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 your own shit?

This insightful novel reads like a rejoinder to the sway of plots that employ trauma to absolve their characters’ actions – from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. ‘I don’t use what happened to me as an excuse,’ says Flavia, whom we meet initially via her initials, FEW, in a record of her sessions with Om. He is writing a book and has hired Greta, 45, to transcribe his clients’ secrets, confidentially, of course.

But Hudson, where bakers call themselves makers and ‘Patagoniacs’ visit from the city to hike the Catskills, is a small town, and Greta can soon identify many of Om’s clients from their voices, including FEW, whom she nicknames ‘Big Swiss’, because she is tall and, well, from Switzerland. Greta, who is lugging around her own trauma and writes letters to her dead mother, runs into Big Swiss at a dog park and a passionate relationship ensues, despite Flavia’s marriage and Greta’s deception (she can’t let slip that she listens in on Flavia’s therapy). A forthcoming HBO dramatisation starring Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer sounds joyous.

Beagin, who lives in Hudson, is masterful at offhand humour. Even a line about the colour of someone’s shorts (‘that shade of brown everyone was so hard for – clay, it might have been called, or terracotta’) had me smiling. She has a caricaturist’s knack of summing up her characters: personality-wise, Sabine, who owns the ramshackle old Dutch farmhouse where Greta lives, along with her dog Piñon, a balding rooster and 60,000 honey bees, reminds Greta of one of those exotic vegetables she was drawn to at the farmer’s market but didn’t know how to cook: ‘Kohlrabi, maybe, or a Jerusalem artichoke.’

Freed from being able to blame their actions on past trauma, Beagin’s characters have to fend for themselves and accept the consequences, which makes for a liberating and surprisingly life-affirming read. Therapists may disagree.