Our mixum-gatherum of magnificent reviews this week includes Emma Alpern on Emma Cline’s Switzy, T.M. Brown on Danny McBride’s Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, Sara Collins on Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World, Joy Williams on Lance Richardson’s True Nature, and Tembe Denton-Hurst on Marlon James’s The Disappearers. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
At times, it’s sentimental, unfolding with a sense of its own importance. It’s also odder and more buoyant than you might think with a narrative voice pieced together from David’s Alzheimer’s-inflected thoughts. When he’s tired, they mumble and loop.
Song lyrics, phrases, and stray words bob in and out like visitors stopping by for a last laugh or scare. As in this year’s other notable book about dementia, Ben Lerner’s Transcription, the fritzing out of David’s memory seems primarily like a language disorder. There are puns, misreadings, nicknames given to people whose names he can’t remember or prefers not to. (The liaison, Anna Gould, becomes Ghoul; a black-car driver is called Meatball.) There are snippets from Moby-Dick and The Sound of Music, a nauseous memory of the Stanley Steemer man who used to soak David’s carpets with a toxic cleaning agent that squelched around his bare feet (‘Suck, suck, suck’).
The result can read like a puzzle, but it’s rarely clever or cutesy. Instead, Cline…is implying that this is just what a mind does when it’s thrown into isolation: a soothing sort of wordplay with the materials it has at hand, all of a person’s lexical rubble shifting around one final time. It’s so much more ambient and diffuse, and a lot less concrete.’ Her books have lurid central set pieces—The Girls and The Guest, respectively, are about a fictionalized version of the Manson Family and a scammer vamping her way through the Hamptons—but Cline often lets the action go slack, making her a strangely withholding, even dour, literary-thriller writer.
In Switzy, about a person realizing, with shame, how little human contact he’s actually had, that approach finally coheres. She’s a stronger writer on the sentence level here, and most important, she has found a character who rewards her impulse to write in loops. Every now and then, the novel expands to a bigger view of things.
David is not alone in losing his mind in the internet era: ‘Now there were a million mental jaunts available to you in every moment, consciousness in a constant state of fracture.’ Maybe, he thinks, that’s why no one noticed when he started to drift away. But unlike Transcription or George Saunders’s Vigil, the year’s other novel about a rich old man on his way to the underworld, this book doesn’t try to diagnose our collective ills. What’s left is something smaller, more tense and tender: an old song, Cody’s watchful presence, one last wag of the eyebrows.” –Emma Alpern on Emma Cline’s Switzy (Vulture) “McBride’s stories aren’t misandrist per se, but they do poke fun at male woes, in a way that is neither flippant nor overly serious.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
