“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way,” Claire-Louise Bennett wrote in her first book, 2015’s Pond, a series of essayistic stories by an autofictional narrator. What was her first language, then? She doesn’t know, and she’s still in search of it. “I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.”

Bennett was concerned then – and remains concerned now – with finding words to make inner experience legible, and to make familiar objects, places and actions unfamiliar. Pond was a kind of phenomenology of 21st-century everyday female experience, concentrating on the narrator’s momentary physical and mental feelings and sensation, isolated from the larger social world. Bennett became an acclaimed avant garde writer, and if acclaimed and avant garde may seem at odds, then that tension has powered her books ever since, as she’s been drawn to working on larger scales. In Checkout 19 she showed this phenomenological vision unfurling across a life. It was a kind of Künstlerroman, a messy, sparkling book that threw together the narrator’s early reading history with her early story writing (she retold the picaresque antics of her first literary protagonist, Tarquin Superbus) and her experiences of menstruation and sex.

Now in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye Bennett takes on more conventional novelistic territory, while creating a distinctively isolated world. The narrator has moved to the Irish countryside from the city and has ended a relationship with a much older man, Xavier, whom she loves but no longer desires. Xavier, now in his 70s and in a wheelchair, refuses to segue gracefully into companionship. “I will not exchange my LOVE for friendship,” he writes to her. Lonely, the narrator writes about Xavier in the notebooks that we’re now reading and embarks on an odd correspondence with her secondary school English teacher Terence Stone, who’s written to tell her that he found her last book in the local library. In her first reply to Terence, she reveals with studied casualness that she had “some dealings” with Robert Turner, her philosophy teacher, while at school.

Memories of encounters with Robert thread through the encounters with Xavier, and it’s unclear if we’re meant to read the relationship with Robert as abusive or simply disappointing. Early on, there’s a five-page, flamboyantly erotic sex scene between the narrator and Robert that seems to invite us to share the narrator’s excitement as she reaches into his trousers, her fingertips “spreading out, my fingers, my secret, my god, the whole thing, yes it was his”. It’s only 60 pages later that she addresses the fact that this adult with a duty of care had sex with his student and then discarded her. Even here, she’s concerned mainly with the distinctiveness of her own feelings, parsing her anger and deciding that she doesn’t quite identify a sense of rage – she primarily feels curious to see him again.

Robert is the worst of the men in the book, but the others fail her too. Terence Stone, corresponding with her, evades her revelation about his colleague’s misdoings, merely regaling her with news of him in middle age (“That’s why I can’t endure pleasantness,” the narrator observes, in one of the flashes of insight that power the book; “It seems warm and accepting and sincere, but it isn’t at all, it’s absolutely thin”). Xavier, though never less than adoring, tried to stop her from seeing friends and from writing. Presented with her last book to read, he emailed her with the curt and cruel announcement that it was “some sort of HELL”. The narrator can seem petulant in her dissatisfactions with Xavier (was it so bad to insist on sending her flowers every week?). But that’s not the point. She’s less concerned with skewering contemporary manhood than with exploring the role of these encounters in making up a life. There is no neat arc, the book cumulatively suggests, that means that the objectively worst transgressions affect us more than the merely disquieting ones. And all this is ultimately fuel for the rumination the narrator is both committed to and tortured by.

The narrator’s narrow concern with her own feelings is the book’s strength and also its weakness. In the wake of #MeToo, it’s compelling to read a book about a woman reassessing an obviously abusive love affair that, rather than calling the man out, remains concerned most of all with observing her mental and bodily life with nuance and exactness. But I found myself longing for the world to be allowed to intrude on the exquisite moment-by-moment observations. The narrator is torn between feminist loyalty to complicated experience and feminist loyalty to ethical clarity. I wish Bennett had found a way to raise the stakes on this; to take the kind of risks that resulted in the energy and zest of Checkout 19 – a book zippy with promise. In that work the narrator says that books bring us to life. “Yes, that is how I have gone on living. Living and dying, and living and dying, left page, right page, and on it goes.” Will Bennett give us a book to live and die with?

• Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett is published by Fitzcarraldo (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.