The human brain has a method for dealing with the intrinsic fear of death. Terror-management theory, which builds on the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, explains that the psyche handles this fear in a variety of ways. Many people either escape reality or adopt a belief system that promises immortality: so on the one hand, sex, drugs, or entertainment; on the other, religion, fame, or careerism. Or we might immerse ourselves in family, or culture—something that imbues life with meaning. Otherwise, the theory goes, we would be cognitively immobilized by impending doom.
In her gut-twisting third novel, Switzy, Emma Cline does not abide by the tenets of terror management. Instead, she pulls death out from behind the curtain and forces her readers to look it in the eye for more than 300 pages. Switzy follows the final few days in the life of David Hastings, a former high-flying executive who’s been forced into retirement, and obsolescence, by an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. He has taken advantage of Switzerland’s right-to-die laws, paying the fees (a paltry sum for a wealthy man) and filling out the required paperwork. Now he’ll swallow some barbiturates and die in an impersonal room just outside Zurich, far from his family and his home in America. Cline’s approach is merciless—not toward David, for whom she shows tenderness and grace, but toward the reader, who will be nearly flattened by this novel. Or so I sincerely hope, because death ought to flatten us once in a while.
Switzy begins mid-flight, as David hurtles across the Atlantic in a friend’s private jet. Accompanied by Cody—a former corporate underling who now functions as David’s caretaker, body man, and secretary—he lands first in London. There, he has dinner with his only child, an emotionally distant daughter who doesn’t know about her father’s decline, let alone his upcoming euthanasia. David tours a museum, visits his grandson, reboards the plane for his final flight, to Zurich; he dazedly lets Cody steer him around as a parent would guide a toddler. The younger man negotiates the intricacies of the world on David’s behalf, buffering him from the demands of day-to-day life—buying a museum ticket, sending a text message, procuring beverages.
David needs the help: He is at times absent in his own mind. As rendered by Cline in a wandering, dreamlike style, this becomes a startling and eerie phenomenon—like the moment you realize you’ve been driving for miles but don’t recall anything about the journey. Far from experiencing the blissful ignorance that some people might project onto dementia patients, David is all too aware that his brain has locked away basic memories and social customs. He writes his grandson’s name, Rainer, in a notebook so he can recall it; a clock “in big kindergarten letters” informs him of the date and time each morning; he stares too long at someone in the museum and provokes his annoyance. And he sees each gap, knows that it signals another loss. “Work,” he thinks as he chews a croissant, “everything seemed like work. Even these good things—even this buttered mouthful.”
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The first half of Switzy crawls by, but it feels achingly necessary. This is time the way David experiences it, slowed down and sometimes skipped over: Alzheimer’s novels are rare, and those told from the patient’s point of view are even rarer. Cline, always a graceful stylist, employs a kind of abbreviated modernism to leap among David’s thoughts. They skitter backwards to memories of his failed marriage and his time at a boys’ boarding school. They run in circles, around catchy sayings—such as a mnemonic about Henry VIII’s abbreviated marriages, “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived”—that Alzheimer’s hasn’t stolen from him. And they jump ahead to the moment and manner of his death, which inches closer with every turned page.
Cline’s last novel, The Guest, also followed a character who hastily approaches a reckoning. Alex, a poor and wily 22-year-old sex worker who has just been kicked out of the home of her most recent catch, Simon, has to make it through five days in the Hamptons, until she can plead to be let back into the high-end milieu of Simon’s Labor Day party. Dead-eyed and mutable, Alex, like David, is trying to put on just enough of a show to pass muster with the people around her. For her, a different kind of death awaits—complete impoverishment, and removal from a perch where she may or may not belong.
Switzy raises the stakes on this kind of quest. As the novel’s second half picks up steam, so does the cadence of David’s confrontations with the fact of his looming extinction. When the plane lands in Zurich, an official comes on to inspect their passports. “David smiled to himself. It was obvious, wasn’t it? This man was Death. Why else would he know to come right onboard?” Soon after, he sees Death again as a waiter, a busboy, two restaurant patrons. On his last night, he wakes repeatedly in his hotel, checking the sky’s brightness as a sign of how much time he has left. An Omega watch advertisement catches his eye, and though he doesn’t say it, the meaning is clear: Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet, the universal symbol of finality.
As long as David cannot stop returning to his ticking clock, neither can you. This kind of sustained attention to the one topic many people spend their lives avoiding is practically subversive—a thrill, really. And it’s possibly a public service too. Studies have repeatedly shown that people who think about death on a regular basis are happier, because contemplating mortality reinforces the idea, as Emily Dickinson put it, “That it will never come again/ Is what makes life so sweet.” I daresay most readers won’t feel much happiness reading Switzy—though it does have glimmers of humor—but they might experience moments of sublime clarity.
Death functions here in a way that isn’t common in fiction. Its presence doesn’t make this novel a tearjerker—it’s not, for example, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which beautifully laments the loss of a child. It offers no spectacle akin to Anne Boleyn’s trembling march to the scaffold at the end of Hilary Mantel’s singular historical novel, Bring Up the Bodies. Unlike many 19th-century novels, Switzy doesn’t use death to solve a social problem, à la Anna Karenina (romantic devastation) and Madame Bovary (financial ruin). Nor is death here a handy plot device, as it is in so many works across the past century. Switzy is not about the living who are left behind. Cline’s approach to death marks different territory: It’s about raw, undeniable truth.
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Dying is a transformative event: People pass from the only reality they’ve ever been able to recognize into something nebulous and ungraspable (even for the most fervent religious believers). And this might sound obvious, but you, reader, will die. So will I. Much of humanity has raised its defenses high against death, perhaps unintentionally, as Ernest Becker proposes. So how will it feel to see a man marching straight toward it—not unflinchingly, or tremulously, but with a perfectly ordinary mixture of confusion and acceptance?
In Switzy’s final pages, David becomes a man who cannot help but be alive, even in his last moments. He doesn’t want to eat breakfast, but he feels it’s “better to have something in the stomach.” He feels irritated that he is given a blue pen to sign documents—“blue ink was for grocery lists.” He fumbles over his last words. Cline writes, “His was both the realest life in the room and the most unreal.” The line between everything and nothing is as thin as a breath of air.
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