Emma Cline's Switzy review
A review of Emma Cline's Booker-longlisted novel 'Switzy', which follows a man with Alzheimer's on a journey to euthanasia.
Emma Cline's third novel, 'Switzy', is longlisted for the Booker prize. It follows David Hastings, a wealthy man with Alzheimer's, on a final trip from the US to Zurich for euthanasia.
The word 'Alzheimer's' is never used in the book. Yet the disease's impact on David is unmistakable. He flies on a borrowed private jet to London City airport, visits his daughter, then travels to Switzerland. One last meeting with an old school friend, Tom, awaits near the French border before his appointment at a Dignitas-like facility.
David's world is comfortable but fractured. He was a chief financial officer, a 'support person' whose name was never known. An early sign of his impairment was scattering company money into 'an archipelago of overseas accounts'. Now, navigating a phone or a conversation is deeply problematic.
The Landscape of Illness
How ill is David? He is ill enough to qualify for euthanasia, but still capable of choosing it. He has soiled himself, lost the ability to tie his shoelaces, and woken in his car with no memory of how he got there. His consciousness is like a 'mental ice floe'. The book's structure, with paragraphs separated by white space, mirrors this fragmented state.
As his comprehension fails, the reader's understanding grows. We follow his stream of consciousness, ricocheting between present inputs and piecemeal memories. The effect is profoundly moving. It is 'probably impossible to remain unmoved by David's journey towards death', the review states.
A Narrative Contradiction
Yet a nagging doubt emerges. The storyline involving Tom, his boarding school roommate from the 1960s, follows a conventional trauma-plot pattern. Clues about a shameful event surface in David's mind. One involves Tom's sister 'narrowing her eyes at him across the lawn at graduation'.
The review, referencing a 2021 essay by New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal, notes that characters in such plots 'work to fill in the gaps of partial, haunting recollections'. The reader feels certain David will remember the crucial event before meeting Tom. This certainty of novelistic convention works against the brilliant uncertainty of Alzheimer's that Cline otherwise evokes.
The memory is conveniently unavailable for suspense, then conveniently returns for satisfaction. This 'perfectly calibrated narrative machine' hums behind David's 'unknowable soup' of reality. It contradicts the terrifying uncoupling of cause and effect in his actual condition.
The Novel's Best Self
The book becomes its 'best self' when it moves past the Tom storyline with about 50 pages left. Untethered from plot duties, it immerses the reader in David's impressionistic, arresting, and sometimes funny reality.
Earlier, David muses on losing the word for a shoelace's plastic cap, an aglet. That word 'was probably okay. Sure, toss it overboard.' The final pages, however, mingle horror, beauty, and absurdity. They achieve a sense of profound finality. The reviewer concludes these last pages 'will probably stay with me for ever'.
