Big Swiss

I read 20 books this Summer. Here's part 2 of my Summer Reading Round Up.

Oh, where to begin? Big Swiss by Jen Beagin is a very popular book in the trendy TikTok subgenre of fiction that has been referred to as “Unhinged-woman” lit. Books in this genre, popularized largely by Ottessa Moshfegh, center around female main characters that behave in increasingly insane manners for, at least, the first two acts of the novel.

(These books are not to be confused with “sad-girl lit,” where the protagonists also tend to be mentally unwell women with waif-ish builds. Does your heroine have literary ambitions and an ill-fated romances with swoon-worthy man? It’s sad-girl lit. Does your heroine have bodily functions that don’t include getting wet with arousal? Unhinged-woman.)

The protagonist of Big Swiss, Greta, is a broke and aimless woman in her mid-forties. Her age is unusual for a protagonist of this genre, who are typically broke and aimless 20-somethings; but her behavior is not. Her actions fill the reader with great amusement, disgust, and second-hand embarrassment.

That is to say, Big Swiss is an immensely fun read.

From the second I picked it up, I was completely unable to stop reading. I read most of it with a grin on my face and at various points, I nearly shrieked in delight. This is probably the funniest book I have read all year. Also, bonus points for being extremely gay.

I am tempted to stop the review here and give it a high rating for being such an enjoyable read, but it is impossible for me to overlook the comparison to a similar novel, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, and the third act.

Oliphant is yet another novel about an unhinged woman who behaves in bizarre and self-destructive ways. Like Big Swiss, I loved the experience of reading Oliphant. It was funny, entertaining, and heartfelt. That being said, I have no desire to read it again and almost nothing from the novel has stuck with me. I fear that as more time passes, I will feel the same about Big Swiss. I believe this is in large part due to the third act of both novels.

In both Oliphant and Big Swiss, after the climax of the novel, both main characters address their mental issues, reconcile with those they’ve harmed, and live, more or less, happily ever after. As much as I understand the appeal of having this sort of happy ending, especially for books that are objectively funny, these endings are almost always unsatisfying, given how mental instability is used as a literary device.

It is now a tried and true literary technique to use unhinged female characters to satirize how various traumas, isolation, and patriarchal structures cause women severe mental distress and to feel psychotic, even if most women don’t act on these feelings. So often, below the surface of these novels, there are themes of grief and alienation, and social commentary that suggests these issues are structural, not individual— which makes it almost unnerving when the main character spends the third act going to therapy, as if these problems, can actually be adequately addressed through individual actions.

I think there is a temptation here to “fix” these characters in order to give them a satisfying ending, so Greta, like so many before her, finds a counsellor and the author races through the third act to the end before the band-aid bursts and she returns to her previous ways. But, to me, this is not in the spirit of the unhinged-woman-device.

In terms of Big Swiss, if Greta’s relative insanity was purely for entertainment purposes, then the third act was needlessly sentimental and could have and should have been funnier. If her insanity was meant to satirize Greta’s avoidance of her own isolation, grief, and trauma, and that her suffering is, at least in part, a symptom of the structure of modern society, then the author should have committed more to Greta’s unhinged-ness, rather than all-but abandoning it after the second act.

In unhinged-woman lit, if our heroine takes the off-ramp back into polite society after the second act, regrettably, you end up with a feel-good comedy that while immensely entertaining, is ultimately forgettable.

6.5/10. Would Recommend.