SWITZY, by Emma Cline
“It is self-evident that at 65 a man has done all that he is fit to do,” wrote Anthony Trollope in his delightful 1882 euthanasia fantasia, “The Fixed Period.”
What if a man is 70-something in the 21st century, with the fading memory and sticky amyloid plaques that indicate Alzheimer’s disease?
With enough money and mental reserve, he might choose a luxury assisted suicide with a Dignitas-like organization in Zurich, as has David Hastings, the hero of Emma Cline’s assured third novel, “Switzy.” (If he’d waited a little longer, he could have gone with Quiĕtus in his hometown of New York.)
Hero might be a stretch to describe Hastings, a man of modest accomplishment. He’s a former C.F.O. for an unnamed company who enjoyed decades methodically dismantling falsifiers and fraudsters, but was ousted when he began making eight-figure mistakes in the budget.
Now, with the paranoia that often accompanies his condition, he suspects the people around him of petty theft. “People lied and they stole and they did it to varying degrees,” David muses in one of his more lucid moments. “But there was some part of them that wanted to tell on themselves.”
He’s not an unreliable narrator, telling on himself here — what does he have to lose, at this point?— but he is an irregular one. If the classic “Flowers for Algernon” was a bell curve of its main character’s cognition, “Switzy” is a scattergram. David’s bursts of thought — some vivid, some blurred — are separated by double spaces. Like a hunk of Emmentaler, his memory is filled with holes.
Long divorced from his wife, Annabel, he is also largely estranged from their only daughter, Rebecca, whom he’ll visit in London before his appointment with death, without disclosing the occasion to her. Knowing him only to be retired, she’s sent him articles on his gut biome (mulling his bowels in fancy hotel rooms, David puts the continental in incontinence) and probiotic gel caps.
“The lost years, the brief birthday calls, dates for visits discussed but flights never booked — swallow, swallow, do this in memory of me,” he thinks, invoking Jesus at the Last Supper.
But the more important confrontation is with a boarding-school roommate, Tom, who conveniently lives outside Zurich, which may have factored into David’s big decision. Tom holds an oversize place in the protagonist’s psyche, we discover in increments, because of a youthful homosexual interlude followed by a “Lord of the Flies”-like episode in the woods.
Before he departs this Earth, David wants to apologize for his part in the bullying; but also, it seems, reckon with a truth about himself he was not able to integrate fully into his personality. His few adult hookups with men were furtive and anonymous. He marvels at the easy intimacy his young male assistant, Cody — from “Texas or New Mexico, some yeehaw state” — shares with the boyfriend he calls his “partner.”
Longlisted for the Booker Prize, and a significant swerve from Cline’s female– and youth-centric earlier fiction, “Switzy” does so much so very well, starting with its title. It’s the slang of David’s old chum Bill Stearns (like the old Bear brokerage): a hail-fellow-well-met reformed libertine, who “had built Qatar before Qatar existed.” Stearns offered David a lifeline as his corporate career imploded, then furnished the private plane to his final destination. We all need a Stearns in our corner.
Cline collates beautifully the absurd detritus of modernity that will outlast us: the puffy mailing envelopes, the accumulated airline miles, the aluminum pan burned making popcorn that young David and Tom flung into the brush. How we might realize that we should have washed the windows and repainted before the open house, and then might not be selling the house at all, but instead home cozily enjoying it. The patient’s jigsawing of language — “yuzu” becomes “you, zoo” — rings true.
So why am I not completely head over heels for “Switzy”? The way a nightshirted Little Nemo, of the old comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” falls head over heels on the book’s striking black-and-white-and-red-all-over cover? (“The black night was only newsprint,” thinks David, who’s given up The New York Times and “the pink newspaper, too.”)
Maybe because I’m a weary old hand at Alzheimer’s, questioning whether these narrative lurches from forgetting the lunch one has just eaten to how iPhones have changed young people’s brains are even medically possible. (“Better to exit now,” David thinks at one point, “when the world still contained elements of legibility.”)
Maybe it’s this character’s underdetermined, peevish-seeming dismissal of animals and music, two well-established comforts to the sick and dying. “Classical music meant: This is boring, aren’t you bored?” David thinks, getting his “Executive Physical” at a Mayo-like clinic. And later: “Classical. Trilling, tra-la-la. Serious low notes. Minor key, which meant sad!”
Maybe it’s even mannered exclamation points like that, which heavily scatter David’s darkening sky, as if to ward off the ellipses that await us all.
SWITZY | By Emma Cline | Random House | 352 pp. | $32
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