The Bollinger short-listed Beagin (Vacuum in the Dark) confronts sexuality, relationships, addiction, violence, and small-town living in a novel featuring damaged people striving to become whole. When Greta was 13 years old, her mother died by suicide, and she was raised by a series of relatives, each a little less savory than the last. As an adult, she dumps her fiancé of 10 years and starts afresh by moving to a small New York town, where she consults a therapist and eventually becomes his transcriptionist. Greta soon becomes intrigued with a woman she nicknames Big Swiss, whose therapy sessions she is transcribing, but she can't venture any closer; she's constrained by her confidentiality agreement with the therapist. Then she accidentally encounters Big Swiss at the dog park and recognizes her voice. Big Swiss is looking for a friend, but the relationship soon turns sexual, which means Greta must lie about who she is. What that means for the relationship eventually forces Greta to confront her past. VERDICT Beagin mixes biting humor and deadly serious topics to create a complex and compelling narrative that readers of redemption stories will enjoy.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

Big Swiss is set in Hudson, New York, a small town full of city people who have moved to the countryside to start new lives. The typical Hudsonite's story is: "I was a corporate lawyer in the city for years, and then I moved to Hudson and became a flower farmer/doll maker/antiques dealer/chef/arborist/alcoholic, and I never looked back." Narrator Greta works as an audio transcriber for a sex therapist who employs new agey methods such as gong baths and calls himself Om; as he tells Greta, "Everything in Hudson is a little on-the-nose." Hudson is also small enough that everyone runs into everyone everywhere, and Greta regularly hears voices she recognises from her transcribing work; on a typical visit to a coffee shop, she will involuntarily peg one customer as the man who is sleeping with his sister-in-law, and another as the guy who describes his penis as "Darth Vader in a turtleneck". This has dramatic consequences when Greta becomes infatuated with one of the people she's transcribing, Flavia, a Swiss woman recovering from a brutal assault. Flavia has a voice "like a blade", a husband unable to give her an orgasm, a silver wolf-dog of unearthly beauty, and the habit of walking him in the same dog park where Greta walks her beloved Jack Russell. Big Swiss is a fluffy sex comedy with a dark underbelly. In fact, its dark underbelly has a darker underbelly, which is then startlingly fluffy. There are multiple trauma plotlines: Greta is emotionally stunted by her mother's suicide when she was 13; Flavia is still coping with aftershocks from the assault that almost killed her; even Greta's landlady, Sabine, has a dark secret and a recovery arc. Meanwhile, Flavia's attacker has been released from prison and may be stalking her. It's an abuse-themed love story with a dash of psychological thriller where everything is played for laughs. Somewhat miraculously, this mixture works. The voice is sharp, the plot is compelling, the jokes are funny and sometimes startling, as the very best comedy is; it's easy to forgive the odd moments when two elements clash. What is sometimes a problem is Beagin's excessive use of quirky details. Everything and everyone is manically peculiar. Om's everyday garb is "a white fishnet tank top, a chunky cardigan, and white harem pants". Sabine shoplifts by secreting objects in her unusually dense hair. Every character, however minor, is assigned at least one bizarre trait - the habit of reading John O'Hara's novel BUtterfield 8 over and over; a fetish for performing cunnilingus with a napkin draped over the head, as if eating ortolan; a collection of vintage prison shivs; a tendency to hallucinate Jason Bateman from stress. The decaying 18th-century house Greta shares with Sabine is infested at various points with stinkbugs, maggots, spiders, and 60,000 honeybees that have built a hive in the kitchen ceiling; its back yard features a stray rooster named Walter and two mini donkeys. Often the action stops dead while the characters deal with the latest beasts and grotesques, and it can come to feel as if there is a hive of 60,000 quirks living in the novel's ceiling. This becomes jarring in the sections dealing with suicide and its aftermath, a subject that just doesn't want to be silly. But the book is salvaged, time and again, by Beagin's formidable wit and her ability to write. Every page is packed with good jokes, keen observations and idiosyncratically wonderful prose. A real standout were the sex scenes. "Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth. The flower transformed into an acorn. Then a unicorn. Greta dragged her tongue over it diagonally three dozen times. Now it resembled three dragonflies languidly mating on a lily pad. She reached for her phone." The shock of ending this paragraph with a nonconsensual photo is the natural/unnatural fun of Big Swiss in a nutshell. Because this is also a sneakily transgressive book; it affirms the value of screwed-up relationships that should never have been, and treats the most antisocial behaviour - adultery, drug addiction, intergenerational attraction, stalking, therapeutic malpractice - without judgment. In my darker moments as a reviewer, I sometimes wonder if book reviews are even useful, given that different readers have such different tastes. With this book I found a sort of answer. I can recommend it even to people who might end up hating it. It made my brain do interesting, uncomfortable things and left me questioning my beliefs about attraction, grief, how recovery works, and a dozen other fundamental things. It can be offensive, frustrating, even unconvincing, but it's never boring. It's giddy fluff with lashings of grit and a touch of holy fire.

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Living in a crumbling and purposely bee-infested eighteenth-century manse, Greta Work works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist called Om and falls a bit in love with a patient she nicknames Big Swiss. Hudson, New York, is small and everyone, apparently, meets with Om, so Greta constantly runs into the embodied voices she already knows so intimately. It's inevitable that, at the dog park with her beloved Piñon one day, Greta hears and then meets Big Swiss, who's married, actually named Flavia, and even more beautiful than Greta imagined. Beagin (Vacuum in the Dark, 2019) once again drapes her kooky comedic (and carnal) delights over lifelike character studies and sparkling observations; readers who lift the sheet will be wooed. Sexually dissatisfied and still processing a brutal assault, Flavia/Big Swiss has some work to do, as does professional eavesdropper Greta, who--oops!--tells Big Swiss her name is Rebekah and also doesn't always want to be alive. Truly and heartrendingly, though, they unlock something essential in one another, making for a mesmerizing, warm, and altogether unpredictable romance.