{"id":324328,"date":"2025-10-22T17:04:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T17:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/324328\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T17:04:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T17:04:11","slug":"a-novel-that-understands-where-romance-is-going","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/324328\/","title":{"rendered":"A Novel That Understands Where Romance Is Going"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past few decades, one particular question has played out across numerous books, films, and essays: Can men and women be friends? That debate can seem awfully quaint. The concern has now hardened into a much gloomier one: Can men and women even get along? Recently, the retrograde gender politics of the right have influenced young men<\/a> through podcasts, websites, and other \u201cmanosphere<\/a>\u201d content. Meanwhile, the increase in education and economic autonomy for women has shifted dating norms and expectations<\/a>, and many people (regardless of gender) are disappointed by app-based courtship<\/a>. These developments have, for some people, called into question the future of heterosexuality itself.<\/p>\n

Into the fray slips the British-born writer Claire-Louise Bennett with her third book, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye<\/a>. Set in the period after a breakup, the novel contains moments of sharp analysis that appear, at times, to endorse this fatalistic vision, termed \u201cheteropessimism\u201d by the writer Asa Seresin in an influential 2019 essay<\/a>. Heteropessimism is an attitude, Seresin wrote, \u201cusually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.\u201d It has animated a number of works examining heterosexual relationships in recent years, including novels such as Sarah Manguso\u2019s Liars<\/a>, essays appearing in publications such as The New York Times and The Paris Review, and pop songs from musicians such as Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance<\/a><\/p>\n

Bennett is a writer of great linguistic inventiveness; her previous books, the short-story collection Pond<\/a> and the novel Checkout 19<\/a>, use surprising wordplay to evoke their narrators\u2019 unique ways of interacting with the world. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye offers something else, too: a subtle riposte against gender pessimism. Its protagonist\u2014unnamed, like those in Pond and Checkout 19\u2014is a writer who has recently ended a doomed affair with an older man, Xavier. So far, this sounds familiar. But Bennett is up to something odder and pricklier.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Big Kiss, Bye-Bye – A Novel<\/a><\/p>\n

By Claire-Louise Bennett<\/p>\n

The plot, like those of Bennett\u2019s other books, can meander; at times it is confusingly opaque. The narrator has a post-breakup correspondence with Xavier and exchanges emails with her former high-school English teacher, Terence Stone, who has recently reached out to compliment her writing. She also recalls sexual encounters with a former\u2014and perhaps different?\u2014lover. Scenes slide from the first to the third person, as though the narrator is dramatizing her own story for the reader\u2019s consumption. Early in the novel, she contemplates an imminent move to the countryside. (The location isn\u2019t entirely clear, but it seems to be in Ireland, where Bennett lives.) \u201cI will be glad when it\u2019s all done,\u201d she writes. \u201cI can\u2019t get on with anything. Time feels abstract. The days indistinct. It could be any month at all. It\u2019s very windy tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n

As in Bennett\u2019s other works, vagueness manifests in the book\u2019s sentences, which have a habit of interrupting themselves, thoughts popping in and out with the regularity of a real-life interior monologue. In the book\u2019s sex scenes, however, the opposite occurs: Two bodies grasping at each other create coherence. \u201cWrapped my leg about his body, dug my heel into the small of his back,\u201d Bennett writes in a sentence that leads to one of the more accurate depictions of sex from a female perspective that I\u2019ve read in fiction: \u201cGo in, I said, and go in deep. Go in and get as much of me as you can.\u201d This is as much a dare, a provocation, as it is a sigh of release or a moment of submission. Sex in this book, as in life, is rarely a one-dimensional experience.<\/p>\n

About halfway through, the novel interrupts itself again, the prose turning essayistic as the narrator contemplates the final scene of the film The Piano Teacher, during which Erika Kohut\u2014the masochistic piano teacher of the title\u2014stabs herself in public following the end of a humiliating affair with her younger student, Walter. \u201cThis is a symbolic act, not a fatal one,\u201d Bennett writes. It is done \u201cin order to save herself\u2014it is as if she is lancing a mutinous boil. It represents a transition, a leaving behind of voyeurism and fantasy, and an unflinching readiness to move into another more integrated realm.\u201d It feels significant that this film, as well as the novel it\u2019s based on, by the Nobel Prize\u2013winning author Elfriede Jelinek, has recently enjoyed something of a revival in popularity<\/a> in English-speaking literary circles, in part because of its bleak view of relationships between men and women. When the narrator watches The Piano Teacher\u2019s final scene, she goes through a kind of symbolic transition too, attempting to get out of her head and move into a more \u201cintegrated\u201d domain.<\/p>\n

This domain appears to involve more action and less monologue, which is where the novel moves as well. The narrator joins her friend Maeve for a hike up a local hill. As they walk, they discuss then-President Joe Biden and \u201cthe hypocrisy of US foreign policy,\u201d as well as what the narrator terms \u201cAmerica\u2019s deep conservatism and their ongoing fear of socialism.\u201d The narrator tells Maeve \u201cabout how the CIA, or maybe it was the FBI, funded major exhibitions of abstract expressionist artwork in Europe at the beginning of the Cold War.\u201d Their talking points are almost parodically clich\u00e9d, however true they might be. As the two women continue their walk, their conversation maintains its focus on the United States, as they discuss \u201cRoe versus Wade and Ernest Hemingway,\u201d until they come across an American couple also hiking up the hill.<\/p>\n

The narrator and her friend seem slightly embarrassed at the possibility of being overheard\u2014seeing the couple perhaps reminds them that Americans are not simply an idea on a page or in a newspaper headline, but actual people. The couple turns out to be blandly inoffensive, and after their brief encounter, the two women change their topic of conversation, moving on to dating and the narrator\u2019s experience using dating apps. \u201cTexting and stuff is a complete waste of time,\u201d the narrator muses.<\/p>\n

Read: An all-female society, pushed to extremes<\/a><\/p>\n

The focus of this very long scene is notable. Even on this hill in Ireland, current events in the U.S. are an inescapable part of everyday conversation. And it\u2019s not just the news\u2014the United States\u2019 political and cultural obsessions, including fixations on tradwives and girlbosses, the manosphere, and, yes, heteropessimism, are heatedly discussed around the globe<\/a> on social media. But out in the real world, the sudden appearance of an American couple demonstrates how abstract these conversations can become. Bennett\u2019s book seems to question whether scrutinizing every new gendered archetype or behavior, in the disembodied way social media encourages, is productive. What happened, simply, to living? To experiencing life itself?<\/p>\n

An actual relationship, Bennett seems to argue in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, matters more than the sociopolitical environment it exists in. She is better for having broken up with Xavier. But she is allowed to mourn the person, and the relationship\u2014the companionship, his sweetness. Bennett\u2019s novel probes the ways our experiences of love and sex are simultaneously influenced by both generalities and particularities: by societal trends and by ourselves as individuals. Our intimacies are connected to politics, and yet are also profoundly more specific, more real. \u201cWe are in the dark,\u201d Bennett writes of the shadowy, wordless experience of two people connecting. \u201cWe are together in the dark.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past few decades, one particular question has played out across numerous books, films, and essays: Can…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":324329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-324328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115418907971665130","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}