Emma Cline is known for her troubled young women. In Switzy, she inhabits a man with dementia

Emma Cline is best known as the author of novels about troubled young women. The Girls, her debut, inhabited a follower of a Charles Manson figure, who opted out of the murders at the last minute. Her second, The Guest, followed a callow beauty who’d attached herself to a wealthy man for accommodation.

Switzy, her third novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, turns to a different kind of protagonist. The novel follows an elderly American man making a final journey to Switzerland. The way to Golgotha? A last hurrah? Readers can quickly guess Switzerland is the place where David Hastings, our narrator, plans to end his life before his accelerating Alzheimer’s disease robs him of total agency.

Rather than scrutinising the ethics of such a decision, Cline focuses on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, how we construct our own version of events, and what happens when our ability to control that narrative begins to slip away.

Review: Switzy by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus)

David is not an immediately sympathetic guide. He is often curt, entitled and rude, particularly towards his assistant, Cody (who is not altogether warm). What makes David compelling is his limited awareness of these shortcomings. Cline repeatedly depicts David recognising his own irritability even as he succumbs to it. His unpleasantness often arrives before he fully understands its source.

A wealthy retired businessman in his seventies, David leaves the United States accompanied by Cody and heads for Zurich, where an appointment at an assisted-dying clinic awaits him. Along the way, they detour through London to visit David’s daughter Rebecca and travel to France so David can reconnect with Tom, a boarding-school friend he has not seen for decades.

The novel unfolds through David’s consciousness, allowing readers to experience his cognitive decline from the inside. It is not only memories that disappear. Everyday competencies begin to collapse. Looking at the itinerary for his journey, David tries to recall even the most immediate details of his plans: “Well, go ahead, David. Give it a shot. His brain jumbled and stuttered and spit out – nothing.” Elsewhere, conversations stall and names vanish almost instantly.

We encounter a mind that can no longer reliably distinguish between past and present, memory and observation.

The stories we tell ourselves

The assisted-dying plot gives the novel its shape, but is not its primary focus. Readers looking for a sustained ethical debate about euthanasia may be surprised by how little interest Cline has in mounting one.

Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies, another novel culminating in a journey to Switzerland for assisted dying, treats that decision as inseparable from friendship. Tully Dawson, the best friend of protagonist Jimmy, spends his final months surrounded by the people who know him best, and his death becomes a test of what loyalty requires when a friend asks for help to end his suffering.

Switzy is a far lonelier novel. David’s ex-wife and daughter do not accompany him towards death. Instead, he travels with a paid assistant who manages the practical details of a life increasingly slipping from David’s grasp. While Mayflies is concerned with the obligations between friends, Switzy is interested in the stories people tell themselves in isolation.

The instability of David’s memory forces a reconsideration of the life he has constructed for himself. As Alzheimer’s erodes recent memories and daily habits, older memories awkwardly and abruptly emerge. Again and again, David finds himself returning to his boarding-school years and to Tom, his freshman-year roommate. These memories are initially affectionate. David tenderly recalls Tom’s worn green sweater, his earnest recitation of poetry, and the academic prizes he proudly displayed around their shared room. These recollections are quickly eclipsed by the revelation of a cruel prank Tom became the target of.

Blindfolded, tied up, driven into the woods and terrorised with a gun by his classmates, Tom was left humiliated after soiling himself in fear. David was not the architect of the prank, but neither did he stop it. “Who are you, David?” he asks himself decades later, replaying the scene. “David was nothing. He was the boy, silent among the other boys.”

Before travelling to Zurich, David arranges one final meeting with Tom, now living across the French border. Like much of Switzy, the encounter frustrates expectations. David has spent decades imagining this reunion as an opportunity for apology, perhaps even absolution. When he finally apologises, Tom refuses it: “I don’t need this, any apology.” When David returns to the events that have haunted him for half a century, Tom’s response is even more surprising: “I can barely remember that time.”

David has carried this story and the burden of his conduct for decades, revisiting it so often, it has become central to his understanding of himself. The reunion forces David to confront the possibility that the narratives we build around our regrets may ultimately tell us more about ourselves than about the people we’ve wronged. One wonders whether David’s apology has less to do with making amends than with seeking relief from his own guilt.

Impressive form

Cline has explored similar forms of self-deception throughout her fiction. The narrators of both The Girls and The Guest significantly misunderstand themselves. David belongs to this line of characters, though age augments the problem. The issue is not simply that he has misread his life. Increasingly, he struggles to hold that life together as a coherent story at all.

One of the novel’s most impressive achievements is formal. Cline’s prose often reproduces the repetitive and associative qualities of David’s thinking, to depict dementia on the page. Fragments of songs, school exercises and half-remembered phrases recur throughout the narrative. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” surfaces repeatedly, as does the line from Moby Dick, “The invisible spheres were formed in fright.”

David has spent much of his life believing in a particular version of himself: competent, successful, rational. Alzheimer’s steadily dismantles that certainty. Yet it would be misleading to describe Switzy as bleak.

For much of the novel, David’s life appears marked by absence: failed relationships, missed opportunities, emotional evasions and a persistent desire to be elsewhere. Looking back, he sees himself as someone always searching for a shortcut, convinced there was “some back way” through the difficulties and obligations of ordinary life. Death, in one sense, becomes the final workaround.

The novel’s closing chapters complicate this reading. As David approaches the clinic, his reflections expand. Narration moves beyond guilt and regret towards a broader meditation on what it means to have inhabited a body and a life. Cline catalogues memories both significant and trivial: crossing oceans, raising a daughter, broken bones, fleeting acts of courage, sexual encounters, family holidays, moments of shame and joy.

‘It contained its own meaning’

David spends much of the novel attempting to impose coherence on the past, to understand what his life has amounted to. In the final pages, however, he arrives at a different kind of understanding. “There had never been another story,” he reflects. The line initially sounds despairing, but it gradually acquires a different resonance. The alternative lives he imagined, the better versions of himself, the roads not taken, these do not exist. There is only the life he actually lived.

This is perhaps where the novel locates its fragile hope. The final pages offer neither redemption nor resolution. David’s regrets remain. His failures are not erased. Yet as he relinquishes the need to explain himself, life itself begins to feel sufficient. “Here, at the end,” he realises, “there had been no need to strain, after all. It contained its own meaning.”

The closing image of David sending a final message into the world, “I am holding out my hand”, is characteristic of Cline’s restraint. It suggests a late-in-life recognition of connection – and an acknowledgement of other lives, imperfectly understood but nevertheless deeply significant, however belated. For a novel so concerned with loneliness, memory and self-deception, that gesture feels surprisingly hopeful.

To die or not to die?

While Cline largely avoids arguing for or against assisted dying, by allowing David a measure of peace and clarity at the threshold of death, she inevitably gives the reader permission to revisit the question on ethical grounds.

There is something troubling in the novel’s vision of elective death as a response to cognitive decline. David’s suffering is real, but so too is the meaning he continues to discover in his life. As his reflections broaden beyond regret towards gratitude and connection, Switzy implicitly raises a difficult question: if life remains meaningful even in the face of confusion and decline, what exactly justifies bringing it to an end?

One possible answer, suggested by David’s choice, is the desire to arrest decline before it strips away independence and selfhood. The novel never fully resolves this tension. David approaches death not as someone who has discovered life is meaningless, but as someone who has belatedly recognised its value.

Readers are left with the unsettling question of whether the solution to ageing and decline is to endure, or to end these processes before they run their course.