There are at least several dozen books about the troubled 20-year-something sexually and emotionally deranged woman who is perpetually sad and yearning. It always made me wonder about what would happen when this woman turned 40 or 50. The answers are hard to come by – very few writers (or perhaps publishers) seem interested in the lives of lonely middle-aged women. In her novel Big Swiss, Jen Beagin tackles this question as a continuum through the lives of three women – Big Swiss or Flavia who is 28, Greta who is 45, and Sabine who is 55. All of them too old to “come of age”, this eccentric novel (both in structure and plot) reminds us that perhaps not everything gets okay with time and getting older.
Greta, 45, recently broken up, hardly making any money as a sex therapist’s transcriptionist, lives with her longtime friend and landlady Sabine. Besides her dog Piñon, they share the house with a gigantic beehive that hangs right in the middle of it. The ever-buzzing beehive is a strange contrast to the rest of Sabine’s house which is meticulously done up with tastefully chosen artefacts and upholstery. The house, even in disrepair, is stately. Greta’s room is without any heating and day after cold winter day is spent luging firewood and pinning heavy curtains to the window.
When Greta met Flavia
Despite these niggles, Greta is not the one to complain. She’s grateful to have a place and her work as a transcriptionist gives her all the fuel – and fun – she needs to keep going in the sleepy little town of Hudson. She only knows Om’s patients (the irony of his name not lost to anyone) by their initials but the tight geographic and intellectual boundaries in the town make it easy for her to identify these characters. And when she cannot, she freely fantasises about them. The details of their sex lives are not just titillating but fodder for Greta’s fascination. There’s no limit to the gossip she can invent and the scenarios she can imagine.
Her fevered imaginations reach their climax when she begins transcribing the sessions of 28-year-old Flavia. A Swiss woman with a distinct accent, married, and who has never had an orgasm. Not the one to quietly take up Om’s unconventional therapy methods, Flavia gives it back to him as good as she gets. Their animated exchange stirs Greta who increasingly begins to take sides and from the wings, adds her own input to the doctor-patient conversations. Flavia was once assaulted by a local man, severely enough for him to be locked away for a few years.
Not at all gay – Greta was engaged to a man for ten years and Flavia is in a normative marriage – Greta cannot quite put a finger on the strange attraction she feels for the faceless woman. Till a chance encounter at the dog park puts them firmly into each other’s paths and they start a poorly thought out but torrid affair. The sex is unlike anything either have experienced before and Greta – Rebekah to Big Swiss – is further titillated by the secrecy that she is legally bound to.
Once the two women are set into each other’s lives, the author dexterously moves between the two and their contrasts. While Greta is (for what it’s worth) a total mess, Flavia tries to brush her complicated past under the carpet by dressing elegantly, pretending to be stably married, and having a grown woman’s job (she’s a gynaecologist). While Flavia is equivalent to a magical creature who can grant Greta second innings at life, for Flavia, Greta is a way to stay rooted in reality and to fit in a town where she so distinctly stands out. These juxtapositions are interesting for even though we get detailed insights into their most private lives, it’s hard to determine what the currents under such a relationship might be.
The aftermath
Beagin understands that trauma – very real and serious in this case – can be debilitating. However, it does not stop the person from making petty mistakes or being cruel in their own way. When Greta’s identity is revealed to Flavia, she lashes out by saying, “…You’re suggesting that adultery is somehow more refined – or genteel – than eavesdropping, and it isn’t.” In this moment, as banal as breaking off a relationship, neither of their traumas buckle down on them but simply their difference in ideals of morality and living.
Beagin resists intellectualising – or worse still, pitying – the affair. It’s a simple arrangement – Greta is lying to Flavia who is in turn lying to her husband. For two women who have only known sadness for most of their lives, this is their chance to feel affection and be unapologetic about their desires. They rarely make love, they’d rather fuck. It’s a state of free fall. When things finally fall apart, the lack of financial, personal, and philosophical clarity does not impede Greta from starting over. Her friend Sabine, wise and whimsical, allows herself another chance at life when she secretly decides to clean up her cocaine addiction. Though neither was fully aware of the goings on in the other’s lives, the warmth of shared physical space and the assurance of having a friend saw them through some of their toughest times. There is solace in silence. Healing too.
Big Swiss takes on the ideas of age-gap relationships, sexual enlightenment, obsession, survivor’s guilt with humour and elan. The UK cover – an orange-white dog reaching for a black dog with its tongue – is a clever depiction of the central event of the novel and how despite their sexual intimacy, neither of them could quite develop a taste of each other’s life. The pure animalistic representation of the two lovers coalesces their existence into base emotions of hunger, want, and need. Sadness and fear are fleeting – the intellectual being is redundant. Neither is “attached” to their suffering. Darkly comic, Big Swiss seems to suggest that life, painful and unbearable though it might be, can be endlessly fun if we just stop taking ourselves so seriously.
Big Swiss, Jen Beagin, Faber and Faber.
