"An obsessive, tortured domesticity runs through the fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett. The narrator of "Pond" (2015) forms an uncommon attachment to her seaside cottage: she takes great pains with the arrangement of her breakfast and her garden, organizing crockery "into jaunty stacks along the window ledge" and spending a memorable chapter on the deteriorating control knobs of her mini-kitchen. "Checkout 19" (2021), by contrast, is haunted by the absence of a proper home and the despair of unbelonging."
"Its narrator is "homesick for a place I have never seen"; when imagining her perfect house, she pictures a place that favors "darkness, patina, and fragility." It's fitting, then, that "Big Kiss, Bye-Bye," Bennett's third and latest book, is formed around the upheaval of moving. In it, "the things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away," not merely the narrator's possessions-her old letters, a "significant teapot," a decorative parrot sent by a friend in Provence-but the accoutrement of her emotional life."
A recurrent obsessive domesticity shapes the work, with close attention to household detail and interior ritual. One narrator forms an intense bond with a seaside cottage, arranging breakfast crockery and fretting over kitchen knobs. Another narrator experiences profound unbelonging, longing for an imagined home defined by darkness, patina, and fragility. A later work centers on moving, the removal of possessions, and the unmooring of emotional life. The narrator is a successful writer navigating the aftermath of a longtime affair, relocating from city apartment to remote country house and engaging in emails and meandering walks with friends.
Read at The New Yorker
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