‘Big Swiss’ by Jen Beagin      (2023) – 323 pages

Much of the novel ‘Big Swiss’ is taken up with recorded transcriptions of patients’ sessions with a sex therapist/relationship coach called Om. Our main character Greta makes her living by typing out these recorded transcriptions. Greta becomes fascinated with the transcriptions of one particular patient, Flavia, whom she calls Big Swiss.

“Big Swiss had not only courted disaster, she’d practically bought it a boutonniere.”

Greta is 45 years old, and Big Swiss is 28. Both women are bisexual; they each have had long-term relationships with men – Big Swiss is currently married to Luke – and a few flings with women.

So through her transcribing, Greta has all the intimate details about Big Swiss. I would expect that in this day and age a sex therapist would not hire a transcriber from the same town where the therapist is practicing, but if that were true here we wouldn’t have a novel. As it is, Greta gets to do some emotional eavesdropping on neighbors she may ultimately meet.

Finally Greta and Big Swiss do meet at the local dog park, Big Swiss not knowing that Greta has listened to all her sex therapy sessions. They begin an intimate affair, and a lot of raunchy lesbian humor follows. No, this is not a reprint of a novel, a sex comedy, left over from the swinging 1970s. For one thing, it is the women who are making the jokes about sex here.

I won’t quote the raunchier lines in ‘Big Swiss’. There are quite a few of these lines. Some of them are quite funny; some of them flew past me. No, not every novel is for every person. ‘Big Swiss’ is not a novel for me to grade.

But along the way there were some non-raunchy lines which I did appreciate. I will end with one of those:

“At the time, Greta was just beginning to understand that human relationships were pure folly, because nothing was ever perfectly mutual. One person always liked or loved the other person a little more than they were liked or loved, and sometimes it was a lot more, and sometimes the tables turned and you found yourself on the other side, but it was never, ever equal, and that was pretty much the only thing you could count on in life. This went for relationships between friends, siblings, lovers, spouses, even parents and their children.”

Wise, quite wise.