The word “Alzheimer’s” never appears in Switzy, Emma Cline’s third novel, which arrives pre-endorsed as a Booker prize longlistee. But we can be certain that it is the disease afflicting its central character, David Hastings – certain in a way he finds it increasingly hard to be about anything.
When the novel begins, David and his assistant Cody are aboard a private jet flying from his home in the US to the UK. Landing at London City airport (which the book, experiencing its own senior moment, situates in the countryside), they visit David’s daughter and her family before travelling on to Zurich (hence “Switzy”). One more appointment, a catchup with an old boarding school roommate called Tom, awaits just over the French border, after which David will be euthanised at a facility resembling Dignitas.
David is wealthy. Not wealthy enough to own the jet he’s flying around in – that’s a loan from his boss – but someone to whom its polished doors, “that slid silently and obligingly out of sight”, are of a piece with the comfortable, largely frictionless world through which he moves. He has had a career in business, chief financial officer of some undefined entity – one large enough for a forensic accounting firm to be required when it became apparent David, in an early sign of the seriousness of his impairment, had mistakenly scattered its money into “an archipelago of overseas accounts”.
For all the capital he has accumulated, David has been “a support person, a man whose name would never be known”, who sat at a desk and “made certain numbers swell up and other numbers recede”. Has it been a happy life? Well, the revelation or otherwise of that is one of the strands running through this extraordinarily well-made novel.
How ill is David? Not so ill as to disqualify him from choosing euthanasia, but enough that navigating the world, from finding his hotel room to operating a phone, holding up his end of a conversation or understanding how and why he has offended someone, has become deeply problematic. He has reached the stage of his illness where, we learn from references to past events, he has woken up in his car uncertain of how he came to be there, soiled himself, upset employees, even lost the ability to tie his shoelaces. Sometimes he forgets he has eaten until a burp, tasting of lunch, reminds him of the fact. At other times he experiences the feeling “of coming into a room and the room offering no answers as to why he was there”. His world is full of aftermath but often frustratingly empty of cause.
He compares his situation to that of a “mental ice floe, populated only by David, floating off into the polar darkness”. The text elegantly reflects this, its atomised paragraphs separated by white space – treacherous voids across which the thread of David’s awareness might not stretch from one moment to another. Yet as his comprehension thins, our own deepens. As his self-referential and fragmented stream of consciousness, often rich in similes, rebounds between the inputs of wherever he happens to be – in a car, at a restaurant, walking the streets of one city or another, always with Cody beside him – and his piecemeal memories, we begin to catch the resonances he no longer can.
I think it is probably impossible to remain unmoved by David’s journey towards death, but as I accompanied him on it, I registered a nagging doubt that became increasingly insistent. David’s condition is worsening; he knows the day is coming when “he’d find that the contents of his brain had been excised with an ice-cream scooper instead of these dainty little teaspoons, here and there”. But in the case of the storyline involving Tom, David’s faltering memory just so happens to fall into precisely the pattern of revelation employed by a traditional trauma-plot novel.
Characters in such books, as the New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal noted in her 2021 essay on the subject, “work to fill in the gaps of partial, haunting recollections”. Throughout Switzy, clues bob to the surface of David’s consciousness about some shameful event that soured things between himself and Tom at boarding school in the 1960s. One involves Tom’s sister “narrowing her eyes at him across the lawn at graduation”. No further context for the look is provided, for us or David, but as soon as it was mentioned I felt confident that the closer the meeting with Tom came, the more would be revealed about their shared past.
This certainty that novelistic convention would be obeyed works against the uncertainty Cline otherwise evokes so brilliantly. It’s true that with Alzheimer’s long-term memories can persist as short-term memories cease to imprint. But David, too, appears to be searching for precisely what happened between himself and Tom. The memory is conveniently unavailable, provoking suspense, and then, just as conveniently, it returns to provide satisfaction. The reader’s knowledge that David will remember – an expectation drummed into us from myriad stories that work this way – runs counter to the reality of his predicament, to which neither narrative nor real-world logic applies. Behind his chaotic decline, the “unknowable soup” of his reality in which cause and effect have become terrifyingly uncoupled, hums a perfectly calibrated narrative machine as smooth and obliging in its operation as the doors of his private jet.
When the novel moves past the Tom storyline, as it does with about 50 pages to go, it becomes its best self. Untethered from the duties of revelation it can fully immerse us in David’s pocked reality: impressionistic, arresting, upsetting, even funny. Earlier in the book, when reflecting on losing the name for the plastic cap on a shoelace (an aglet), he thinks that that one “was probably okay. Sure, toss it overboard.” By contrast – although it’s tempting fate to say it – the last pages of Switzy, which mingle horror, beauty, absurdity, and a sense of profound finality, will probably stay with me for ever.
• Switzy by Emma Cline is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
