About halfway through Claire-Louise Bennett’s second book, Checkout 19, the narrator recalls a trip she and two school friends took to Florence. She had just read A Room with a View; she was seventeen – about the same age as Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s novel – and, she recalls, ‘wanted to walk where she had walked, among the churches, the Basilica, the statues’. The point of the visit has something to do with the scene in Forster’s novel when George throws Lucy’s blood-spattered postcards into the River Arno; the narrator, to her own surprise, had thought it was Lucy who had thrown the postcards, but it doesn’t matter, really. The image – postcards flung into the air, fluttering down towards the water – is the same. ‘Nothing has been decided. Nothing has fallen into place. No, nothing settled yet.’ 

I thought of this scene while reading Bennett’s new novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. When the novel opens, the unnamed narrator – who, as in Checkout 19 and Bennett’s debut, Pond, is a writer – is about to move from the flat in which she has lived for some years to a remote woodshed. A series of vignettes follows: a last meal with her older ex-lover, Xavier, about whom she cannot stop thinking; a dream about a lost dog in a French medieval town; a tense exchange with a pushy florist; sex in the rain against a Corinthian column in London’s Square Mile. Bennett’s periodic return to the narrative present – signalled by temporal signposts like ‘today’, ‘yesterday’ and ‘this morning’ – acts as a chronological bass line connecting these disparate moments. 

Despite this, the novel’s main events are overwhelmingly non-linear, as though they have been tossed into the Arno and are now floating on the surface, circling each other in the river’s current. In the opening section, for example, the narrator reveals that she and Xavier haven’t been in touch since