A bold and arresting departure from Cline’s earlier work ... Though Switzy can be tender, melancholy, and even commemorative at times, it’s far from canonizing and David is no saint ... Stylistically adventurous ... Stuck with me long after I finished.
Assured ... A significant swerve from Cline’s female- and youth-centric earlier fiction, Switzy does so much so very well, starting with its title ... So why am I not completely head over heels for Switzy? ... Maybe because I’m a weary old hand at Alzheimer’s, questioning whether these narrative lurches...are even medically possible ... Maybe it’s this character’s underdetermined, peevish-seeming dismissal of animals and music ... Maybe it’s even mannered exclamation points like that, which heavily scatter David’s darkening sky, as if to ward off the ellipses that await us all.
Switzy is Cline’s big swing ... At times, it’s sentimental, unfolding with a sense of its own importance. It’s also odder and more buoyant than you might ... The explanation for Tom’s importance is a misstep, a lapse of authorial confidence ... She’s a stronger writer on the sentence level here, and most important, she has found a character who rewards her impulse to write in loops ... This book doesn’t try to diagnose our collective ills. What’s left is something smaller, more tense and tender.
What’s hypnotic about this novel is the illusion that we’re watching a mind decaying even as it engineers its own expiration. Cline manages to pull the dramatic irony increasingly tight without letting us see the strings ... She holds out her hand to the essential yearning in every human being, to that desire that persists until the very end.
Evokes an intimate, sometimes smothering feeling of presentness ... The writing is piercing and suspenseful, and Ms. Cline deserves praise for engraving a style recognizably her own ... All surface, lacking the interiority and character development that provide immersion and depth ... The book powerfully constricts as it nears the final appointment, describing a terrible itinerary of last things—David’s last meal, his last change of clothing, his last bit of paperwork. Ms. Cline recounts it all without looking away.
Gut-twisting ... Cline’s approach is merciless—not toward David, for whom she shows tenderness and grace, but toward the reader, who will be nearly flattened by this novel. Or so I sincerely hope, because death ought to flatten us once in a while ... Wandering, dreamlike.
I think it is probably impossible to remain unmoved by David’s journey towards death, but as I accompanied him on it, I registered a nagging doubt that became increasingly insistent ... David’s faltering memory just so happens to fall into precisely the pattern of revelation employed by a traditional trauma-plot novel ... This certainty that novelistic convention would be obeyed works against the uncertainty Cline otherwise evokes so brilliantly ... When the novel moves past the Tom storyline, as it does with about 50 pages to go, it becomes its best self. Untethered from the duties of revelation it can fully immerse us in David’s pocked reality: impressionistic, arresting, upsetting, even funny ... Will probably stay with me for ever.
A defining novel about assisted dying ... Emotionally expansive and mature ... A magnificent high-wire book that turns a personal crisis into a reckoning with modern life ... 'Unflinching' is one of the most overused words in criticism, but here it is entirely appropriate. There’s something very brave about how Cline sees her premise through to its painful, inevitable end.
Cline nimbly imagines a mind in the throes of unraveling ... The book mostly avoids pathos. Because it cleaves to the perspective of an unlikable, unremarkable person who has no friends and has isolated himself from his family, Switzy lacks the texture of prolonged tragedy that an illness like Alzheimer’s often inflicts on the sufferer’s loved ones ... Has none of the uniquely insightful and heartbreaking details of old age, death, and grief ... Switzy seems to pose a question: why should we care about David Hastings?
The prose is hypnotic but also full of a surprising narrative tension ... There are times, however, when the spell is broken by jarring shifts in perspective ... Overall, however, Cline does a remarkable job of articulating a fractured human consciousness that humanises beautifully both the alienating mystery of dementia and an often-polarising debate. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this is a worthy candidate for the win.
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 ... Cline has a habit of piling on too many metaphors about death ... 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.
The novel hums with luxury: the private plane, the voguish hotels and restaurants, the limousine. And yet those pristine spaces end up merging seamlessly with the institutional nihility of the euthanasia clinic ... Cline takes a close third-person approach to the story. We’re in David’s head – which, you might assume, is not a promising place to be. His thoughts are hard to shepherd; facts are hard to recall ... Cline underscores the canned scripts that clutter our brains, but she drops in unobtrusive moments of beauty to startle the reader ... Such moments are a reminder of the singularity of experience, or the perfect dovetailing of word and experience, unavailable to machines and to brains that lapse into mimicry of machines.
Tackling a subject as heavy as the end of a person’s life as his grasp on himself and the world weakens is no small feat, but Cline handles it deftly, avoiding clichés and pat emotional catharses to explore both the weight and unburdening of a man’s final days. This truly profound journey will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.
Starkly beautiful ... The novel’s lucidity is remarkable considering the dimming of David’s inner light, which Cline portrays with a laser focus and deep sympathy. It adds up to a striking meditation on mortality.
