At the beginning of many Emma Cline novels, one gets the impression that a timer has started. Readers know it and can often feel it palpably, but her characters take longer to catch up.
In her 2016 debut, The Girls, the narrator, 14-year-old Evie, is listless, believing that her “real” life will only kick into gear once someone notices her. The Guest, Cline’s sophomore novel, follows 22-year-old Alex as she clings to the belief that if she stays in the Hamptons until Labor Day, her boyfriend, Simon, will take her back. If she can grift through the seven days, Alex insists, her “real” life will resume. In Harvey, a novella narrated by a fictionalised Harvey Weinstein awaiting criminal trial, Weinstein grows convinced that a film adaptation of his neighbour Don DeLillo’s White Noise will restore his reputation and protect him against his fate. As the trial inches closer, his certainty that the film will save him escalates into hysteria.
Cline’s characters are often waiting for the future to deliver them into another version of themselves. Though the books differ in setting and trajectory, they share an emotional arc: as the narrators descend further into their illusions, it becomes increasingly clear that these illusions will not hold. What exactly will expire—safety, protection, a relationship—remains particular to the taut, chilling contexts of Cline’s stories, but the feeling is consistent: time is running out, and her characters are the last to know.
In her latest novel, Switzy, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, there’s a departure from this setup: the narrator, David, an executive with dementia, has planned his ending in advance. As the world grows increasingly opaque to him, he chooses the one unknown he can still control. Each stop of his final voyage is planned as a goodbye: to his daughter, Rebecca, in London, and his estranged friend Tom from boarding school, in France, before he arrives in Zurich, where he will undergo voluntary euthanasia.
The structure of Switzy, though, echoes that of The Guest. Both novels compress possibility into a fixed span of time, magnifying their characters’ encounters. For Alex, the people she meets determine her continued survival. For David, each meeting carries a different kind of finality: it is his last chance to show his daughter affection, or to show Tom, whom he has not seen in decades, how much he has repented for what he did to him.
By way of plot, not much comes to pass in Switzy—after all, this is a novel whose opening scene is a man playing solitaire on a plane. David’s final arrangements are checked off without much significant deviation. But this doesn’t make the novel feel stilted. Because we are so embedded in David’s myopia, the narrative actually moves suddenly, dizzyingly fast.
The nature of his anticipation changes inside his unstable consciousness, which is where we spend the duration of the novel. Though the future is fixed, it’s impossible to pin down the present. As David’s condition worsens, his mind is marked by bland apathy and flickering inattention. Memories arrive without warning: the lyrics of ‘Edelweiss’, teachings from Sunday chapel, a brief, matter-of-fact recollection of possibly the most violent thing he ever did. Certain phrases acquire a cloying stagnation, their meanings tilting each time they are repeated: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” From a shampoo bottle: “No more tears.”
Over time, we begin to inhabit his private, childlike language. He becomes a “busy-ness” man. The amyloid plaque in his brain is renamed “Amy Lloyd”. He refers to Anna Gold, his contact in Zurich, as “Ghoul”. Words survive in David even as the things they once named begin to disappear.
Some of this is strangely recognisable. The feeling of not being able to land on a train of thought without the confluence of the past and future. To think without hearing the voices of other people. To discover that the person to whom something was once important is no longer you. These moments are the novel at its grandest scaled-up reading—even within this tight and inaccessible aesthetic, there are universals.
Cline’s fiction tends to end just before the veil is lifted. The last dregs of her narrators’ fantasies, however feeble, tend to remain intact. In the closing scene of The Guest, Alex asks, “Why was Simon making that face? Why did his eyes seem to look at something beyond her?” She cannot accept that the artifice that has sustained her has been punctured. The promise of a final saving grace lingers against logic or reason.
Switzy, though, does not conclude this way. In his final moments at the Zurich clinic, we see David at his most unguarded. His conscience seems to rise to the surface just as the last of his faculties disappear. It is one of the more moving elements of the novel, this sad inversion: just as David loses “custody” of his body, he grows accepting and peaceful. The person who might finally be able to reckon with his own reality is no longer capable of fully inhabiting it. The tragedy, then, is the timing.
Switzy is published by Penguin Random House; ₹2,098
