The Catskills

Voice recognition: Big Swiss, by Jen Beagin, reviewed

When Flavia, 28, starts seeing a sex therapist called Om – a name that is as ‘on-the-nose’ as everything in Hudson, NY, the college town without a college where Jen Beagin sets Big Swiss – she is upfront about her ground rules.  Having been brutally attacked a few years earlier, she says to Om: Can we stop using the word ‘trauma’? Trauma people are almost as unbearable to me as Trump people. If you try suggesting that they let go of their suffering, their victimhood, they act all traumatised. It’s like, yes, what happened to you is shitty, I’m not denying that, but why do you keep rolling around in