Review: Young woman, much older man equals problems in ‘Big Kiss, Bye-Bye’

The #MeToo movement may have faded from the news, but its influence still reverberates in the literary world.

Recent years have seen a handful of authors reassessing relationships between young women and older men. Some of these scenarios derived from an author’s past fiction, as with Mary Gaitskill’s “Minority Report,” which retells one of her early stories about exploitative power dynamics. And some derived from their actual past, as with Linn Ullmann’s “Girl, 1984,” which centers on a teenager’s modeling trip to Paris.

Irish author Claire-Louise Bennett’s new novel, “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye,” falls somewhere in the middle, as the unnamed narrator wrestles with reawakened memories of an intensely passionate schoolgirl relationship with a teacher. These emotions from 30 years earlier meld with the woman’s feelings about other relationships, primarily an adult romance with a different older man. It’s an entrancing and exacting examination of the persistence of memory and those “half-buried distorted things [that] have a habit of rearing their noxious malformed heads again.”

When the novel opens, in October 2021, the woman hasn’t seen former lover Xavier for three months, since she rebuffed his request for a kiss at their first post-pandemic meeting. She cherishes their friendship, but is decades younger than the septuagenarian and no longer attracted to him. He wants love or nothing, so says goodbye and then days later emails to say her latest book was “some sort of HELL.” Reminiscing about their time together, her genuine affection makes her tend to explain away his often passive-aggressive, needy or petulant behavior.

Around the same time, the woman’s former high school English teacher writes to her, triggering memories of a day in his classroom when she was distracted because “one of his colleagues [had been] fooling around with me.”

That colleague was her philosophy teacher, Robert Turner, with whom she had a fiery fling that seemingly ended badly. She refers to him as “the coward” and keeps an unsigned poem as “sufficient evidence” that “it was certainly not one-sided.”

Bennett’s prose is full of utterly original imagery, as in “To begin with my eyes jumped all over the resplendently gruesome words haphazardly, like the snowy paws of a kitten trapped in a white-hot fire grate.” And the novel’s shifting perspective keeps the narrator’s — or the author’s — conclusions nebulous.

When the woman recalls seeing Robert in a cemetery seven years earlier, “she” and “I” merge into a narrative “we,” while flashbacks to physical encounters with a man who is presumably Robert are more ambiguous, taking place between “she” and “he.” One of these latter passages stylistically channels Molly Bloom from the conclusion of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and is among the most rapturous pieces of writing about desire that I’ve ever read.

The narrator’s intense introspection can become mind-numbingly repetitive at times, but it is all part of the woman’s almost dispassionate assessment of the profound effects her past relationships have had on her. Her prescription would likely be endorsed by other authors revisiting the past, too: “Keep writing. Keep making books. Keep dropping them on people.”

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

By: Claire-Louise Bennett