Big Swiss

I picked up Big Swiss because I wanted a novel about work and money, and I got something stranger: a book about what listening costs. The premise is plain. A woman is paid twenty-five dollars an hour to type up the recorded sessions of a sex coach, she signs an agreement promising not to repeat what she hears, and one voice on the tapes begins to mean more to her than the woman she eventually meets. By the end of the first chapter I was keeping a mental list of everything Greta Work knew about Flavia Eloise that Flavia believed nobody knew. That list is the book. The bees are only the bees.

Scribner published the novel on 7 February 2023. The edition runs 336 pages and carries the ISBN 9781982153083. It is Jen Beagin's third novel, after the two Mona books, Pretend I'm Dead and Vacuum in the Dark, the second of them also from Scribner. The publisher lists it as a national bestseller and a cult favorite, and it was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, Time, NPR, Vogue and Elle, along with a much longer list of magazines and papers. Jodie Comer is set to star in an HBO limited series produced by A24 and Adam McKay's Hyperobject Industries, adapted by Kayleigh Llewellyn.

A house with bees in the kitchen

Greta Work is forty-five, and she has rearranged her life recently. She used to work in a pharmacy in Los Angeles, she was engaged to Stacy for ten years, and she left both. The move east to Hudson, New York, was the first act of the new arrangement, and the job was the second. She takes transcriptions from a man who calls himself Om and does the work at home, at a desk, in headphones and fingerless gloves and a kimono, with a Jack Russell terrier named Piñon at her feet.

The house she shares with her friend Sabine is the kind of place that makes a person decide something is wrong with the world. It was built in 1737, and it has no insulation, flaking lead paint in the layers, and a woodstove that is hard to keep from smoking. Around sixty thousand honeybees live in the kitchen, in an enclosure with a screened hatch, and Sabine found them and had a local beekeeper build it rather than kill them, which tells you most of what you need to know about the two of them. Sabine makes and sells weed edibles, pilfers at farmers' markets, and shoplifts by hiding things in her unusually dense hair.

After her mother died by suicide when Greta was a teenager, the woman's mother left her a postscript: a long strand of hair with a small piece of scalp still attached. It has tormented Greta ever since. She writes letters to her mother now. She tells herself she is not suicidal, or that the part of her that is has been well behaved for thirty years, but the letters are the shape of the wound. A therapist gave her a diagnosis she refused, emotional detachment disorder, and Greta would rather think of herself as a person who is simply very good at her job.

Om and the tapes

Om's real name is Bruce. He wears a felt fedora, black eyeliner, a white linen tunic and tight denim shorts. He has a gong he likes to wax, a thing he calls a sound bath, an interest in kundalini, a habit of fire-breathing at clients who are open to it, and a mantra he wants to chant with his patients, the word Har, which he explains is another word for God. His line for the town he lives in is that Hudson is where the horny go to die. He is writing a book, which is why he needs the transcripts, and he pays Greta twenty-five dollars an hour for the work.

The transcripts have rules. Om's style sheet permits [WHISTLING], [SINGING], [APPLAUSE], [LAUGHING], [CRYING] and, for some reason, [FIRE-BREATHING]. It does not permit [PAUSES] or [WEIGHTY SILENCE] or [WHIMPERING]. When Greta types the word gong, Om texts to say it is gong, honey, not dong. He tells her to be transcriptive rather than descriptive, which she resents, and warns her that the next set of tapes contains material that will be difficult, because the man who beat a client is being released from prison and lives in town.

That is the job in a nutshell. Greta is paid to eavesdrop on strangers and forbidden to describe them. The question the book keeps asking, never in the abstract, is what she owes the people whose voices she is paid to hold. She breaks the agreement constantly, mostly with Sabine, who needs gossip the way other people need air. The job also does something stranger to her. Greta starts recognizing voices. In the coffee shop she looks at a man and knows he is the client who described his penis as Darth Vader in a turtleneck. Hudson is small enough that everyone has spilled their guts on Om's couch, so the tapes are a shadow version of the town, and Greta walks through it with the shadow version in her head.

The woman on the recording

The client Greta transcribes most often is identified on the files as FEW, date of birth 5-23-90, client number 233. Greta calls her Big Swiss, for her height and her nationality, and the nickname is affectionate and also faintly sneering, which is part of the trouble. Greta has never seen this woman. She has a voice only, low and loud and a little sad, and from it she builds a face: tall, blond, dressed from top to toe in white, a gap between the front teeth, pale blue eyes, a beauty like Switzerland itself, stunning but sterile.

The real Flavia, when they finally meet, is a gynecologist. She is married to a man named Luke. She has never had an orgasm, and it was her husband's idea that she see someone about it. Two further things arrive in the transcripts. Flavia has an aura she describes as the size of a barge. And eight years ago, at twenty, working as a cocktail waitress in Brooklyn while she was still in college, she went to dinner with a much older man called Keith and was beaten nearly to death. He has served eight years and is getting out. The word that will not sit right is trauma. When Om reaches for it, Flavia pushes back, tells him not to read too much into what happened, and refuses to let the beating define her. She calls it the beating and gets on with it.

What hooks Greta is the contrast. Big Swiss has done the unforgivable arithmetic and come out the other side whole, while Greta is still doing sums with her own dead mother. Om is not the worst therapist in the world. He is also not the best. Ask him whether a client would be willing to try masturbating with a vibrator and you get a clearer picture of him than the gongs suggest.

The dog park and the false name

The meeting happens because a dog starts it. Piñon is attacked by a pit bull terrier in the park, and Flavia throws herself at the dog to save him, and Greta recognizes the voice mid-shout. She has a choice about what to do next and she makes the worst one available: she gives a false name, Rebekah, and lets a woman she has been secretly listening to for months believe they are strangers meeting for the first time. Then they have drinks. Then they have an affair, and the affair is the best part of the book and the most impossible.

It is impossible because of what Greta is holding back. Flavia tells her things Greta already knows. Greta has to sit there and look pleased to be told things she typed out on a transcript months ago, and she has to do it for months. The dinner party at Flavia and Luke's house is the set piece the novel is aiming at: cheese fondue, a married man, his wife's lover, and a table where nobody can say the obvious thing. Flavia says they bicker like sisters, then corrects herself and says they are more like mother and daughter. Later, when Greta finally apologizes, Flavia tells her she does not accept apologies, that sorry is something you take off a shelf and it means nothing to her.

The unraveling and the ending

Flavia finds out who Greta is. The affair tapers off, at least for now. Om, who has worked out what Greta has been doing with his tapes, confronts her, and she says she feels relieved, because she could not have kept the charade up much longer and she avoids conflict. Then comes one of the book's better turns. Om makes her his patient, so that Greta spends the last stretch of the novel transcribing her own therapy sessions, sitting at her desk listening to herself lie.

The landing is not a wedding. The Chicago Review of Books found that the book ends in a place of fragile peace, which is about right. What Greta has landed on comes from Om, and it sounds like this:

We all have an inner shithead, and maybe you need to shake hands with yours.

What she shakes hands with, in the end, is the fact that she has been leaning on her own bad history for more than thirty years. Flavia's lesson was never that you should not be wounded. It was that you do not have to keep the wound as your address. The house is still there, the bees are still there, Greta is still writing letters to her mother, and the last thing she understands is something she has been slow to accept about people. She comes to see that human relationships are pure folly, because nothing is ever perfectly mutual, and that this is the thing you can count on.

How it was received

The reception was warm and unusually broad for a book with a sex therapist in it. The New Yorker called it the funniest fiction Alexandra Schwartz had read all year and said there is a tender heart beneath the antics. Time put it on its 100 must-read list of 2023. NPR chose it as one of its best books of the year and called it a hilarious, dark and quirky coming-of-middle-age story. The Los Angeles Times said it was one of the funniest books of the last few years. Kirkus called Greta a wonderfully off-kilter protagonist and Beagin an artfully eccentric writer in the company of Nell Zink, Elif Batuman and Jennifer Egan. Bindu Bansinath in The Cut wrote that it was a refreshingly anti-trauma-plot novel, which is the sharpest description of the book anyone managed and the best answer to the accusation that the jokes are a dodge.

Big Swiss was also nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction in 2024, and the audiobook runs eleven hours and fifteen minutes with five narrators, which turns out to be the right cast for a novel made of recorded voices. The publisher calls it a cult favorite, and the audiobook has turned the transcripts into a performance in their own right.

What works and what does not

The thing that works is the voice. Greta's narration is fast, funny, mean and self-aware, and it never blinks. The prose about sex is unusually good, with a specificity reviewers compared to Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh. The transcript device is the real structural idea of the book. It turns listening into a job with an ethics attached, it lets a reader overhear intimacy without a scene, and it makes the town of Hudson into a set of voices before it makes it a place. The two women are drawn with different appetites. Big Swiss is funny in a colder way, and Greta is funny in a way that knows she is not funny.

What does not work

The therapy material stays at arm's length. The transcripts arrive as documents, with no stage directions and no sense of a room, and Om's advice is thin in a way that is deliberate but also flattens the sessions. The form suits the audiobook and the planned series, and it also means the book never quite dramatizes the thing it is about.

The plot has a shape a hostile reviewer noticed: will they meet, will it work, how will they deal with things imploding. Naoise Dolan in the London Review of Books found the premise relentless. The Chicago Review of Books, otherwise enthusiastic, found an aimlessness taking over as the book went on and said there was a great concept without always great plotting behind it. Reviews split on the ending. Some found it satisfying. Others called it rushed, wrapped up too fast, or too neat.

Then there is the joke problem. Some readers love the book precisely because it is funny, and treat the laugh as the point of a novel about trauma. Others think the writing hides behind jokes and Gen X references, which is what the Chicago Review meant by evasive. A smaller group will not accept a narrator whose racist asides are played for laughs. A London Review of Books essay called the casual racism a crude and harmless tic, and Greta's private commentary on Big Swiss's body has become one of the most repeated complaints about the novel. Nobody who loved the book denied it.

Who it is for

This is for readers who want a funny book with something uncomfortable inside it, and who do not need the romance tidied up at the end. It suits anyone who has ever found that listening to other people's problems is a way of feeling less alone, since that is exactly what Greta is doing. It is a poor choice if you want a love story with a happy ending, or if you need the sex writing tender rather than blunt. Read it in print if you can. The joke density rewards being wide awake.

I have not stopped thinking about the lock of hair in its envelope. That is what the book did to me, not the affair and not the bees: a woman carrying a piece of her dead mother for thirty years, because putting it down would have meant finishing the story. Greta's version of that is the letter she writes every night to somebody who cannot answer. She ends up, if not cured, at least willing to look at what she has been carrying and to set some of it down. That is a modest thing to ask of a novel, and Beagin does not ask for more. She also wrote one of the funniest books of the last few years, which makes the whole package harder to argue with.