Big Swiss is set in Hudson, New York, a small town full of city people who have moved to the countryside to start new lives. The typical Hudsonite’s story is: “I was a corporate lawyer in the city for years, and then I moved to Hudson and became a flower farmer/doll maker/antiques dealer/chef/arborist/alcoholic, and I never looked back.” Narrator Greta works as an audio transcriber for a sex therapist who employs new agey methods such as gong baths and calls himself Om; as he tells Greta, “Everything in Hudson is a little on-the-nose.”
Hudson is also small enough that everyone runs into everyone everywhere, and Greta regularly hears voices she recognises from her transcribing work; on a typical visit to a coffee shop, she will involuntarily peg one customer as the man who is sleeping with his sister-in-law, and another as the guy who describes his penis as “Darth Vader in a turtleneck”. This has dramatic consequences when Greta becomes infatuated with one of the people she’s transcribing, Flavia, a Swiss woman recovering from a brutal assault. Flavia has a voice “like a blade”, a husband unable to give her an orgasm, a silver wolf-dog of unearthly beauty, and the habit of walking him in the same dog park where Greta walks her beloved Jack Russell.
