Switzy follows a successful businessman in his seventies as he travels to Zurich via London accompanied by his young assistant. Only Cody will return to the States.
London was where David spent his honeymoon with his ex-wife, the mother of Rebecca who lives there with her husband and their son who David has rarely seen. Rebecca hardly knows this man who she’s not lived with since she was a child. After two nights, one eventful they travel to Zurich. David has another goodbye to make just over the border. He’s not seen or spoken to Tom since the sadistic hazing Tom endured in their last days at boarding school watched by David who did nothing to help the person with who he’d been most intimate. The following day, Cody accompanies David to his final destination.
David’s journey unfolds in an interior monologue made up of short episodic paragraphs. He is, of course, an unreliable narrator, his mind already severely frayed, unravelling further as he travels. What happened with Tom is left a little unclear, there are hints that David may also have suffered. Either Cody is an embezzler, waiting to get his hands on David’s money or he’s a solicitous and patient employee who’s remained loyal to David throughout his decline. Cline’s writing is strikingly polished, peppered with occasional flashes of dry black humour. I was impressed with this uncomfortably immersive novel which made me want to explore more of her writing.

Emma Cline is so incredibly talented and her newest work is no exception. I love that with each new publication she seems to try something new - this felt distinct from her previous books but her style is very much there still, and I will read anything she writes. Daniel is sort of a monster but also compelling, and she manages to humanize him without apologizing for his way of life. Nothing much happens and yet it is incredibly gripping - she has a way of gluing your eyes to the page with her words.

In this captivating story, we meet David - in his 70’s, with his mind slowly but very surely starting to unravel, David makes a decision that will take him on one final journey; to Switzerland.

As a reader, I found some strands of the story frustrating - I wanted more back story, more resolution - but this story is narrated entirely by David, consumed by confusion and unreliable memories, and I think this is the entire point. As the reader we *are* David, with his advancing dementia, and the fear and confusion this brings to each new day. It’s cleverly done; certain things (a childhood memory, a line from a song) come to him frequently, and yet he cannot remember where a bruise has come, nor recognise the shoes he’s been wearing for days.

David knows this pilgrimage is exactly what he wants to do, and yet confronted with the reality of his final days he is faced with anxiety, worry. Having the ability to make that decision while he still can, and yet the enormity, the finality of it. I found it such an interesting juxtaposition - the desperately sad reality for those succumbing to dementia whilst still being lucid enough to know what that means, the decision you’re still able to make, so huge, and yet so simple.

I absolutely raced through this, I just couldn’t put it down. Funny, frustrating, remarkably poignant - David’s is a story that deserves and needs to be told.

‘What will it be like when you’re gone? It will be pretty much the same as before you got here.’

David Hastings was a young man with a friend named Tom. He was a man entering the world of work uncertain of the etiquette and the costuming this new world demanded. He was a CFO. He was a man unused to a life or circumstance requiring self-discipline. He was a man who, within the confines of his own mind, plays a part, acts out a piece of theatre, the pretence of his own desires and the game of whether to surrender to them. He was married and divorced. But when the novel opens, his identity has shrunk to single a note: David Hastings has dementia and he is on his way to his final exit.

David Hastings is already dead; he has paid the deposit.

This is a decidedly Gothic novel, albeit a new Gothic for the modern age, where the true unknowns are the political and medical and horror is that of the real when it is experienced by a mind which can no longer rely on its own function and impulses, where hauntings take place under a techno-paganism which has put new stars in the ascent and from them we find our uncertain way, receive visions from so many new moons. David describes himself as split, his selves are multitudinous. Is he being haunted by the selves he was before, his younger selves, or is he being possessed by his dementia, a demon for the modern mind? His perception now tends towards the funereal, the eerie. Baths become ‘porcelain coffins’ or ‘tombs’, an instrument case is a sarcophagus, and David is haunted by the spectre of his body’s own mortality; the basic machinery of life is, by one's knowledge, encrypted; it becomes so many metaphors for death and its ceremonies. The money that makes up Switzerland’s economy he thinks of as ‘phantoms slipping around in a void’. His uses soaps (‘shrouded in plastic’) specifically to conceal the smell of his aging, his decay, just as bodies were prepared for burial with perfumes in ancient times. Even a funeral he thinks of as ‘bloated’ with hymns; the service itself has the distorted form of a corpse; the body of the ritual, the ritual body, the ritualised body. A dressing gown hung on the hotel’s bathroom door has ‘entwined’ ‘its ghost arms’, he describes standing in his wardrobe looking for clothes as conducting a ‘private séance’. David is separated from himself, from his previous level of function, and he likens it to the difference between the questioning living and the certain dead. His younger, nescient self, ‘that had been his own self’ stands on the other side of the veil between now and then, sick and well, mortal and forever, and if that self speaks, it is unclear, in riddles, through a dubious mouthpiece. He feels the presence of the next world, sometimes more sharply than the current. His time is not that of those around him, for it runs fast and strange.

The reader is told early in the novel that here is a man whose life has been his work. When he travelled, he did so for work. His interpersonal relationships have collapsed due to his fixation on his work. Now, however, his illness has expelled him from the world of work. It has taken from him his identity and the routine of his days. It has left him placeless, here, at the end of his world, with nothing but ever-reducing memory and comprehension and regret at the time he spent. A man at the peak of Business, of a capitalist hierarchy, a place where the gifts flowed down and he sat, beneficent or not, at the height of these structures, finds himself beyond them, outside of them, impervious to them. Maybe, to some, even beneath them. He is beyond money, beyond capitalism; his illness has forced him beyond money’s boundaries.

Boys from infancy are surrounded by images and taught stories that offer fantasies of an escape from domesticity; David had belonged to work, to a world of performance and appearance; he describes his work clothes as 'costuming' and his carer is the 'picture' of diligence, an image, not a reality. Is it David's illness that makes his life and his surroundings seem false, or has his illness removed from him the ability to remember his lines, to be a method actor, to accept the strangeness and falsity that was always there? He sees now a hotel as presenting to its guests a previous generation's understanding of luxury; he frames conversation, goodbyes, as almost cinematic in their routine. Experience is forgotten but the play of at all, the game of the social and the dignified, is not so easily left behind.

A conversation with the tailor David visited for his first suit, the same tailor everyone in the office went to, he remembers as encoded, with undercurrents of meaning, of reality, of semantics, in what was his new life, now become his old life lived by his past self. The language and play of privilege had been alien to him and he had had to learn it, too well, perhaps, and, now, the rhythms of everyday conversation have become puzzles and objects and their presence are riddles. He had been ‘costumed’, his clothes communicating ‘some urgent quality of self’ to others, but now none of these things mean anything. David’s past is foreign country and he no longer understands the language or culture of the self that lived there.

To those whom capitalism serves, for whom wealth is present, business and institutionalised structures are a comfort; distance (personal space, if you will, whether that is physical or mental) is one of the great privileges of a moneyed existence. Yet, at his final exit, it is this distance that David struggles with; his distance from the ‘friend of his youth’, from the daughter and the child of his child, from his ex-wife. The materiality of his life, those physical signs of achievement and acquisition, the result of that which his work has revolved around, money, has become meaningless. The body is flesh and what use has he of money, of things, of his luggage?

The country of work exiles you in your times of need. It demands the greatest patriotism, a fatal loyalty, it defines you and your life and your space and your things and your children and how many of them you have, and then in sickness your visa is rejected, you are deported from the place that wanted everything from you, your time, your passion, your fealty, your pretence.

At one point in the novel David recalls the three-day medical check-up required for work, that society marks some individuals as being ‘valuable’ and thus their care is marked as ‘urgent’. But this urgency, this privilege that is the difference between surviving and living, and then between living and dying, has not saved him. The friend of his youth does not offer him forgiveness, his daughter cannot offer him a farewell, and the god of his youth will not offer him salvation.

Civilisation so often betrays the civic. Civility requires deceit. Kindness needs a pretence that things are other than they are; there is no dignity in reality, in the truth of us.

In his dealings with his daughter, they both fall into excessive performative politeness to conceal the absence of familiarity and tenderness, not where it once was and left, but where it ought to have been and never was. He describes their respective roles as ‘approximate dialogue’, their conversation a reckoning of their affection; is it an approximation of meaning? Of intent? Of what they are to each other? To themselves? David experiences a deeper and more absolute death: that of potential, of hope, of fantasy. We grieve not what we had and lost, but instead what that body could have been and could have given us; a form of ourselves, a vision now departed; the dearly departed is the dearest dream of ourselves, the piece of our souls that is truest not because it is what we are, but because it is what we would be, what we would make ourselves, how we would see ourselves. Perhaps we depart, not the past, but the expansive future.

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A great many of us will know what it is to care for a loved one with dementia and Cline’s portrayal I found to be painfully accurate, at least in those moments of witnessing David in his confusion, in the difficulties of care. There are many references throughout the novel to David feeling himself a child again, how the responsibilities of adulthood have become the allowances made by his carer, how decisions, autonomy, have become a performance which must be checked and confirmed by someone else. But, equally, how the recollections and thought processes of his younger and childhood selves are so present for him, now, here, at the end.

There were horribly moving moments where David’s experience echoed things said by my own family member who had a similar condition: ‘David had discovered, this late in his life, a new kind of privacy. Here, at age seventysomething. An interior chamber where he could make himself safe, calm, tucked away. He amused himself there. He kept himself company–– for none of them could follow. They recited words and sentences from an old way of life, mannered and rote, and he could sometimes dial in. Then back to the inner world.’ One of the hardest things to witness was the distress, from confusion, from misunderstanding or misremembering, and the knowledge that, for all that was lost, a feeling of shame or discomfort or embarrassment remained; that they still needed to distance themselves from what was going on because it was just too hard to live with, to experience. Fear, too, remains; it can make monsters of shadows and a mind in pieces is unforgiving in its perception.

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David ‘is both here and not here’. But, to the privileged there, there is a certain insignificance to the now. There is no now to a good education: the texts are all the Classics and much of it consists only of what was done before you and what you will go on to do. We are taught as children the past that we might pass the future in order that we might finally be restful in the present; but David has come to find that the promised present has abandoned him; he is stranded with the shadows of the past and the time to which he accommodated himself is gone as the present offers no sanctuary. The new old David listens with incomprehension to his old boss explain a new (forgive my financial illiteracy) money-making scheme, which is based on finding profit in change-of-use land developments (on the basis that, once land has been purchased, a building can be put up and torn down over the centuries without any form of taxation). David, the David native of the land of illness, who has realised a new meaningless in the material, expresses bewilderment at this plan to commandeer money over the centuries, for it to not be enough to gather wealth about you for yourself, for the comfort and success of your family, but instead your takings must reverberate over the centuries. This is, of course, its own fear of mortality, one particularly pertinent in this age of billionaires seeking the eternal, but it is a greater fear for society; that it is no longer enough for men to belong to their own time, they must have their part in all time, there must never come a time in which they have no part.

Emma Cline recognises that we live in a time and, more importantly, an economy where salvation is not moral, but mortal. To be saved is not from sin, but from death, from one's own hideous mortality. There is an indignation felt by the financially privileged in the face of that which is impervious to trade and barter: time and health. This is not to say, I should emphasise, that David’s character in any way tends to a resemblance with those billionaires (who I have no need to name, you all know of whom I speak); his is the shock and sorrow of loss, a loss inseparable from life; the loss of friends and family and hope and function and future. This is not a rich man whose mortality, whose fall we are meant to stand as triumphant angels; this is a man, who when he lived as he would, was wealthy, but now that wealth is nothing more than the ritual around his exit. Great men are marked, not in the majesty of their funerals or the statues they commission, but being able to die well, in a time and manner of one’s choosing.

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This novel is about that which is not there: friends, structure to everyday life, family and all the feelings that family ought to inspire, memories, old friends, the artefacts of a recent past, things material and spiritual. It is a distinctly gothic novel, populated by so many ghosts, the ghosts of things, the ghosts of memories, the ghost of David, the ghosts around David who wear the almost-faces of the familiar.

We are the ghosts at our own feast, consuming the sheer, the mere flesh of it all; our past selves look on with despair as we fail what we were and cannot reach what we would be and still Death’s hands on our own, commending the food to our mouths with one and turning the hands of the brief and poorly-constructed clock with the other.

The Gothic novel was always a development, a reconstruction of the Odyssey narrative; it retained all its themes of great journeys, crossing from one land/world to the next, meeting points in liminal spaces. From innocence to awareness; from life to death; from one bank of the river Styx to the other. And the exit that David journeys towards (there comes a point where journeys no longer mean moving forwards, no longer mean going to arrive, but instead arriving only to depart) requires so many crossings, all documented, all carefully monitored by earthly authority which lacks its previous significance, now that David feels he belongs more to the absences in him than what is left, belongs more to the next world than this.

A key aspect in one of my favourite interpretations of the Gothic, the Derridean, is that of the letter, of correspondence between. This may be correspondence between writer and reader, between one text and another, between the living and the dead. David’s new world of illness bears much similarity to the old; it is as remorseless and unyielding in its bureaucratic demands on the journey towards death as it is in the crossing of any border. David writes a letter, another body offered to the demands of Death and all its ritual; changed and mundane, but still so present even in this, our ghost-less, gods-less age. Yet this text cannot be, this Body of David Hastings, broken for you, for him, for us all; this is not David Hasting’s body. He no longer has the capacity to write this, the words ‘redacted’ in his mind, and his carer does so for him.

There is much correspondence between the beginning of his life and its end. David is haunted by the lessons of his Catholic up-bringing, his perception is riddled with Catholic imagery: he offers his naked back ‘in supplication’ to a lumbar puncture. The language and ritual of religions in their earliest and most primal forms are always present in the Gothic, whether in the first novels we recognise as belonging to such a genre or a modernity rendered alien by unmet or unmanageable medical needs. The new terror, the new vision beyond the veil, is that the Now, that modernity, is not enough; there are no gods here, and that which replaced them offers salvation erratically. The world David inhabits is not secular: it is as hungry for the material as the pagan and as dependent on its ritual as Catholicism. His life has been bent to demands of the economics of religion and the scripture of the economy and the religions of illness.

He describes a woman as having 'a religious demeanor' in her inability to be shocked by what he could say, and there is the essence to David of the religious figure. Imperturbable, immoveable to your distress, to forgive sins when you were not sinned against and listen with equanimity of wrongs of which you were not the victim.

‘Man made small before Nature, Tom said, by which he meant God. Nature meant God and Man was sometimes also God but Man wasn’t Nature.’

As we face death, the question is always: but how did we choose to live? What is left when all the ‘it won’t be like that for me’s become: this is it. This is all there is and there is no time left to change and no choices and autonomy I took for granted has been lost to something that might as well be me, it is so internal and so invisible and so impervious to will or sight or intention. David’s illness is not there: it is only so many absences, in his memory, in his thought processes, in his understanding of his own history.

On at least two occasions David describes his brain as a fuzzy radio: he receives unintelligible transmissions from his previous self. His memory has poor reception and his past selves are so alien, voices of experience and memory so distant they might as well belong to a stranger. The mind moves erratically and unpredictably, producing unconnected memories or pieces of information, imitating the fracturing of David's thought processes, his ability to progress his thoughts along pre-established lines. The radio of his mind picks up stations at random.

David at times cannot even recognise his own voice; it has taken on a childish, ‘querulous’ tone, or in its distress, forlornness, or irritation, it seems to him a stranger’s voice. David is not regressed, but possessed. When memory and context are gone, it is our child selves who possess us, who speak through our mouths, that cliché of the horror genre: a voice unsuited to the form from which it issues; thus, our assumptions foiled, the world unmalleable to our expectations, to our hopes of others, of ourselves, of Time disinterested and Death inefficient when he calls out the register and leaves us immortal.

David’s perception is unanchored: sometimes he describes himself as being on an ice floe drifting away, and at others he is watching himself moving farther off the mainland. His old young capable self, beginning and where ignorant, learning as opposed to new old self, forgetting, drifting away from himself or watching himself drift away into a landscape unfamiliar and all is become ignorance where there was once understanding, competence. Which is he, where is he, in this illness that breaks the mind and memory into so many discrete parts? Is he the part gone or the part left? What is left, where there is no context?

‘I no longer desire my desires.’

David has no will, no Will. His inheritance had been his mind, (as one of his professors said: you need a mind to make a mind), but it is now strewn through the past and too heavily redacted to be read.

Disability or illness renders the familiar and the domestic hostile, almost animate in objects’ refusal to accommodate the shift in your perception and function. David finds himself 'spooked', 'undertaker-ing' himself into the bath; again, the language of the gothic, a haunting, a funeral. He is a ghost for the new age, a spirit moved to the liminal, the in-between, a secular purgatory summoned by the medical, waiting for the next-world while in mind being more there than not.

Every source of comfort becomes susceptible to a minor distortion, either of fact or perception, away from being a source of suffering, and it is in that way that religious imagery is also necessarily gothic, the design of terror. That which promises to save you can only in the same breath assure you of its equal power and willingness to damn you?

‘Now there were a million mental jaunts available to you in every moment, consciousness in a constant state of fracture, and even before he’d actually lost his mind, he’d lost his mind; everyone had. Everyone was afflicted like he was— maybe that’s why no one had sounded the alarm earlier. David was just acting the same as everyone was— addled, confused, blinking in the nothingness. Entire weeks were scrambled. The air went slack.’

There is something strangely familiar in David’s experience of the world in illness. The lost moments, the disorientation, faces looking at you in expectation but you were not there, you were absent. I do not have dementia, and I do not wish to draw any false equivalence between very different neurological conditions, but as there is passage in the novel where David speculates that part of the reason for his own failure to understand the significance of his confusion, his inability to keep time, was that he acted no differently to everyone else in the fast-moving world, an echo of Paul Virilio’s thesis in ‘The Aesthetics of Disappearance’, it may be that individuals, like myself, with conditions that impact time perception and memory, will too find echoes of their own experience in Cline’s novel.

The experience and disorientation David finds so terrifying, the shadow that falls on him of the figure of death standing ever closer to him, is the stuttering time and non-linear progress of time and action that I have always lived with; an epileptic removal from the timeline, only to reappear at a later, contextless, moment.

Time may be linear, but if so, it is a dotted line.

Time is not the regular pulse of a heart beat; it’s a drunken jig and the music and conversation is jagged around it; the carnivalesque of epilepsy. The joke of it, the loss of it, the death of the soul of you so many times a day and you are not material, how could you be the flesh, how could these things be, when they dance around you and faces are expectant without context and music skips, it needs no dancers, no feet, it is its own movement. And you stand there, amongst the dancing things, and if you are lost, confused, incapable of memory in that moment, there is comfort there, acceptance there, because the world has never been different; there has never been a perception of the world different from this; the world is in so many pieces.

Emma Cline understands that time does not run the same for us all, and the ease with which we can be split from our friends and families: by time zones, by age, by illness, by neurological aberrations, by money and the time demands for its acquisition. I do not experience the same disability as David, but Cline’s avoidance of ableist assumptions, her awareness of the complexity and ramifications of engaging in supposedly mundane tasks when the individual has a disability was impressive.

Cline writes humanity sharply and shrewdly, but while recognising all that is weak and selfish and over-privileged and under-acknowledged in others and in ourselves, there remains a fundamental kindness in these depictions, almost a forgiveness. Her writing is sharp, yes, but never cutting.

Reading this shortly after Vigil - George Saunders on a wealthy ruthless man at the end of his life - and Departure(s) - Julien Barnes on coming to the end of his own life - here is another end of life book, introducing David, a wealthy business executive who has been diagnosed with dementia and whose condition is advanced and irreversible.
David is confused, but also aware of his situation - 'When the day would come and he'd find that the content of his brain had been excised with an ice cream scooper instead of these dainty little teaspoons, here and there' - and has chosen to go to Zurich to end his life in the company of a young male companion whose task is to steer him through the journey.
THe narrative - and there is very little dialogue in this novel - is stacatto and the style is fast, breathless almost, David experiencing his journey - by private jet lent by a colleague; through London to visit his daugher, and the grandson he barely knows; to the hotel in Zurich; a side-trip to France to meet Tom, his dear friend of schooldays from whom he traumatically split, and from which split he has never recovered, a split which has haunted him for his whole life. As he experiences these events, usually through the blur of his dementia, David muses on where he has been, the ongoing blurry strangeness of his current dealings with the world, and where he is about to go.
This is a very real insight into the heart of dementia, and the sadness of a life that was financially successful but ends with a man entering his final moments without friends or family, assigned to the care of a patient employee.