Big Swiss

The Therapy Sessions as Raw Material

Greta’s job is unusual: she transcribes sessions for a sex therapist, sitting in a van outside the therapist’s office and typing what she hears through a microphone. The job puts her in intimate contact with other people’s secrets, desires, and damage — without giving her any legitimate claim to that intimacy. She types what she hears; she does not process it; it sits in her anyway.

One patient — a Swiss woman Greta calls Big Swiss, both for her nationality and her imposing physical presence — becomes an obsession. Greta builds an elaborate interior portrait of Big Swiss from her transcriptions: her history, her psychology, her sexuality, her marriage. She falls in love with a woman she has never seen.

Then they meet, at a dog park in Hudson, New York, and the novel begins to get complicated.

The Voice

Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss is the kind of novel that stands or falls on voice, and Beagin’s voice is one of the most distinctive in recent American literary fiction. It is dry to the point of arid, sexually frank in ways that are sometimes funny and sometimes alarming, and possessed of a kind of ironic intelligence that sees the gap between what people say they want and what they actually want with a precision that is both entertaining and slightly uncomfortable.

Greta is not a reliable narrator — not in the traditional sense of actively deceiving the reader, but in the more interesting sense that her obsessive attention to Big Swiss is clearly not perception but projection. The novel is aware of this and uses the awareness to generate most of its comedy and its unease simultaneously.

Hudson, New York

The novel is set in Hudson, a small city in the Hudson Valley that has become a destination for New York City refugees — artists, professionals, people with enough money to escape the city and enough taste to want the semi-rural life that Hudson provides. Beagin renders the specific social texture of this environment with sharp-eyed accuracy: the pretensions, the contradictions, the ways that a community of people who have left one thing are still carrying it with them.

The Hudson setting is not backdrop but character. The class dynamics of the city — between old-time residents and new arrivals, between people with money and people serving them — run under everything.

The Ethics of Listening

The novel’s central ethical problem is the transcription job itself: Greta knows things about Big Swiss that no one in their relationship should know. When they meet and become involved, this knowledge is operative but undisclosed. What Greta does with what she knows — and what Big Swiss reveals that she knew — forms the thriller-adjacent plot that the novel builds toward.

Beagin does not resolve this ethical problem cleanly, which is to the novel’s credit. The ending leaves things deliberately unresolved, which will frustrate readers who want conclusion but is accurate to the kind of mess that this kind of situation creates.

The Comedy of the Serious

Big Swiss is funny in the way that fiction about obsession is always slightly funny — the gap between the grandeur of the obsessive’s interior life and the smaller reality that the obsession is actually about. Greta’s relationship with Big Swiss is, among other things, a relationship with herself, with what she needs and cannot find, with the version of intimacy that is simulated by knowledge rather than built by experience.

Beagin treats this with the respect it deserves — as something genuinely sad and genuinely comic at once.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Darkly funny and formally inventive. Beagin’s distinctive voice makes the uncomfortable comfortable and the comfortable uncomfortable. Not for everyone, essential for some.