Say it with flowers. Say what? This is the question Claire-Louise Bennett’s narrator might have been tempted to ask as she deals with her older lover Xavier’s endless gift of flowers. Gift-giving can be a form of licence-taking and the narrator in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is never quite sure when the giving ends and the taking begins.
Bennett, who had already demonstrated her skill in subtle, incremental evocations of character in Pond (2015) and Checkout 19 (2021), excels in the creation of Xavier, a taker masquerading as the most selfless of givers. Urbane, self-absorbed, fastidious in his microaggressions, his very credibility makes him all the more insufferable on the page.
Part of what puzzles the narrator also puzzles the reader: how has this man ever been a source of attraction to her? The narrator grapples with reminders of earlier loves, and their confounding mixture of exhilaration and humiliation. She receives an email from her former English teacher, Terence Stone, and this triggers memories of her passion for one of his colleagues, Robert Turner.
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Bennett is particularly adept at capturing the doomed logic of this relationship that cannot be but that will not leave her be. She remembers the tyranny of a particular kind of politeness or niceness or reserve that chafed against her restless spirit. Conventions become suspect as do rituals of conformity of any kind: “it’s tedious and asinine yet everyone is trapped in it because nobody wants to let anyone else down, though if you ask anyone they’ll likely tell you they’d be very happy to spend Christmas day with five types of cheese and the curtains drawn.”
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Bennett’s narrator is often drawn to defend women in cinema (Erika Kohut in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher) or literature (Madame Chantelouve in JK Huysmans’ The Damned) who get a bad rap for not behaving as they should. She wants to own the darkness of her appetites, not to be continuously scolded for them. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is a careful probing of the elusiveness of human connection and an unsettling portrait of the heart as the loneliest of hunters.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
