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. 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. 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
