Big Swiss

It's a very good thing if the main character in a novel blurts. It can set all kinds of mayhem in motion. You would think, in Greta's situation—she is a professional transcriber for a sex therapist in a small New York town where everybody knows everyone, and she has fallen in love with one of the patients, whom she has nicknamed, not incorrectly, Big Swiss, by the sound of her voice—she might be more discreet, but she is anything but. Her blurting is your gain, especially when it turns out that Big Swiss, in person, has plenty of her own emotional chaos to spread, since it gives Jen Beagin the chance to spin out one comic riff after another, in a story that piles on plenty of embarrassing entanglements but also turns out to involve more tenderness—and more bees and mini donkeys—than you might expect.