Switzy by Emma Cline
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A compelling, humane achievement that succeeds in overcoming what might be a grim story into something almost triumphant.
David Hastings, an aging, semi-retired business executive, is playing solitaire on his phone aboard a luxuriously appointed private plane. He is bound for London, where he will have dinner with his daughter whom he has not seen in years, and then proceed toward Zurich for an appointment that had required complicated planning, many phone calls and documents. David is accompanied by Cody, often referred to as “the boy.” David muses, pokes around in some murky memories, asks himself questions he can’t always answer. Cody doles out medication at bedtime, offering a selection of anti-anxiety and soporific pills. It is clear that something is wrong with David. Scraps of song float through his mind; he fills in awkward pauses in conversation with innocuous remarks. And then there comes a sharp question: “The budget is off by nearly eight figures. Can you explain this, David?” Something has gone very wrong indeed.
We learn that David’s trip to Zurich is to purposefully, gently, and professionally end his life, wracked by progressive dementia.
We follow David through the ensuing few days, as he is shepherded by Cody through airports, elegant old-world hotels, restaurant meals, and changes of clothes. Cody is endlessly patient, obliging, careful, and nearly colorless. In fact, David barely acknowledges him as a human being. A mightily capable young man, who handles every wrinkle, every delay, every confusion, who is in fact in charge of everything every day, who is just “the boy.” Ask the boy. The boy will know. It becomes apparent, through the smoke and mirrors of David’s own failing perceptions and memories, that David Hastings was not ever a very nice man. Not to his family, and certainly not to a once-dear “friend of his youth.”
Cline observes, creates, and magnificently describes a mind ruined by dementia, telling David’s own story through that mind. I would love to know if she has had a close family member fall into the abyss of dementia. I have, and Cline portrays the frustrated fumbling, the vagueness with sudden flashes of reality popping up now and then; the hostility, the accusations, the incomprehension with heartbreaking accuracy. Tiny details noted by David’s wandering eye recur in artful and poignant moments. And through it all, David always knows what lies ahead, what is going to happen. He has moments of clarity and regret, but little fear. It’s almost a shrug: you get what you get. And that’s it. When he meets his daughter in London, we realize with a start that he hasn’t even told her what he is going to do.
Cline escorts us all the way, to the very end. To the last thought, the last sip and swallow, with “the boy” sitting at his bedside because there is no one else. But it is calm, it is dignified. I was reminded of Amy Bloom’s powerful memoir In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, in which she describes her husband’s journey to the same end for the same reasons. I hope anyone who chooses to go down this road can have it conclude in such a quiet, deliberate, and beautiful way, as it does in Cline’s hands.
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