An obsessive, tortured domesticity runs through the fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett. The narrator of “Pond” (2015) forms an uncommon attachment to her seaside cottage: she takes great pains with the arrangement of her breakfast and her garden, organizing crockery “into jaunty stacks along the window ledge” and spending a memorable chapter on the deteriorating control knobs of her mini-kitchen. “Checkout 19” (2021), by contrast, is haunted by the absence of a proper home and the despair of unbelonging. Its narrator is “homesick for a place I have never seen”; when imagining her perfect house, she pictures a place that favors “darkness, patina, and fragility.” It’s fitting, then, that “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye,” Bennett’s third and latest book, is formed around the upheaval of moving. In it, “the things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away,” not merely the narrator’s possessions—her old letters, a “significant teapot,” a decorative parrot sent by a friend in Provence—but the accoutrement of her emotional life.

If “Pond” was loosely concerned with a woman’s relationship to her home and “Checkout 19” with a woman’s relationship to literature, “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” is nominally preoccupied with a similar woman’s relationship to romance. She is a successful writer in the aftermath of a longtime affair with her aging lover, Xavier, in the midst of which she leaves an apartment in the city for a remote country house, exchanges e-mails, and goes on meandering walks with friends.

Yet to attempt to describe the plot of a Bennett novel is a delightfully doomed venture. Her books are set in the British Isles, in the present day, but they have an anachronistic, mannered style that makes the mention of a text message or a recent U.S. President disconcerting. Littered with goats, mountains, vegetables, and books, and less consistently with people, they share a discursive narration that slides between the deliciously forensic and the deliberately opaque, as well as between voices, from her usual first person into third, or into an oratorical “we.” Despite this slipperiness, one would know a Bennett paragraph anywhere: her novels are defined by the turgid, relentless, and spectacular movements of a self-centered and hyper-attuned mind.

In “Big Kiss, Bye Bye,” the narrator’s restive inner world is occasionally punctured by the intrusions of letters, calls, e-mails, and trips. Her emotions are tied to objects in forceful and mysterious ways. A crystal bowl full of dried rose heads, or a fire in a grate “exactly like a magnificent vulva,” can turn her thoughts headlong. If time exerts some sense of its passage on Bennett’s narrator, she is too proud to yield to it, except in one important sense: she no longer desires Xavier. He’s finally grown decrepit, wheelchair-bound and subject to dentures. In her imagining, his tongue is an “ancient cold thing.” The two of them once had a secluded, tender courtship in which Xavier impressed her with glamorous stories of the sixties and seventies, and she was, in his eyes, “just not the usual thing.” Now he refuses to accept that their romance has been demoted to friendship.

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.

Near the end of the book, the narrator finally asks herself whether she’s angry with Turner for pursuing her when she was young and vulnerable. “Yes as time went on we realised just how badly his behaviour had been,” she writes, shifting into a first-person plural that dramatizes her inner dissension. “We realised it but we didn’t feel irate or anything did we. . . . We came close to it now and then. We did. We did. But all the same it was not our feeling.” The significance of her and Turner’s “dealings” sharpens as repetition becomes the instrument of meaning: “And we didn’t know then. No, of course not. We didn’t have a clue, did we? Oh no, of course we didn’t. . . .” The sense that the narrator contains a multiplicitous “we” robs her of her misanthropic vigor; we’re plunged into her much younger mind, riven by confusion and self-doubt. Maybe Turner’s inappropriate affections possessed and split her, putting her mind at war with itself. But it seems just as possible that a confused division of loyalties is, simply, the lot of a person who was once genuinely in love: “We adored him,” she remembers. “It was unavoidable.”

Perhaps this state of cantankerous internal conversation is responsible for the narrator’s stilted relationship with Xavier. The novel reads at times as a portrait of the impossibility of intimacy. Her and Xavier’s cumbersome affair reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s paraphrase of Freud, which described relations between people as “at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.” The narrator’s solitary fantasy system is indeed powerful: her interior monologue floods, soothes, ignites, and bitterly defends. By contrast, scenes that recount conversations between her and Xavier are starchy, full of solicitous endearments and truncated attempts.

Yet “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” 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, complete with all the electrifying anxiety that accompanies such a performance, because, despite her self-possession, Bennett’s narrator is porous to the point of fragility. Her attachment to furniture, objects, and foods is so high-pitched that when she handles a teapot or orders at a restaurant I feel the terror of Pnin as he lowers the glass bowl into the sink. A pair of Moroccan slippers are spoiled by the heedlessness of a lover; when a dinner guest fingers a delicate fern she’s arranged on a table, she’s so disturbed that she flees to her bedroom rather than watch. The force of her personality so relies on a careful arrangement of objects that even her scarce tolerance of intruders can seem generous. Her belongings form a snug, elegant carapace.

By a writer’s third book, we begin to see clearly the constitutional sense of the world from which her work is born, even—and often—in spite of her hopes or imagined values. It seems to me that Bennett might well be happily immune to frustrations of this sort. Her sense of the world is epicurean, defensive, and slightly wretched, yet she doesn’t conceive of these last as any kind of tragedy. She writes with confidence that we’d like to spend countless pages on repetitive accounts of the same banal incidents and temperamental swishes, simply to be in the presence of her voice. There’s real arrogance to that, perhaps an arrogance of which writers should have more. When I was studying writing, we talked often about the mandate to love the reader; 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. We’re happy to be her guests, even if we aren’t permitted to touch the ferns. ♦