our expectations about testimony, confessionalism, narrative access; our presumption that we know just how the accent is falling in a life or a work, that the obsessions and preoccupations shown us are the only or even the main ones. This is a vertiginous wager to make as a writer – offering us not quite an unreliable narrator but a narrator attuned to the gap between inner life and shared discourse, not to mention the little ruptures and ambivalent abysses within a person.

Yet​ Bennett’s first person is partial in another way – not primarily as a mystery to herself but as a dispersible subject: one open to, and often seeking, a radical dispossession. The novel continues her inquiry into love-as-adventure, sex as a modality of undoing. In Checkout 19, Anaïs Nin appears as a tutelary spirit, defended against her peers’ condescension:

I said that I’d been particularly struck by the way she writes about sexual relations as a way of uprooting herself, of remaining unfixed, of transgressing the familiar lines of her personality. In fact, if anything – though I did not say this – Nin should be read later on in life, when one has solidified and feels so very sure of themselves and would perhaps benefit from coming undone, from perhaps going out of their minds. Nin did not shy away from the phantoms and fantasies that haunt and goad us – on the contrary, she cajoled and probed them. Sex, as far as she was concerned, was as much an existential adventure as it was an erotic one.

In Pond, the narrator recalls a lecture she once gave at ‘a very eminent university across the water’, which was ill-received because ‘my interest was far too personal and not strictly academic and so my methodology came across as nostalgic and my perspective rather naive’:

It had something to do with love. About the essential brutality of love. About those adventitious souls who deliberately seek out love as a prime agent of total self-immolation. Yes, that’s right. It attempted to show that in the whole history of literature love is quite routinely depicted as an engulfing process of ecstatic suffering which finally, mercifully, obliterates us and delivers us to oblivion … I am mad about you. I am going out of my mind … That kind of thing. I don’t think it went down very well.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye gives us a vision of such self-immolation in the sex scene in the financial district:

His breath examined my arousal, saw the whole thing, the thick hunger and the shrouded depths of that hunger and the variegated history of that hunger and the chthonic force of that hunger and the recklessness and the willingness and the shamelessness, all mine, all undoing me, all bringing me to my knees.

The girl ecstatically undone here is also the woman who years later thrills to the secret relationship with Xavier: ‘She felt unmoored and divested of the markers that ordinarily made her legible and occasionally attractive. Sometimes when he looked at her she felt truly blown away. It was unnerving and thrilling … she could be anyone, couldn’t she? She could be anyone.’ She could be anyone; yet she is this one – though not only this one.

Sex activates the archaic and the transpersonal. It impresses on her a kind of vibrational frequency, the unnamed man becoming ‘all the bodies he’d ever been and that undid me I can’t tell you’. In the novel’s final scene, we again find the narrator and Xavier at the crucial moment their desultory casual friendship becomes erotic: ‘There is so much drama in the room suddenly. She is not her, she is the situation, and the situation pulls things from her that exceed her direct experience and personally gained understanding. She is immaterial. She is all the ages.’ These scenes – with the man in the financial district, with Xavier – propose eros as a kind of portal and revelation, where a person condenses into, or distils, ‘all the bodies’, ‘all the ages’, they have been and might yet be. A person emerges here not as a discrete, describable entity but as a kind of wave function.

In her novel of 2010, Sheila Heti asked ‘How should a person be?’ Bennett asks something different: what is a person? Why and how might a person seek to undo herself? And, crucially, what then? Perhaps a person is best approached as an element in a ‘situation’. Hence the novel’s recourse to scenes and scenarios, erotic involvements repeatedly characterised as ‘situations’. At moments of erotic intensity, ‘she is the situation.’ At other moments, she must ‘read the situation’. The lover’s discourse she offers is both particularised and disseminated across the situation of being in love: structural, transposable yet singular.

In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the narrator returns to the phenomenon of love-as-brutality described in Checkout 19:

It’s not the least bit unusual, is it, to be mad about someone. No it isn’t. There’s a very long and illustrious tradition of it in fact. And that helped didn’t it, to think that the madness we felt was in fact part of a tradition. A rich and profound and probing tradition no less. It helped tremendously. We read all the stories and listened to all the songs and thus our madness was given dimension.

In both books, the literature of erotic ‘madness’ offers a tradition at once enabling and confining, a tradition to read oneself into and against, a template for self-understanding but also for getting a grip on these ‘situations’. Yet Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is not all ecstasy or despair. It is interested in both erotic annihilation and persistence. (It is also at times very funny.) Bennett sustains a subtle dialectic throughout – between the ecstatic ‘undoing’ promised by eros and the ongoing possibilities of provisional reassemblage through writing and conversation. Friendship emerges as a significant mode of mutual recognition. The names of friends float through the book like a sociable chorus – Sophia, David, Maeve. The tangles of inner life are modified, and sometimes untangled, by exchanges with these characters. Bennett sidesteps the slough of heteropessimism, though she provides grounds for it (all that male obtuseness, the ambient and sometimes enacted threat of violence). Instead, she offers something else – a philosophical rehabilitation of romance.