![]() But Beagin loves Greta and everyone else around her, loves the people who jump off society’s hamster wheels and shoot for happiness where they can find it, whether through a terrier, an unnatural sense of curiosity or sex so wild that, as Flavia tells her, “you look like you’re … mutating.” Yes, she has no backup plan for her life, financial or professional or philosophical. Yes, Greta is violating patient privacy, lying to her lover, who is lying to her husband. If Susan Choi or Ottessa Moshfegh were writing this novel, it might be either more earnest or more off-putting, but in Beagin’s hands, the entire situation remains clean and pillowy, like one of Flavia’s high-quality duvets. She likes titillation, and she’d like it even better if it happened in real life and not just through her headphones.Īfter their meet-cute at the dog park, the women begin a torrid affair with myriad complications - from Greta’s hidden identity to Flavia’s marriage to a man. We figure out early that she has few scruples about spreading gossip. As she slouches around Hudson with her terrier, Piñon, Greta fantasizes about the people she can identify from the tapes. Thus, Greta hears tales of adultery and ortolans, of a man who imagines his penis speaking to him in the voice of James Earl Jones and another who fears his foreskin is growing back. After bunking in with Sabine, she finds work as a transcriptionist for the town’s only sex therapist, Om. She’s recently relocated from Los Angeles to the Bobo burg of Hudson, N.Y., whose main claim to fame - before the bistros rolled in - was its status as the first incorporated city in the U.S. Greta doesn’t mind any of this, at least not much. Its “fifty or sixty thousand” inhabitants provide both a potent metaphor and an oddly anodyne threat to a household where thrillingly expensive window treatments bulge with stink bugs and the centuries-old walls are no match for the upstate New York chill. This hive is situated between the ceiling of the kitchen and the floor of the bedroom above it. It’s not just that Sabine’s thoughts revolve around it and not just that it’s right above the hearth. ![]() If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.Īt the center of the house where Greta, the 40-something narrator of Jen Beagin’s eccentric and wise new novel, “ Big Swiss,” lives with her longtime friend and flaky landlady Sabine, is a beehive. ![]()
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