Big Swiss

In many ways, I’m the ideal audience for Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss. It’s a novel about a lonely, confused, and pretty thoroughly traumatised woman in her 40s who is obsessed with her dog and reluctant to articulate her queer identity. It might be that I can relate to some or all of these attributes.

The concept of the novel is brilliant - Greta, the protagonist, beautifully characterised by a close third-person narrator who remains somewhat dry and detached, is a transcriptionist for a sex therapist who’s writing a book. This kind of thing is absolute catnip for me and allows for some wildly entertaining metafictional whimsy towards the end. It’s also a highly effective way to build tension, and the pacing is done with textbook precision. I haven’t read Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen yet, a book which was written with what she’s described as an Oulipian adherence to a how-to novel-writing guide,¹ but I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out that Big Swiss was constructed similarly. That’s not to say it’s formulaic, though. The joy of the novel for me was in how the author managed to surprise me constantly while nonetheless reassuring me that I could trust her with a completely pristine management of plot.

Speaking of Moshfegh, Big Swiss is concerned, in many ways, with sleep, and more crucially with waking up. But where My Year of Rest and Relaxation takes as its central theme a medically induced experiment with literal sleep, Big Swiss considers the way a history of childhood trauma can lead us towards life decisions that are ultimately anaesthetising, whether intentionally or not. After the suicide of her mother and a childhood being passed around by aunts and uncles, Greta finds herself in a long relationship with a man, in which she “never felt so cherished, nourished, pacified, and … sleepy.”² Years pass in a kind of trance, until he proposes marriage and she finally wakes up. The description of her eventual departure is funny, but for anyone who has slept away their thirties similarly it’s quite a gut punch to read about removing the feeding tube and learning to take care of oneself again, and all the while feeling that enormous effort of will to manoeuvre oneself into independence as the anaesthesia persists.

This big metaphorical waking up is mirrorred by another one at the end, in which Greta transcribes her own therapy session, and we learn of the events leading up to her mother’s suicide. When I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation I wondered which of the many accounts the narrator delivers to Dr Tuttle about her mother’s death was accurate, and considered the possibility of her responsibility for the apparent suicide. The question comes up more explicitly in Big Swiss, and it resonated with me artistically and personally. Does every traumatised woman have to reckon with that maternal legacy eventually, in order to wake up? It’s how I structured Amourette, at least in the first draft; it’s also how I’ve narrativised my own memories, to an extent. It’s a plot that comes up again and again, and it’s one I think I’ll always find interesting.

I’m only comparing Beagin with Moshfegh because I read the latter so recently - I don’t actually think they’re very similar, stylistically, beyond both being very dark and very funny. Big Swiss has a lot more warmth to it, helped by all the dogs and dog people. Flavia’s heroic moment of wheelbarrowing a Mexican pitbull off Greta’s beloved Jack Russell is thrilling, and neatly foreshadows a much tenser moment later on - textbook plotting, remember? And the ending of the novel made me desperate for my own pair of miniature donkeys. Upon reading reviews of Big Swiss and seeing photos of the author I noted that her photograph in the back of the book had rudely cropped out a miniature donkey, which I think was a poor decision. Perhaps if the day ever comes when an author photo is required of me, I will include my beloved wet croissant of a GSD mix. As I said, I am very much the target audience for this book.

As I mentioned before, I adore a playful hint of the metafictional, and Beagin delivers beautifully on this front. In my recent blog post on My Year, I mentioned Sophie’s World and the absolute thrill of Hilde’s father sending postcards to his daughter through Sophie, a fictional character who becomes self-aware. We get a flavour of this in the final transcript of Flavia’s therapy sessions, in which she speaks directly to Greta and Greta responds, while the therapist - a bit like Hot Priest when Fleabag breaks the fourth wall - looks on in confusion. Using therapy as a device for disclosure in fiction is pretty useful, which Beagin knows and allows her protagonist to know, as well - Greta caffeinates herself thoroughly ahead of her own therapy session, hoping it will be “conducive to taut storytelling”³. As someone who’s fascinated by internal family systems therapy I was completely delighted by this integration of narrative, characterisation, and trauma therapy.

The absolute icing on the cake for me, though, was the revelation that the therapist is not writing a self-help book, as Greta assumed, but rather a novel, which he describes as “The Secret History meets Animal House.”⁴. He even suggests that Greta write one, too, though he forbids her from including transcripts. We’ve seen how well Greta respects such rules, though. Is Big Swiss her novel? Let’s have a ten-minute gong bath and wonder.