“Big Swiss” Review: On the Queer Age Gap Novel Set in a House Full of Bees
I know I’m not supposed to fixate on a novel’s cover, but I find myself obsessed with this one. A woman’s mouth forms an O, her tongue sticking out, not quite all the way, but definitely at attention. Her tits spill out of a white milkmaid dress. She’s on her back, on what looks like a wood floor. Her hair fans out, and she isn’t the right side up, her head near the book’s bottom edge, her torso above. It’s an image that fits the book as snug as that milkmaid dress: amorous, humorous, ominous. The pages within similarly brim with mordant comedy, naked and captivating sexual heat, and strange but satisfying details at every turn.
In Jen Beagin’s sexy madcap new novel Big Swiss, Greta is a forty-five-year-old transcriptionist who diligently listens to and notates sex and relationship therapy sessions conducted by a harmless but very cringe man named Om in Hudson, New York. She spends her days listening to the sexual confessions of everyone in this small, artist-infested town where people are horny for farm-grown produce and gossip. She lives in an 18th century crumbling house with her eccentric friend Sabine. It’s full of bees, stinkbugs, and drafty crevices. She has a dog named Piñon who she dotes on and the baggage of leaving a ten-year engagement to a man named Stacy. Her mother killed herself when she was away at horse camp as a preteen, and she occasionally wishes to die, too. At the book’s beginning, she develops a feverish obsession with one of Om’s clients, who she dubs Big Swiss, because she’s tall and Swiss. Big Swiss is a 29-year-old gynecologist who has never had an orgasm. After an encounter at the dog park, they strike up a rumbling affair, complicated by the fact that Greta lies about who she really is and harbors the secret of knowing about Big Swiss’s inner sexual life, the ins and outs of her marriage to her husband, and her history with violence, including a brutal physical assault by a man who’s soon getting released from prison.
That’s a lot of preamble, yes, but I think my little summary accurately harnesses the strange and immersive dissonance of Big Swiss, how it veers from horny to humorous to macabre in zigs and zags. It’s a hot a sticky trap that’s instantly immersive, like a bee’s honey. Beagin’s prose titillates throughout, and movement between Greta’s transcripts and close-third narration from Greta’s point of view gives the story an interesting shape, asking us to view characters from afar and then smashing us close. (We’re in such a close third from Greta’s POV that the book keeps referring to Big Swiss as such, even after Greta learns her real name.) Greta keeps listening to and transcribing Big Swiss’s sessions even once they’re entangled, lying to her lover and to her boss, essentially reading Big Swiss’s diaries. Sometimes, there’s significant tension and difference between the moments Greta and Big Swiss live out together and the ways they’re framed in these sessions — if they’re touched on at all.
Greta’s charmingly old house crumbles into squalid wreckage through Big Swiss’s sessions, when she describes it to Om. “I don’t know why she doesn’t move,” Big Swiss says in session, Greta closely transcribing. “She could easily find a place in town, a place with a thermostat. But the only piece of real estate she’s interested in is my vagina. She talks about it like it’s an apartment she’s renting.
Greta interrupts this, alone in her decrepit home full of bees: “‘Uh, that’s a gross misquote,’ Greta said. ‘I compared it to the antechamber, because it’s ten degrees warmer in there.'”
Here, Greta attempts to have a dialogue with someone who doesn’t even know she’s listening in. But the real revelation here isn’t Greta’s ongoing violation; it’s the fact of different perceptions, of the story shifting depending on who’s telling it. Big Swiss isn’t misquoting necessarily. She’s saying what it meant to her. Greta has made Big Swiss into a character, and when Big Swiss’s own perception is at odds with this role Greta has cast her in, she festers.
The novel asks ongoing and open-ended questions about sex, trauma, violence, about violation, observation, obsession. In her first session, Big Swiss tells Om: “I’m not attached to my suffering. I’m not attached to what happened to me. I don’t believe it explains everything about me, because I haven’t made it part of my identity. I’m a worker, not a wallower. I would never call myself a ‘survivor.'”
The novel isn’t dismissive or flip about trauma itself but rather is sharply critical of social media’s breeding of trauma discourse, of the pop psychology that festoons pretty infographics and flattens words in ways that dampens their meaning. Greta often provides her own commentary while listening to Om’s sessions, highlighting his surface-level analyses and frustrating tendency to suggest mindfulness practices when he himself is not really listening to what people are saying. Greta self-analyzes and armchair-diagnoses others with erratic aim. The book is very much about processing trauma but all the odd forms that can take, things that don’t fit so neatly on an infographic. Big Swiss is also about shifting desires and, in some ways, our inability to perfectly parcel out why we want the things we want.
The sex in the book, as a result, is a little kinky and very specific. Greta and Big Swiss explore and revel in the contours of each other’s bodies but also of what it is they really want from each other, which sometimes evades them, as these things often do. This very much feels like a sex novel but without being obnoxious about it. It’s erotic in bursts and embeds into its fabric weighty contemplations on sex and relationships, with nuance and mess. Does Big Swiss crave control over Greta because of what happened to her? Does Greta desire Big Swiss because of what happened to her? Is their age gap connected to any of it? Om would have very straightforward and clean answers to these questions. Big Swiss, crucially, does not.
Instead, Greta and Big Swiss get to be more complex — sometimes frustrating and confusing, too — versus being boxed in as Good Survivors. They are not defined by what happened to them, but of course they are affected by it. It’s not necessarily Greta’s mother’s suicide itself that hangs heavy on her but the other things that touch it. The biggest tension between Greta and Big Swiss stems not from their steep age gap, not from a game of trauma Olympics, and not even from Greta’s deception, but from their divergent approaches to living. Big Swiss knows exactly what it means to fight for her life, and Greta lives hers almost as a passive participant, as someone who transcribes what’s around her rather than really experiencing it. Obsession will forever be one of my favorite forces in fiction, and the compulsions Big Swiss and Greta have toward each other — even at their ugliest — are bewitching.
The book’s very funny, too.
In a particularly excellent iteration of the Awkward Dinner Party trope in fiction, Greta joins Big Swiss and her hapless husband at their home for a meal of cheese fondue. It’s an absurd thing to eat in general, but especially when the dinner guests are a young woman, her husband, and the significantly older woman she’s having an extramarital affair with. Dipping hunks of bread into warm cheese while everyone speaks in crisp subtext? Absolutely stunning levels of discomfort comedy.
The cadence of the prose, macabre sense of humor, and themes (specifically of suicide, sex, jealousy, and self-sabotage) remind me a lot of Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, a book I wish I’d reviewed and more people had read. It’s short, so pick it up and thank me soon after. Big Swiss is longer but similarly quick-paced and buzzing. They’d pair well together, on a weekend where you wanna read about age gaps, obsession, and sex with an undercurrent of upheaval. Which for me is pretty much every weekend.
The novel has already been optioned and is in development as a series at HBO with none other than Killing Eve‘s Jodie Comer set to star as Big Swiss. It’s the most perfect casting choice I can think of, her style of humor and comedic timing perfect for this story, which is somehow both subtle and over-the-top.