Big Swiss, Jen Beagin
‘Rare is a novel that genuinely inspires laughter – audible, unrestrained laughter – but Big Swiss strikes that chord often.’
Greta, a transcriptionist in her forties, becomes obsessed with the private life of one of her client’s patients – Flavia. Enigmatic and sharply spoken, Flavia’s voice enraptures Greta, and she soon becomes the planet that Greta orbits like an invasive satellite, probing every grisly detail. Inevitably, curiosity soon gets the better of Greta, and their lives soon become tangled in a knot of desire and pretence.
Jen Beagin spins a sapphic tragedy that is farcical, poignant, and occasionally vexing. Greta and Flavia are a match made in hell – an infernal pair who unwittingly emancipate each other from traumas both barefaced and long-buried. Both characters are regularly loathsome; in particular, Greta’s incessant stereotyping, dubbing Flavia ‘Big Swiss’ on account of her being tall, blond and from Switzerland, often devolves into spouting racist microaggressions that feel casual and careless. While fictional characters have no obligation to be righteous, these flippant remarks mar an otherwise nuanced protagonist who, for all her flaws, is worthy of redemption.
Big Swiss’s swift adoption for screen by HBO comes as little surprise; the dialogue has wit and bite, and transgressions pile up like a house of cards ready to topple – the reader awaits the inevitable fallout like a car rolling towards a cliff – Big Swiss is a disaster you can’t look away from. In fact, voyeurism permeates the novel, be it through the therapist’s dubious enquiries, the transcriber’s intrusive gambit and even the reader eagerly anticipating a slip off the tightrope these characters walk on.
Rare is a novel that genuinely inspires laughter – audible, unrestrained laughter – but Big Swiss strikes that chord often. Greta’s wry asides have an air of Fleabag in their delivery, and Flavia shuts others down with remarks so blunt they’d maim. Such wicked writing gives the book an unwavering momentum, even when the plot takes a respite in the second act.
Big Swiss is bombastic, miasmic, and everything in between. It’s a book invigorated by its own absurdity, but Beagin navigates it with crude humour and naked humanity.
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