Book Review: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

By Simon Demetriou

I’m in love. Among the many crude ways in which I judge books, one of the most common and basic is whether or not a book makes me want to read the rest of the author’s work. Well, there will be more reviews of Jen Beagin novels, because finishing Big Swiss produced the kind of joyful sadness (you know it’s love when you start talking in Petrarchan paradox…) that can only be relieved and exacerbated by picking up another novel by the same writer.

Let’s start with the animals. This is not a novel about animals. It’s a novel about a sex-therapy transcriptionist called Greta who falls for the disembodied voice of a client whose ‘Teutonic stoicism made the people around her seem like emotional libertines, or, to use a more psychiatric term, total fucking basket cases’, and who then manipulatively embarks on a very-much-embodied affair with the owner of the voice, the eponymous ‘Big Swiss’.

But the magic of the novel is the generosity, precision, and wit with which every aspect is delivered, and the animals – of which there are many in Beagin’s Hudson, NY – exemplify this perfectly. Greta’s dog, Piñon, is ‘superior to every other dog’ for ‘in addition to being a highly gifted and trained athlete, he was a very powerful kisser’ with ‘trans-breed dysmorphia of the soul and believed himself to be a young wolf’. The ‘ancient Dutch farmhouse’ in which Greta lives with Sabine (‘No, she wasn’t French. She loved smoking, however, and butter.’) is also home to 60,000 bees, who at the start of the novel are mysteriously dying out: ‘Sometimes they died in pairs and seemed to be holding hands.’ Sabine is obsessed throughout the novel with the promised delivery of a pair of mini-donkeys whose arrival late in the story leads Greta to ponder the profitability of mini-donk ASMR.

The bees’ deaths, replacement by things wriggly and terrifying, and subsequent restoration might be seen as a clunky metaphor for Greta’s own development via her affair with Big Swiss. But it isn’t. It’s perfect. Beagin is so mercilessly loving in her satire, and the fact that Greta undergoes her journey from feeling that ‘Yes was a place Greta had never visited…She couldn’t seem to get out of Maybe’ to her ultimate Joycean climax in a place inhabited by ‘clown[s] with ankle cleavage’, sex therapists called, ‘without a hint of irony, Om’, and bakers who prefer the term ‘grain scholar’, allows the humanity of the book’s central characters to ring out without any of the dull earnestness that such a voyage might risk in the hands of a lesser writer.