Precious Vestiges of Something That Took Place

Claire Foster reviews Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.”

By Claire FosterOctober 25, 2025

• Fiction

TOWARD THE END of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, Claire-Louise Bennett’s third novel, there is a passage that describes a scene from Michael Haneke’s 2001 film The Piano Teacher. Isabelle Huppert, in the role of Erica Kohut, a renowned piano professor, removes a box from under her bed to present to her student, with whom she has entered a sadomasochistic relationship. The box contains a bounty of domestic objects she intends for him to use to brutalize her. Bennett, or the narrator, writes,

The way she does this, the way she pulls this secret box out […] reminds me […] of how a child nervously shows another child its most treasured toy in the hope that the other child will immediately understand the significance of the toy and take part in the magical game that it surely inspires. Play with me.

Across all her books, Bennett has been interested in privately stowed boxes and the girl or woman who keeps them. Her first novel, Pond (2015), charts the objects, encounters, rooms, and outdoor spaces that make up the world of a woman writer who lives alone. Her second novel, Checkout 19 (2021), dwells in the childhood and adolescence of a girl who will become a woman who will become a writer; it is a study in the act of reading and the vital shimmer that exists inside and around the figure of the child. Bennett is also the author of a book-length essay-fiction, Fish out of Water (2020), that returns to the rosebuds of childhood and also extends a gaze in the direction of Dorothea Tanning’s 1944 painting Self-Portrait, which features a woman, seen from behind, looking out into a green landscape.

In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the narrator, seen from behind a notebook, is looking at men. She is writing, she is writing about not writing; she is examining various green-painted, flower-festooned rooms, gazing toward a body of water (“always feel much steadier by water”) and thousands of bodies of herself (“She is all the ages”). She is always pursuing sentences, themselves another kind of box.

The major—in some ways, sole—event of the novel is the ongoing writing into a notebook the narrator is keeping; its contents, we are to assume, comprise the book’s 224 pages. This notebook that is the novel contains a sometimes-tight, sometimes-baggy compression of selves and situations, the narrator deploying a variety of pronouns (we, she, I) with which to remember and analyze (or fictionalize) dreams, drafts, desires, details. There are several men, kisses given and withheld, fucks had and affairs abandoned, conversations (or arguments) and their discontents, a few bedrooms, too many flowers, and several waves of an unnamed but obvious virus.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye reminded me, in its inner-lived repetitions, of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (2024), and in its form—a novel that reads like a notebook—of Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978–1986 (2019), a notebook that reads like a novel. Big Kiss’s spiraled display of intimacy’s afterlives also called to mind these lines from Diane Seuss: “who will say of me I kissed her who will say of me I kissed someone who kissed / her or I kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed her.”

A central figure in the narrator’s life and notebook is Xavier, a much older (north of 75) man who has been in her orbit for about a decade. An erstwhile lover who remains loved by her but no longer desired, he resents her but goes on wanting her to have beautiful bouquets—an ongoing source of alternating stress, anguish, and pleasure throughout the book—anyway.

And who, after all, is she? We learn, always in pieces, that the narrator is a writer who has published several books, the most recent of which has really ticked Xavier off. He writes her an email to tell her it was “some sort of HELL”—this comes after the opening scene in which she gives the book to him before offering to slide it into the bag attached to his wheelchair (this is also the moment we gather, with intended shock, his age).

Speaking of emails, we are almost always reading the narrator’s experience of thinking about them. Emails are of primary importance to the novel, or to the notebook that shapes it: the narrator takes pleasure in writing and sending them, writing and not sending them, tinkering with and theorizing them. Sometimes a few hours pass after she sends an email and then turns a sentence over in her mind only to discover a bug—not a spider, she doesn’t mind those, but maybe a scorpion—clinging to a word or a reference. The narrator also takes pleasure in receiving emails and thinking about when she might like to receive one (“I was on the train yesterday, coming back from where I used to live to where I am now, and I thought to myself, now would be a good time to receive an email”), as well as in thinking about how much time has passed since she last thought about when she might like to receive one (“A week has passed since I was on the train and considered it a good time and place to receive an email”).

Specificity of detail is reserved for napkin holders, croissants, names of flowers, choreographies of a hand on a table or two bodies on a street, the fantasy of a deleted or daringly included punctuation mark. Very little is turned towards the ostensibly bigger-picture stuff—for example, the narrator’s own age or means of paying her rent—which is meted out in supposed opposition to Xavier. For example, she is much younger than him, and we learn this because he asks, “I seem old to you?” and she replies, “Yes, […] you are old, darling.”

Another older male figure emerges and soon forks into two when the narrator receives an email from Terence Stone—or not from him, exactly, but from her previous publisher, who sent her an email that includes an attachment of a scan of a copy of a letter (a typical Bennettian convolution) written by Stone, one of the narrator’s former A-level English teachers. He has just learned about her books and her literary success while visiting his local library. He includes in brackets that she won’t remember him (a detail the narrator consequently includes in parentheses), but of course she remembers him. She emails Stone to say as much and to introduce a few “things of [her] own.” The primary thing is a revelation about Stone’s then-colleague Robert Turner, with whom the narrator, she tells Stone, had “dealings.”

“Dealings” is a term—like so many knots of language that scuttle across the novel—that just won’t go away. A few pages later, the narrator recounts the letter and her response to it to a friend: “‘Had dealings with!’ she said, laughing.” The narrator replies, “Yeah, I know. I don’t know where I got that from! Dealings indeed.” And later: “‘Dealings,’ whatever that means, and over a week had gone by since I’d written that.”

It is through this progression of emails exchanged with Stone that the narrator identifies the emergence of a “theme of green,” the beginning of which she locates in Stone’s first letter to her, a reference to a “pot of green ink.” She rounds off her reply “by saying green ink has a habit of vanishing,” an observation she immediately judges as having been “not true and completely meaningless.” The elevated and allusive literary mood afforded to emails of this kind means that the paint war carries on: Stone then offers a green-filled stanza from an Andrew Marvell poem, to which the narrator replies bearing J. K. Huysmans’s The Damned (1891), an allusion made uncanny a few weeks after sending the email because, as she continues reading The Damned, she comes across a passage in which a letter written to Monsieur Durtal is written in “peculiar pale green ink” and the narrator had “underlined that part of the text with a green ink of [her] own.”

Before encountering that passage, with a green pen of my own, I had been seeking the pleasure of underlining each of the green-colored objects or notions that appear throughout Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the texture or degree of each thing’s greenness characterized whenever central or simply desired. We are given the following inventory (sometimes repeated verbatim or with minor variations): “a green velvet jacket,” “ashen green walls,” “a green swimming costume,” a “pale green” shell, “a green mound,” “far too much greenery,” “the theme of green,” “a green thought in a green shade,” “the green walls of my bedroom,” “Green is life is poison is sickness,” “days [written] in green,” a cat’s green eyes, “pale myrtle green ink,” “a pot of green ink,” “the greening power of God,” “not just green but greenness itself,” “green foliage,” “the colour green,” “Green,” “Greenly,” “Greenliness,” “Greenest,” “Greened, all greened,” “green about the gills,” “dubious green.” This list bears out the brilliance of Bennett’s sentences, each one a master class in how language gives rise to thought and memory, and how its repetition revises both. Green devours and demands more green, and each sentence is a box in which to collect it.

With repetition, Bennett’s sentences become louder, more intense, often assuming the steady tempo of a grammar lesson in tenses: “We didn’t have sex. We’ve never had sex. We will never have sex.” At other times, the reader might find her posture slouched into the cloaked silhouette of a juror: Bennett, on the stand, tells us something once and then, a few pages or words later, instructs us to disregard it, cross it out, revise the transcript. But of course the reader is holding the transcript—it’s called Big Kiss, Bye-Bye—and Bennett is a fastidious editor. Every one of the narrator’s rippled repetitions, stuttered variations, or flat-out contradictions has been handled with care.

Examples of this are fun:

Xavier often talked about us having breakfast together. As soon as I met him he talked about that, he painted quite the scene. Or perhaps I did that. Yes, I did that, he didn’t furnish the proposed morning ritual with any kind of domestic particulars at all—I capably filled those in—in fact they came to me without much devising, quite distinctly.

(Of course they did.) Another, this time about the moment at which the narrator read Xavier’s email in which he likens her book to “HELL”: “I was queuing in the supermarket when I read that. It winded me. I almost ditched my basket of groceries.” Later, a hot throat becomes an icy one: “My throat froze over when I read it.” At another point: “I’m especially fond of hellebores” blooms into “I absolutely love hellebores.”

One last example: “[P]leasantness […] seems warm and accepting and sincere, but it isn’t at all, it’s absolutely thin—you come to the sheer edge of it very quickly.” Then, further down the page, lower your chin—as she once choreographed for her reader in the virtuosic opening chapter of Checkout 19—and you’ll see that the sheer edge has changed texture: “[Y]ou get to the edge of it very quickly, the stark edge of it.” Sheer becomes stark; a raised chin becomes doubled; a comma enables a revision. All for the narrator, many pages later, to shrug it off: “[B]ut really, what was my problem with pleasantness, exactly?”

Not only across the page but also across Bennett’s entire oeuvre, words and images resurface: this is one of her magical games. A passage in Fish out of Water—“I am not long for this world. […] Saying it on the edge of our bed made us feel seminal and decidedly afraid”—becomes, in Checkout 19, “I am not long for this world. […] Sat on the edge of my rosebud-patterned bed, repeating my grandmother’s mantra, however, I felt noble, mysterious, and independent.” And a passage from Pond may be retroactively understood as informing the epistolary thrust of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye:

[A] letter attests to something that did not happen, that could not happen, it will not come to rest. […] Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do […] And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions.

The narrator of Pond keeps these letters in a box, along with “poems, songs, cassette tapes, little portraits even”:

I even have an unremarkable pebble with a delightfully brazen message wrapped about it, I like that very much in fact; it always astonishes me. And all these notes and stones and so on are precious vestiges of something that took place and played out, however briefly, however blunderingly, and as such they are tucked in a big box all together, side by side, like lovely soft-hued sugared almonds, tied up with silver string.

And now the box is in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye when the narrator refers to a poem that resides “still with [her], in a box behind this very bed.” In a different box, all of her notebooks: “That box under the desk. It has almost all of my notebooks in it. […] Are they the past? No, not entirely. I am made of what they contain and I am living now. I am here. I am still here.”

At the end of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, there is either a draft or final version of the narrator’s contribution to a panel discussion hosted by a festival in Montevideo “about violent scenes from movies” that has been, or will be, translated into Spanish (the narrator's gratitude for Sandra, the translator of the text, is kindly included). This is where The Piano Teacher comes in. On my first reading, this section struck me as having come out of nowhere, but it turned inevitable, as almost immovable as a green landscape, on my second. Of course, it’s here, at the end of this notebook made of inventions and accounts, revisions and rehearsals. Now the reader is given a recital.

The narrator has just played for the audience a clip of the film’s last scene: the moment at which Isabelle Huppert stabs herself in the shoulder with a knife, in the lobby of a concert hall, where she is due to perform piano accompaniment to Schubert’s “Im Dorfe.” After noting the significance of Vienna as the film’s backdrop—home not only to a storied tradition of musical achievement but also to psychoanalysis and to Freud, that “most famous neurologist”—the narrator offers her interpretation of various reviews written about the film by other “mostly male critics” as being deluded and misogynistic: “perhaps […] a woman going without is nothing to get upset about. They might not be entirely conscious of it, but could it be that they see nothing wrong with a woman remaining a child on and on?” The narrator then presents her own reading of the film’s conclusion as being entirely liberatory, a “reckoning,” a “moment of anagnorisis” for Huppert’s character, a rising of that which had been buried underground—or kept under the bed—the effect of which “is not unlike seeing the sun breaking through the clouds”: “she does it in order to save herself.”

Then an encore—a first kiss painted in the third person in Big Kiss’s last scene: “There is so much drama in the room suddenly. She is not her, she is the situation […] She is immaterial. She is all the ages.” She is thinking about what to embrace, where to move, which green to underline next. Bennett’s situation is the sentence, the sentence another box, the clause a box inside a box inside a box—and the comma, just one more kiss.