Emma Cline’s first novel, The Girls (2016), sold more hardback copies than any other debut novel published in the UK that year. It was an atmospheric treat of a book about young women in a Mansonesqe cult. Her next novel, The Guest (2023), was a haunting story about a beautiful, brittle grifter trying her luck in the Hamptons and coming unstuck. In between came Daddy (2020), a collection of short stories united by their exploration of toxic masculinity.
This latest novel, Switzy, which won her her first Booker Prize longlisting, is quite a departure, in that it is about a man with dementia contemplating the end of his life. Cline is attempting something even more difficult here than producing an interesting story about a boring man in the style of, say, John Cheever. She has written a profound book from the point of view of someone who is not only dull and dislikeable but also unintelligible, particularly to himself. David Hastings looks at notes in his notebook written in handwriting he no longer recognises and later wonders: ‘Where had the other words gone? Vaporised. When he turned the corner in his brain, there was just an empty room.’ Cline has explained: ‘I wanted to try to drop into a consciousness pressurised by its own ending. And what if that consciousness was already slipping away – what remains of the self? What to make of our lives, all that has passed through us?’
David is a retired businessman in his seventies, long divorced and with an adult daughter whom he is due to visit in London before he makes the final journey to Zurich. He has been lent his former boss’s private plane for the trip and is travelling in the company of his assistant, a young gay man called Cody. David suspects Cody is conning him and repeatedly accuses him of misplacing or stealing items. Most bizarrely, he is so convinced that Cody’s partner Sam is wearing a sweater stolen from him that Cody forces Sam to take it off in a hotel bar and hand it over to David. At one point, a peripheral character says of the way our lives are set up now, with technology etc: ‘All that stuff, it’s like every person has 200 people working for them. How much electricity you use a day.’
David is recognisably a ‘quarter-zip sweater guy’ and the world he inhabits is bleak – monied and soulless. His mind returns repeatedly to the question of what will happen when he dies to the thousands of air miles he has accrued. Cline nonetheless manages to wring poignancy out of his fate, not least because he is desperate to make amends for some (imagined?) misdemeanour in his youth. He is also pathetic in every sense of the word. Unable to hold on to the fact that there is a build-up around his brain cells of one of the proteins, amyloid, which is thought to cause Alzheimer’s, he thinks of it simply as ‘Amy Lloyd’.
Switzy doesn’t have the gorgeous fluency of The Girls. It is an almost perversely unenjoyable novel from an author whom we know can produce page-turners. But it is a serious attempt to describe a meaningless life, and I feel quite sure if it had been written by a man in the past century it would have been hailed as a masterpiece.
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