Each night at bedtime, I snacked mindlessly on Jen Beagin’s new novel, Big Swiss, like it was a bag of popcorn. It’s worth saying that I really liked reading it, emphasis on the gerund. I enjoyed passing time with Greta, a woman living in Hudson, New York, who works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist and who becomes first intellectually and then sexually obsessed with one of his clients, a woman Greta refers to as Big Swiss. The book was airy and approachable. I liked who and where I was while reading it — nobody and nowhere.
But when I was done, when I had flipped all Big Swiss’ pages and the metaphorical bag of popcorn was empty, it hadn’t moved or changed or deposited anything in me, which was a surprise given how much this book had been hyped in the literary news cycle. What had I just consumed? I wasn’t sure.
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