New Reads: Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett

This review is also available on my Substack in a newer edit.

e v e r y w o m a n

I love Claire-Louise Bennett’s writing so much. When I read Pond I was enchanted by her prose; unpredictably descriptive, internal but universal. Reading any of Bennett’s novels is an effort but not so much because the language itself is dense, although I guess some might call Pond opaque. To me it’s more like, the words are important so you can’t let your mind go too too much. You have to bring yourself back. I often read a page up to 3 times to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Anna Burns is also like this for me in her writing. Milkman was so wonderfully rich I’d be constantly rereading passages and flipping around to make sure I read it right. Might even go back and read it again now that I mention it.

Is this not the best most beautiful cover you have ever seen?

Why can’t I stop reading Irish women writers?

I once had a creative writing instructor who really thought all women should be feminist writers. I mean #goodforhim, but also, I was 21 years old and had no understanding of what being a feminist writer meant or how that could influence me in my writing. He even brought Gail Scott into our class to talk about…something…likely feminist writing - and I admit, I just rejected the whole thing. Was I being closed and stubborn and did I think I knew better what I should write? Sure. But none of it appealed to me at the time, linguistically or intellectually. I just wanted to read what i wanted to read and write what I felt like writing at that time. Ah, who knew how important it would be to retain that instinct.

All this to say, I know nothing about feminist literature or writing, in a feminist language theory way. But I do know what I consider to be feminist writing as a reader and woman and how it speaks to me when I read it.

Also a great cover. Would have also accepted Robert Doiseau’s photo The Kiss 

Not a review of Milkman

No, this isn’t a review of Milkman but I do have to talk about it because for me, it was the novel that had the most impact; was most revealing of feminist writing for my reading self. I was completely spellbound. The narrative was structured so elegantly but so incredibly deconstructed at the same time, it flowed like Middle-sister’s own thoughts were my own and she was inside me. There were no jarring breaks of time or backstories that came after a respectable amount of character building or whatever or anything explanatory in an editorial way. It just was Middle-sister telling the story in her way. Honestly, do we even understand how difficult it must have been to write that novel?! Indescribably difficult! We learn writing in such a patriarchal way (even the stream-of-consciousness bits!) that I just can’t even imagine how much Anna Burns had to really trust herself to unlearn.

Claire-Louise Bennett has furthered my obsession with this “kind” of writing (ugh, I don’t like to even lump it in together because it’s not the same).

Novel that this article is actually about…

Where was I?

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye has this wonderful way of showing you the story of this woman’s life by thought process, some parts are gone over twice, sometimes more, because that’s the way she is thinking about it, and to me that rings true. She goes over and over some things while other things, the more dark and uncertain things, she comes to and then leaves and comes back to again later with a different part until she finally finds the core of the story, that she maybe was not wanting to talk about at all.

It’s very funny and a bit dark and quite dreamy to read. Like, you are going on a nice ride with a friend and nothing is really planned but you haven’t seen each other in a while but there will be snacks and lots to talk about. It’s like that.

The woman is at the turning point of her relationship with a man, Xavier, many years her senior, but is also remembering another relationship she had with another older man, Robert Turner, a teacher she had in high school. This triggered memory is brought about by another teacher’s letter mail correspondence (Terrance Stone) that she receives via her publisher. There are all sorts of funny twists and turns to her getting the letter and the ensuing email replies ( … it has been customary, has it not, to end our emails by alluding to the colour green. Green. Greenly. Greenliness. Greened. Greened, all greened. Greenest.) The forced direction they bring about to Robert Turner is not a path she wants to be taken down at first. It’s clearly painful and because she is concentrating on changing the nature of her relationship with Xavier to a platonic one but she still cares about him deeply and worries about him, she keeps on moving away from the memories of Robert Turner. As these two narratives converge in the novel, she is going about her life moving house and writing. She is still in touch with Xavier but it is different. She comes to confronts her memory of Robert Turner and is rebuilding her life.

I’m not THAT SMART

I’m not going to pretend I understand this ending 100%. I definitely could use another read of this book but to me the metaphor is elemental and about power and dominance. She is trying to reclaim herself from these relationships. 

Has she? She is trying.

She is not her, she is the situation, and the situation pulls things from her that exceed her direct experience and personally gained understanding. She is immaterial. She is all the ages. What does it matter therefore? She is his superior. She stands still with her back to the fire. He has his coat on. Usually she would be moving by now, towards the door, or perhaps into the little kitchen. She does not move and she does not speak. This can only mean she is waiting for something. She is looking at him, yes. She doesn’t take her eyes off him as he walks towards her. Her eyes are holding his and feel like they are about to crack open and pour out across the stone floor. He looks at her and it is unbearable. Something is going on. Something is really going on and it is not what she foresaw, and it is too late now because now her eyes are closed and his eyes are closing and their mouths open, their lips are touching, their mouths are open and he reaches right in. We are in the dark. We are together in the dark. He is very strong in this place. I want it to go on and on. I want to stay here. The dark, the dark.

I loved this book as I loved Checkout 19 and Pond (and Milkman and many, many more books by Irish women, including Bina by Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield). I hope you read them and love them too. They are funny and smart and tender and fresh.

Reading glasses rating of of 5: 👓👓👓👓👓

A Bitch and a Fake: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Classic reread: 

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. 

This review is also available on my Substack here: 

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 I don’t remember what the cover looked like either.
But feels like it could’ve been this one?

My Dad’s Books

We had all sorts of books in the house when I was growing up. I mean, I say that — but also, in retrospect, it feels like they were a very specific type of “all sorts”. Like GK Chesterton and CS Lewis, a Mary Queen of Scots biography that I was scared of for unknown reasons… and, yes, Graham Greene. My Dad loved a good sinner to Catholicism story. He was a devout Catholic himself, he was orphaned as a youth; his mother died when he was 5, and father died when he was 11 (maybe? My memory fails me on his age, but, very young). As a youth, he hung out at the boxing ring and on the street, but slowly found mentors in Irish Catholic priests, who brought him around to another way (in part. haha!) to education and God. I think he saw himself in writers who wrote like sinners, as he saw himself, but loved God deeply, as he did.

In my late teens, I read the End of the Affair because I thought it would be racy and I was permitted to read it, unlike The Thorn Birds, which, when it was discovered I was reading it, was nearly confiscated, but I won the argument in the end; a point against censorship! 

I don’t remember almost anything about that first reading of The End of the Affair except a poignant feeling of loss. When I saw the movie with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore (1999), I was confused, was this the book I read? I couldn’t connect this film version with the story I thought I had read.

As I wade through this intensely introspective phase of my life, I keep on thinking of books in my past, and I thought of this book again and decided to revisit and read it again. Not always the best idea! But let’s find out if it was. I can almost always find something good in any book which is sometimes annoying to my book friends (you know who you are), but we’ll see if this is the case here.

Old Sexist Writers of their Time

I sometimes forget that most male writers of that era (WWII) were stuck in the world they lived in and not had evolved to see beyond the gender roles or intensely patriarchal systems of the time. Sure women could be intelligent, learned even, have jobs - things like that, but they still were put away in their little boxes and treated with a kind of unnamed disdain. Like, how dare they have sexual lives and powerful personalities that outshine your own (- a man)! Graham Greene was no exception to this, the general rule. But what I am trying to work out is if maybe he knew this, even in the back of his mind, as he wrote.

His writing of Bendrix for instance was so hard for me to read this time around. Maurice Bendrix, my guts hate him so much. But I know why Sarah falls in love with him. He’s everything her husband Henry is not: passionate, sullen, unrepentant, and then angry and remorseful. And in the scornful language he uses to speak of Sarah, he is a caricature of an angry man who hasn’t gotten what he wanted - the girl. It’s always clear he loves Sarah very much, but it’s annoying to observe his childish unevolved emotions.

Ugh - Religion

But - back to religion, which somehow I had, in my selective 18-year-old-way, forgotten that this book was actually about. Faith. When we begin the story we are getting it from Bendrix and he is staunchly areligious, but still casually dropping religion here are there as if to point out God’s importance:

Hate seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have have been able to say from their actions whether it was the jealous Judas or cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Bendrix also believes Sarah is as agnostic as he is,

We had agreed so happily to eliminate God from our world.

Even as he notices that God has crept into Sarah’s thinking, People go on loving God, don’t they all their lives without seeing Him?, she says, on the day of the end of their affair, he still is disconnected from the depth of her feeling.

In Book 3, we find out that Sarah has been holding so much more faith in God than Bendrix, or Henry, could ever have imagined. Bendrix had hired a PI, the irreplaceable Mr. Parkis, at first as a thinly veiled kindness to Henry, and then to feed his own jealousy. The hiring and subsequent information he is fed through Parkis, emboldens Bendrix to read Sarah’s diary after Parkis steals it. This is where we see that Sarah’s faith in God is so steadfast and that the reason she ended the affair is because she made a pact with Him in Bendrix’ apartment when they were bombed during the V-1s in London in 1944. They had not taken cover but the building was damaged and Bendrix got up to check on the damage, leaving Sarah to worry and wait, after begging him not to go. And when he did not return she could not wait any longer and went to go find him. There under the front door on the floor was Bendrix, still and immobile. Sarah was sure he was dead, and indeed even touched his cold lifeless hand, and then she went back to his apartment and got down on her knees to make a deal.

She is not alone to have made such a pact! Who hasn’t prayed for things in a mindless vain way and promised God something in return? I have, but only as a child, my faith long having since gone astray. I feel certain my father was very familiar with these contracts we make with God in our achingly human way, powerless and desperate. But who keeps their pacts with God? My guess is only those who truly believe.

Most of the novel is a slow unveiling of why the affair really ended and a reveal of Sarah’s inner conflicted life through her diaries. Truly, she is the only character in the novel who behaves well and follows the strength of her convictions. This is why I suspect that Greene, using the template of the era he is living in, is actually exposing the limited thinking of the patriarchal systems that women had to live in.

A Slut in her own Mind

Even the character of the righteous Father Crompton insists to Henry and Maurice that Sarah was a good person, and a faithful one: Mr Miles, I don’t think you realize what a good woman your wife was. He is trying to convince them to have a Catholic funeral because he believes that’s what she wanted. But they don’t want to do it, and say it’s unreasonable.Especially Bendrix, who manages to railroad Henry into thinking Sarah was just delirious in her last moments (oh yeah, spoiler alert: she’s so good she has to die).

Sarah does not think she is good, she thinks she is a phoney and a fake and in the end says so in a letter to Maurice. But to herself in her diary, she is even more critical calling herself a slut for her failed seduction attempts after breaking it off with Maurice and a bitch and a fake to God when she talks to Him in her diary, asking Him:

…in this bitch and fake where do you find anything to love?

She is so convinced that there is nothing in her that she doesn’t even try to save herself in the end. Her inattentiveness to her self kills her: A cold, then likely pneumonia, then dead.

The difference is the language is crucial to me. That she can’t bear to use a coarse word like bitch in her letter to Maurice just shows me that she cares so much how he sees her and does not want that to change. This is where I have have a glimmer of hope for Greene, he chose this plot and these characters for a reason and making Sarah the person with the most faith who, however miserably, stays true to her word shows his awareness of the confines women lived in during this era, by elevating Sarah (a fallen woman) to the highest moral standard.

Not Terrible!

So, I guess despite the slow bitter narrative by Maurice Bendrix, I did like this reading I had of The End of the Affair. It’s a quiet novel, it might bug your modern sensibilities like it did mine, but Graham Greene is an interesting person and writer and sometimes it’s worth it to go back and remember how we got to where we are now, in literature and life.

Was this a reread a good idea: Unexpectedly, yes

Favourite character: Mr. Parkis, what a gem.

Least favourite character: Failed cult leader and evangelical atheist, Richard - who I didn’t bring up because he’s even more annoying to me than Bendrix, which is saying A LOT. I mean, who gives up their whole “raison d’être” just because you meet someone who has a stronger sense of conviction than you do? A weak, weak person, that’s who. Oh AND you have to fall in love with them? Please! Anyway, annoying but serves a kind of purpose in the plot.

Favourite plot point: Sarah’s childhood books and copy of The Children of the New Forest by Andrew Lang

Least favourite plot point: Sarah’s miracle, unmentioned here for similar reasons to “Least favourite character“. 

Reading glasses rating of of 5: 👓👓👓 and a half