Desperate, intelligent, irreverent: in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, Claire-Louise Bennett breaks up with illusions

In Burnt Norton, the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, the poet moves down a passage “we did not take” and passes through a door “never opened” to arrive in a mythic rose garden. Here, in the thorny cradle of mournful innocence, a bird delivers the famous line:

                                     humankind Cannot bear very much reality.

That inability to “bear much reality” reverberates in Claire-Louise Bennett’s experimental new novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.

The novel dissects the mind of a young woman reckoning with the psychological upheaval of a romantic separation. As the unnamed narrator grieves and reflects, she unpicks the patchwork of illusions that sustained her relationship with a peculiar elderly man named Xavier.

At the centre of this thrillingly interior work, almost entirely denuded of sentimentality, is the collision of these two deeply self-involved characters, both of whom are more wedded to their fantasies about one another than their actual selves. One of the most intriguing elements of the novel is witnessing their failure to connect in the middle point between their incongruent psychological worlds.

Review: Big Kiss, Bye-Bye – Claire-Louise Bennett (Fitzcarraldo)

Bennett’s brilliant debut Pond (2015) wove together stories narrated by a reclusive woman living in a remote cottage in Ireland. Her second book, Checkout 19 (2021), was a novel that examined a young woman’s maturation through her engagement with literature, combining elements of autofiction and the Künstlerroman (artist’s novel) to navigate material that might have fallen flat in the hands of a writer with less flair and ambition.

The playfully titled Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is Bennett’s third book and her most desperate, intelligent and irreverent to date. It resonates stylistically with modernist predecessors in its scrutiny of consciousness and often overlooked complexities buried within the quotidian.

This characteristically modernist concern with the mind’s mysterious workings and its convoluted relationship with material reality is reflected in the narrator’s interest in dreams. She takes pleasure in recounting and interpreting her dreams to uncover the self-knowledge she believes they hold in uncanny suspension.

‘Some sort of Hell’

As in Bennett’s previous novels, the unnamed narrator at the centre of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye resembles the author. She is a writer at a similar age and stage of life. In the beginning, however, her occupation is an ancillary detail. The event that monopolises her attention and nervous energy is her recent separation from her beloved Xavier, with his dentures and his time-hardened eccentricities.

Early in the novel, it is revealed that the catalyst for the breakup was an email he sent about the narrator’s recently published book, in which he described her work as “some sort of Hell”.

With this email, a line is crossed. The plainness of Xavier’s lack of regard for her feelings is laid out so clearly and uncompromisingly that nothing can atone for his insensitivity. Any illusions the narrator might have nurtured about him being sensitive (albeit socially clumsy) are shattered.

What follows is a forensic examination of the illusions that fuelled their partnership. As the novel progresses through its solipsistic textual landscape, the narrator’s non-linear recollection of events provides intimate access to her time with Xavier. It is only with the clarity of hindsight that she is able to reconstruct a nuanced portrait.

Xavier is a wealthy Christian scientist with a limp grip on reality. He believes “sickness is an illusion” and that friendship is for children. When he and the narrator are together, he wants to be with her all the time. He cannot seem to fathom “why she did so many things that didn’t involve him”.

Beyond his neediness, Xavier is comically self-interested. He has written a book on the topic of himself, which he affectionately refers to as his “bio”. He dreams of having it made into a film. It contains intimate details about the narrator and he has no regard for why this might concern her.

A polite but painful man, Xavier has a penchant for undermining the narrator with compliments. When she hands him a copy of her book (the one he calls “some sort of Hell”), he notes “how smart it was”. He then turns straight to the author photo on the jacket and says “cute little ears”, shifting the focus away from her intellectual achievement and back to her physical appearance.

The extent to which illusions have sustained the partnership between the novel’s two unlikely lovers is perhaps most explict in their final encounter – depicted at the beginning of the work.

They attend the races. It is Lady’s Day – which, the narrator reflects, Xavier enjoys because “he likes to see women dressed up”. She is nevertheless certain that Xavier won’t stare at them, because “too much scrutiny might spoil the illusion of sophistication and Xavier isn’t interested in having his illusions dispensed with”.

The narrator reflects that Xavier is rather fond of illusions “and is of the opinion that there isn’t much else”:

“Life is an illusion,” he’ll say, “but then you already know that, don’t you.”

Yet he also believes his take on reality is authoritative. “I don’t see you as your friends see you,” Xavier tells the narrator. “I see you as you really are.”

She humours his belief, in what reads as an attempt to remain palatable.

Illusions reinforced

Throughout the novel, the narrator reinforces the illusions Xavier projects onto their relationship. At one point, she reassures him the dress she is wearing was purchased with money he gave her, even though it wasn’t.

She mulls over which flower arrangements she should buy at his expense – a detail makes her appear somewhat petulant. Xavier believes it is normal to spend a significant sum on a routine bouquet; the narrator desires a more modest arrangement. But she panders to his desire to provide for her and, in doing so, assists in preserving his fantasy. She permits him an artificial sense of accomplishment in supplying her with something that is not wanted.

The narrator shares Xavier’s tenuous grip on “reality”. Over the course of the novel, she comes to realise that she was more invested in the ideas she manufactured about Xavier than the man himself.

She confesses that her attachment had been “very much predicated upon” the idea of “staying close during his final days and hours”. Her belief in the statistical likelihood that she was destined to be “his last love” inspires a mock-heroic degree of psychological fortitude.

Along with the exquisite prose, one of the most satisfying elements of Big Kiss Bye-Bye is Bennett’s delicate depiction of the conflict that stems from the narrator’s competing desires. The feminist yearning for equality in a heteronormative partnership is sometimes incompatible with the more universal longing to be loved and desirable.

Beyond her reflections on her inflated sense of responsibility for Xavier, she examines her relationships with other men. This includes ruminating over a letter she receives from a past English teacher, which stirs dormant memories.

Despite her keen awareness of Xavier’s potent self-assuredness, the narrator struggles with her own sense of self-awareness. She confides that she is the type of writer who doesn’t like to be aware of herself when she is writing. She goes on to acknowledge that this is nonsensical, given that so many of her sentences begin with the singular pronoun “I”.

She is also self-aware enough to recognise that she is riddled with anxiety. She recalls a period in her life when she was convinced all the men in her world – even frail old Xavier – were trying to kill her. She acknowledges the creative impulse in this paranoia, reflecting that “all my life I’ve felt something was after me and to my own irritation I looked behind too often and kept seeing things”.

Again, the novel returns to the disjuncture between how things are and how the mind perceives them, and reminds us of the human tendency to seek shelter in illusions.

Georgia Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.