Quirky is the order of the day then! Everyone knows everyone around this place, more like just two degrees of separation, and though Greta never meets Om’s clients personally through work, she winds up recognizing them by the voices she’s heard while transcribing, coming across them in coffee shops and bars, knowing immediately who they are. (His real name is Bruce, but he calls himself Om, and sometimes uses a clanging gong in his sessions sometimes he talks about his own neuroses you get the idea…) And Greta? She has brought a skill with her from out West - she’s a talented transcriptionist, and in Hudson, she puts the ability to work setting down the conversations between a local sex therapist and his clients in writing. Sabine makes an income by producing and selling weed edibles she also likes to pilfer expensive goods from farmer’s markets. Their heat is furnished by fireplaces and stoves the windows let snow in they share the place with a myriad of creatures large and small - a giant hive of honeybees, occasional infestations of maggots and ants, a crazy rooster, some miniature donkeys, and, importantly, Greta’s Jack Russell, Pinon. They’re living in a ramshackle Dutch farmhouse Sabine has bought with the proceeds from her divorce, in the countryside outside of town, next to the fire station. You have Greta, a sensitive middle-aged introvert, who has moved to Hudson, New York, from California with her older friend Sabine. (Now that half of Brooklyn seems to be in the neighborhood, it’s a certainty, of course! Rip Van Winkle has nothing on this crowd…)Īlright… while difficult to thumbnail the woolly premise of Big Swiss, let’s give it a go. And it seems that things in the area’s sleepy towns and hamlets were already chock-full of eccentrics and scoundrels, if we are to believe her story. Scribner, 333 pp., $27.Įveryone knows that due to the pandemic, a lot of New Yorkers wound up moving to the Hudson Valley - maybe some of Boston’s Arts Fuse readers did too? - but Jen Beagin’s third novel is set slightly before the great Covid relocation. Big Swiss is effervescent and funny, even if overcooked to some extent.īig Swiss by Jen Beagin.

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