David Hastings, the retired corporate executive protagonist of Switzy, Emma Cline’s new, Booker Prize longlisted novel, always carries a small leather notebook in his jacket pocket. When he wakes up in the mornings, he opens it up to recall his own name, the names of his daughter (Rebecca) and grandson (Rainer), his itinerary over the next week or so – all scribbled down in a patchy handwriting that must be his but he still can’t recognise. His 30-something assistant Cody is “the real keeper of the schedule, but it was one of those little feints they made at normalcy”. Not too long ago, David was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. His doctor had told him there was no cure: the best therapies merely stave off the worst symptoms. To David, the plodding progression of the disease seemed particularly dreadful, the ignominy of bearing witness to steadily losing one’s mind.
He had enrolled in a Dignitas-like euthanasia clinic just outside Zürich. The timing was perfect, the liaison at the clinic informed him: David is just about lucid enough for them to avoid legal liability. As a farewell present of sorts, his former employer, Stearns, lends him his private plane – bought because of a “tax loophole” that David had discovered when he used to work for him – for the last trip to Zürich, with a two-day stopover in London to see Rebecca and Rainer. His family doesn’t know about his plans. At dinner, he lies to Rebecca about going to Switzerland for “a project”. She, too, is thankful that her father is staying busy after retirement.
Much of the novel unfolds inside private planes, luxury SUVs and hotel rooms – the softly lit spectral zones where the ultra-rich prefer to sequester themselves from the harshness of the world. David’s lasting memory of Zürich, too, is of a lake he’d glimpsed on a previous visit from the window of a sedan: “The outlines of the lake, a darkness that was even darker – the drizzle was so fine and uniform that it didn’t appear to disturb the lake’s surface.”
Not much seems to disturb David’s placid countenance. He suspects, for instance, that Cody might be quietly siphoning off money from his bank account, and yet “the numbers were neutral. Not even a flare. It seemed to matter less and less.” Back when he worked as a “point main” to Stearns in New York, he’d get his suits made by a swanky tailor who flew down to the city to cater to special clients. But now the expensive clothes and shoes in his closet seem like “so much costuming”. While meeting his grandson for ostensibly the last time, David jokingly wags his eyebrows and tells the child he is never coming back. The child, too, bids him farewell by pretending to wipe away a tear in jest.
Cline’s bestselling 2016 debut, The Girls, was characterised by a prodigious attention to detail – a young woman’s ankles are described at one point as being “gruff with stubble” – attributable to its teen protagonist’s sense of wonder and estrangement. In Switzy, the sentences are just as crystalline: the estrangement can now be ascribed to the obliviousness of the Alzheimer’s patient. The world can seem just as new to the child as to an old man grappling with dementia. When David and Rainer hang out in the latter’s room, they converse about Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as equals and admire a train set together: “The boy seemed to understand that the intensity of David’s attention was unusual.”
What does David remember in his last days? He recalls an old tagline on his infant daughter’s shampoo bottle: “No more tears.” He remembers taking turns to count upwards with his ex-wife to get through the awkwardness of a meal on their honeymoon. (“One two three, they said back and forth, in conversational tones.”) But most importantly, he remembers Tom, his roommate at boarding school, who now lives somewhere around the border between France and Switzerland. Throughout the novel the reader gets the sense that David has wronged Tom in some way, and their meeting – again, in a town car, just outside Tom’s house – is easily the most delicate scene in the novel.
Elsewhere in the book Cline has a habit of piling on too many metaphors about death. At one point, David remembers reading a story about mortality in school and reflects that he was now “both the horse and the rider and he was also Death”. A few pages later, he looks out of a car window in Zürich and thinks that “Death was in the pewter river and these bland back roads with the concrete medians and beige buildings…” Too many emotionally significant moments tend to lapse into bathos, be it David’s farewell scene with Rainer, or a moment when David spots a road sign in Zürich with the German word for “exit” – Ausfahrt – and thinks of a joke: “Thanks a lot – assfart, very good. He had gotten a sign and the sign was clear. He didn’t need to be interested.”
The problem with these cute attempts at humour is that they don’t really seem apiece with David’s otherwise costive inner monologue. In a novel that is so self-consciously preoccupied with what Arthur Koestler once called the “perverse silence” of the dead, Cline doesn’t often trust her readers to fill in life’s little silences.
Switzy
Emma Cline
Chatto & Windus, 352pp, £18.99
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[Further reading: The Goldsmiths Prize 2026 shortlist announced]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Sunshine and Rain
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