Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

Bennett (Checkout 19) serves up a striking novel about a writer’s retreat into solitude in the aftermath of a love affair. Having relocated from London to the English countryside, the unnamed middle-aged narrator ruminates on the past, beginning with memories of her former lover Xavier, a “jetsetting” and unscrupulous private banker. She thinks back on the keepsakes she left behind, such as the dozen roses she left wilting in a vase, and tries to remember the sound of his voice. As time goes on, the past begins to intrude in physical form, including with the arrival of a package of books from her first publisher that contains a handwritten note from her former English teacher, whose voice comes back to her from three decades ago, prompting her to reflect on the way in which the past steadfastly refuses to die: “half-buried distorted things have a habit of rearing their noxious malformed heads again.” Bennett ranges freely in register and tone, from passionate desire evocative of Ulysses’s Molly Bloom to a measured treatise on violence in cinema. Through it all, the narrator seeks to form a picture of herself apart from what she imagines others think of her: “I have removed myself so that I can think of you which I cannot do while you think of me,” she reflects, to no one in particular. It’s an intellectual tour de force. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Oct.)