First Impressions
When I was a teenager my father handed me the telephone and told me to speak to my grandfather. I started talking and realised fairly quickly that my grandfather had no idea who he was speaking to. I kept chatting anyway, describing whatever I could think of about my life at the time, hoping something would catch, and eventually my grandmother took the receiver and told me gently that he was just confused but that he loved me very much. I understood that and didn’t blame anyone involved. But, more than thirty years later, I can still feel exactly how awkward those few minutes were.
I thought about that phone call constantly while reading “Switzy”, because Emma Cline’s third novel does something I’verarely encountered before: it puts us inside the grandfather. Novels about dementia are almost always narrated from beside the illness rather than from within it, by a daughter or a husband or a carer, somebody holding the memory on the sufferer’s behalf. That’s understandable, since those are the people left able to tell us anything. Cline does the considerably harder thing and locks us inside the mind that is going, then keeps us there for the book’s full length without relieving us of it once.
A Final Journey
David Hastings is a retired chief financial officer in his seventies. The word Alzheimer’s never appears in these pages, though we’re left in no doubt about what is happening to him. As the novel opens he’s aboard a borrowed private jet travelling from America to Zurich, where he has arranged to end his life at a clinic before his decline reaches the point at which he could no longer consent to it. He’s accompanied by Cody, his assistant, who has arranged every element of the journey. They stop in London so that David can see his adult daughter Rebecca and his grandson, neither of whom knows why he has come, and they detour into France so that he can see Tom, the boarding school roommate he betrayed sixty years earlier.
The title comes from the word David’s former boss used for the boozy business trips they’d take to Switzerland, and I love that the novel opens inside a memory of one of those trips without telling us where we are. It’s only several pages later that we learn the city is Zurich, and that he has “only ever been there on business”. The work trip and the death trip turn out to be the same errand.
The Shape of a Vanishing Mind
The tragedy of this novel is structural as much as emotional, because the more thoroughly we come to know David the less of himself he retains. We gain him at precisely the rate at which he’s losing himself, and somewhere around the middle those two lines cross.
Cline lays out her method on the very first page. David plays solitaire on his phone and thinks of it as “chaos that resolved itself into order and then back into chaos, in need of order, future order”, which is what he spends the entire book attempting. The prose then enacts it. The novel is built from short blocks of thought divided by white space, so the connective tissue that would ordinarily carry us from one moment to the next has simply been taken out and we’re left to leap the gaps ourselves.
Certain phrases keep surfacing because they’re among the few things he can still produce whole: songs from “The Sound of Music”, a mnemonic for the fates of Henry VIII’s wives, a memory of “Planet of the Apes” which turns out to be a rather perfect metaphor for a man arriving somewhere disorientating that was his home all along. The one that undid me is “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, which recurs through the opening pages and then again much later. It’s a sentence whose only purpose is to contain every letter of the alphabet, surfacing in a mind that is losing them.
Copying, Not Knowing
Alongside this, Cline is quietly interrogating the difference between knowing something and merely remembering it. David recalls being struck at boarding school by how much seeing a boy’s parents could explain about him, as though it unlocked a personality that had previously seemed obscure. Later, at his daughter’s house, he describes the method he once used to learn songs on the piano by putting coloured star stickers on the keys, and Rebecca points out that this isn’t learning at all, it’s copying.
Which is exactly what he now does in conversation. So much of what passes between people turns out to be gesture and rhythm rather than content, and David has worked out that he can copy the reactions without following the exchange. It’s excruciating when his guess fails to match the conversation actually taking place, and it made me wonder how much of anybody’s behaviour is habit rather than anything formed out of what we can genuinely recall. “I no longer desire my desires”, he thinks at one point, as though pleasure has become unreachable for want of any context to put it in.
All of which brings me back to that phone call. There’s a scene where David goes into his grandson’s bedroom wanting a connection he no longer knows how to make, and we can see from the boy’s hesitancy that he has no idea what’s expected of him. I’ve carried my side of that experience around for decades. To be handed the other side of it, from within the grandfather’s consciousness, gave me an entirely different understanding of an afternoon I thought I’d finished thinking about.
The Scene in the Car
The strand that generates the novel’s tension is David’s memory of Tom and the guilt attached to it. The two were close at school, there was an attraction between them that was never fully acted upon, and David stood by while other boys subjected Tom to something cruel. Across sixty years this has grown into the defining shame of his life.
The reunion, when it finally comes, was almost too painful for me to read. The two men sit in a parked car because David isn’t invited into the house, he’s been allotted fifteen minutes, and because we’re so thoroughly inside his perspective we feel how desperately he wants to convey something and how little of it reaches Tom, who seems entirely oblivious to the context. Tom appears to carry no corresponding store of resentment, or at least none we’re permitted to see. It raises the possibility that the guilt we hold about our oldest relationships has accumulated entirely inside us rather than existing anywhere out in the world, which I found genuinely unsettling to sit with.
I went back to what I wrote about “The Girls” ten years ago and found more continuity than the premises would suggest. What I responded to in that debut was Cline’s understanding of how a vulnerable person can be persuaded into discarding their own morality in exchange for being accepted by people they want to be close to, which is precisely what the teenage David does in that dormitory. She has changed the age and the sex of her protagonist and kept the wound.
Cody, and a Reviewer’s Mistake
The relationship I found most compelling is the one with Cody, and it’s also where the novel’s method is most thoroughly demonstrated. As David’s disorientation grows so does his paranoia, and Cody is repeatedly accused of losing things, of making mistakes, even of stealing from him. Rather than contradict any of it, Cody agrees, which is recognised practice in dementia care since correcting somebody in this condition tends only to produce further agitation. The novel gives us what we need to see that the accusations are false — David leaves his phone at his daughter’s house and then blames Cody, who never set foot inside it.
What makes this so painful is that the care is genuine and the cost of providing it is considerable. Cody has to diminish himself continuously, papering over his own needs in order to give David what he requires. I wondered too whether some part of David’s hostility is born of resentment, since Cody is young, professionally capable and openly in a relationship with another man, which is to say that he’s living the life David never permitted himself. We get only fragments of Cody because David is the sole lens available, and I don’t think the book would work if Cline had relaxed that restriction for even a moment.
So completely does she convince us of David’s perspective that it’s possible to finish this novel holding his conclusions as though they were facts. A reviewer in the Boston Globe stated flatly that Cody has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from his employer, which never happens. I don’t point this out to criticise the reviewer, because the error strikes me as the greatest compliment anybody has paid the book. It has to be read in the gaps as well as on the lines, and what can be deduced from those blank spaces is frequently at odds with what David believes.
Cline makes the same demand at the very end, and I had to reread it before I noticed. The close third person we’ve inhabited throughout gives way to the second person and then, in the final sentence, to the first. David claims an “I” the novel has withheld from him for its entire length, and he claims it only at the very end. That last line also reaches back to the encounter with Tom, where the same words appear in the parked car and are either thought or said aloud without ever being received.
Verdict
“Switzy” was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and I think it ought to have made the shortlist. It’s a difficult book, though not in its sentences, which are precise and often very funny. The difficulty lies in what it asks us to contemplate about memory, mortality and the letting go of everything a life accumulates, which all of us and everyone we love will eventually have to do. It’s a striking and deeply moving novel, and if you’ve read it I’d love to know how it affected you.
