Switzy - Emma Cline
I received a digital proof of this from NetGalley, courtesy of the folks at Random House and Vintage, so thank you to them for that.
Switzy is the twelfth book from this year's Booker longlist that I've read, and it might be the one that's hit me hardest.
If you loved Helen of Nowhere, I think there's a good chance you'll love this too. If you hated it, you'll probably hate this one for a lot of the same reasons, because it's another slippery, experimental sort of novel that isn't interested in holding your hand.
We follow a man who is dying. He's got some kind of dementia, though the book never pins it down exactly, some sort of mental degeneration that's stripping away his grip on reality and his memories along with it. Time has become unreliable for him. He's on his way to a suicide clinic in Switzerland, and we're with him for the last couple of days of his life as he flies from the States to England and on to Switzerland, watching him try to reckon with what's coming while his own mind is actively falling apart underneath him.
We're locked entirely inside his head for this, which means we experience the slippage along with him. The prose moves between past and present, between what's real and what isn't, old films and half-remembered songs bleeding into his thoughts and cutting across them. One moment he's in one place, the next he's somewhere else entirely, and there's no warning before the jump. It's very disorientating to read.
The cruelty of it, and I think this is where the book really gets you, is that we're the ones carrying the memory he's lost. When he lands in a new moment with no context, he's almost at peace with it, because he gets to invent a new reality for himself on the spot. We don't get that comfort. We're the ones left holding what he's forgotten. One scene - or pair of scenes really, a scene and then a reprise - stands out to me, where he goes into an antiquarian bookshop to buy a gift for his grandson, then later finds the book sitting in his car and can't remember who it was for. He decides it must be for someone else entirely (an old school friend who wants nothing to do with him, who he has history with that he can't remember) and he's pleased with himself for having thought of them. It's a really nice moment of dramatic tension (irony?) where we're left feeling worse than he is because we know what's actually happened. There are some parallels here with the events of The Renovation, too, though in this case we occupy the place of that novel's narrator.
I don't want to unpack too much more of the plot here, because part of what makes Switzy work is going in without knowing much beyond the fact that it's going to be a heavy read and it's going to hollow you out emotionally. I finished it in bed and just had to sit there for a few minutes digesting it before I could sleep.
It's beautifully written, very poetic, subtly (forgetfully?) gay. There are a handful of books on this year's longlist wrestling with change, identity, masculinity, the way the future refuses to look like the past any more, but none of them do it as intimately or as personally as this one does. It's a quiet book, an intimate one, and it's gorgeous. This is apparently not much like Emma Cline's other work, but on the strength of this alone I need to go and read the rest of her back catalogue.
Read Switzy. If you already have, come and talk to me about it.