Big Kiss, Bye Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 168pp, £12.99

Claire-Louise Bennett is a writer who occupies a series of interlocking and indeterminate spaces. Born in Britain but a long-term resident of Ireland, she is interested in some of the same societal and sexual tensions that feature in the work of publishing contemporaries Sally Rooney, Megan Nolan and Nicole Flattery, but tends to float freer from the constraints of time and place. She is an avant-garde writer in the sense that she repeatedly disrupts the form of her work and draws on influences that have done the same, but she can also be strikingly down to earth, cheerfully demotic and unpretentious, just as she is citing Huysmans or Count Stenbock. She may seem to skirt modernism, or bring autofiction to mind – but neither quite fit. 

Really, she is a one-off. Across three blazingly intelligent and gripping books – the short-story collection Pond, published a decade ago, her 2021 novel Checkout 19 and, just before that, 2020’s Fish Out of Water, her response to seeing the art of surrealist Dorothea Tanning – Bennett has worked and reworked her themes and tropes: the solitary woman attempting to capture her experiences, thoughts and feelings in language that will allow them to live rather than fix them on the page.

The narrator of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is unnamed, sometimes an “I” and sometimes a “we”, on the verge of moving out of her city flat, or already installed in a remote loft above a woodshed, on a walk up the mountain, swimming in sea or river, often on the move but just as often stilled in thought or remembrance. She is alive to the ambiguity of her suggestive dreams – the sensory precision of an almond pressed into the hard flesh of a halved apple – but tolerant of others’ more straightforward interpretations of them. “‘It is my only weapon’, I joked obligingly from the back of the car, because looked at literally that would seem to be what the dream was implying. Keep writing. Keep writing. Keep making books. Keep dropping them on people”, she replies after her sleep-self has produced the image of her killing a scorpion with a book.

And Bennett’s writing does have something of the force of a dropped object, although just as much as like a piece of glass or ceramic, reflective and splintered, as a more solid and apparently discrete book. Work and sex emerge as consistent preoccupations, shifting between comfort and torment. In the process of separating from her lover, the very much older Xavier, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye’s narrator finally gives him a copy of her book, as they sit eating lunch in a hotel restaurant filled with racegoers on Ladies Day. “Cute little ears,” he responds, looking at her author photograph. “Well done, darling.” Later, he emails to tell her he’s read it, and found it “some sort of HELL”, after which they enter a long period of non-communication. 

Xavier has been very rich, keen not only to deliver a stream of anecdotes about his life as a jet-setting private banker (“‘This doesn’t amuse you, does it?’ he’d say, and I’d say, ‘No, it doesn’t, I hate this story.’”), but for her to write a film of his life. He is incurious about her existence as a writer, and insistent on enacting the cliched role of the sugar-daddy, besieging her with unwanted flowers and retiring, wounded, when she tells him that she is no longer attracted to him (to thicken the plot, they have never had sex, but have frequently lain awake talking).

This is to make the novel sound more schematically coherent than it really is. Instead, it is rich with gaps and meandering, semi-explored paths, in which the narrator is as likely to deliver a non-sequitur about her immediate surroundings – “It throws nice shadows,” she remarks of a bedside lamp; “I could be in Cambodia” – as to plunge us into an explicit, erotic third-person description of an al fresco sexual encounter. That, in turn, might give way to a correspondence with her old English teacher, polite recollections interrupted by her uncomfortable recollections of a traumatic relationship with another teacher. 

That these memories have been given a shape by the literature of young and obsessive love is, in part, a curse: “We read all the stories and listened to all the songs and thus our madness was given dimension. Dimension and tangibility and direction and new words. And a cataclysmic ferocity besides. That’s true too. Which might have got the better of us. Oh, very nearly. Intoxicating one minute. Utterly enervating the next. We could hardly contain ourselves.”

Not containing oneself, or one’s selves, is a central strand of an experimental tradition that Bennett, in the manner of writers such as Jean Rhys, Ann Quin and Tove Ditlevsen, is responding to and remaking. Her version is funny, lusty, painful and provocative, her fractured prose alluringly generative. It is also a wonderful riposte to the way such writing is often critically coded, inflected with ideas of neurosis and self-absorption: instead, it insists only upon itself, and the necessity of keeping on writing, keeping on dropping books on us.

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