BIG SWISS

The author of Pretend I’m Dead (2018) and Vacuum in the Dark (2019) returns with another wonderfully off-kilter protagonist.

Beagin loves weirdos—fully and unironically. Her first two novels starred Mona, a woman whose job cleaning houses affords her a fascinating window into her clients’ lives and an idiosyncratic education in human behavior. Beagin’s new main character is literally paid to eavesdrop on the therapy sessions of strangers. After quitting her job as a pharmacy tech and leaving her fiance, she moves from Los Angeles to Hudson, New York, and starts working as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist named Om. Her job is to listen to recordings and write down what she hears, but she quickly develops a parasocial relationship with Om’s clients—not that different from a listener’s relationship to a podcaster or, for that matter, Mona’s imagined relationship with Terry Gross of “Fresh Air.” But Greta’s feelings for the client she calls “Big Swiss” are unusually intense, and a chance meeting at the dog park with this well-known stranger—whose real name is Flavia—turns into an affair. This relationship is defined by its intensity and by the ticking time bombs buried within it. Greta gives Flavia a fake name when they meet, and she doesn’t tell Flavia that she knows her deepest secrets. Flavia is married, a fact that she doesn’t hide but which is, obviously, a complication. And both women are still learning how to deal with the central tragedies of their lives. Flavia endured a horrific assault that she insists is no big deal. Greta has repressed significant details from her mother’s suicide. Beagin seems to have a keen understanding of the myriad ways trauma manifests. This not only allows her to build damaged but resilient and fascinating characters, but it might also be why her books are filled with people who do bad—or extremely questionable—things without being bad guys. Beagin gives her characters choices and second chances, and the happiness she offers them begins with themselves.

Beagin establishes her place among artfully eccentric writers like Nell Zink, Elif Batuman, and Jennifer Egan.