David Hastings is on his way to Zurich, Switzerland. Mostly he can remember why. He is traveling with a young man named Cody and once in Zurich will meet with the woman he has taken to calling Ghoul. Along the way, he will stop in London to see his daughter and his grandson, as well as his school friend, Tom. Both these visits are fraught with emotion, but they are David’s last acts. Because once he gets to Zurich and meets with Ghoul, he will die by assisted suicide before his Alzheimer's disease robs him of the ability to choose otherwise.

Emma Cline’s latest novel, SWITZY, is told from David’s confused and powerful first-person perspective as he spends his last days contemplating his life and the moments he can still recall. 

"SWITZY is a thoughtful, poignant, affecting and finely crafted examination of ordinary life and what may remain at the conclusion of it."

David was a successful businessman, but now in his 70s, with his memory and faculties diminished and diminishing, he has decided to end his life. He has told no one except his assistant, Cody, who seems to have some power over his medical and financial decisions. That is either tender or menacing, depending on David’s mood and the reader’s interpretation. Cody tends to David, ensuring that he is packed, dressed, onboard his flights, and driven to his appointments. He has helped make the arrangements for the suicide and will be with David at the moment of death. Missing will be any family or friends.

Although he remembers her fondly, David’s ex-wife will not be by his side as he dies, nor will his only child, Rebecca. In fact, during a quick visit with Rebecca in London, David reveals nothing of his plans to her. Instead they share awkward conversation and unvoiced concerns for each other, and he is taken to see his grandson’s toy train set. David later interrupts Rebecca with a visitor of her own, connecting him to his own relationship with Tom, his closest adolescent companion.

David’s memories of his daughter are clear, yet their relationship is distant, and the details he holds onto are minor and sweet. His need to visit Tom is connected to a need to resolve their relationship and absolve guilt. Again, there are things that Cline doesn’t allow readers to be privy to. We suffer from David’s lack of recall and fragmented mind. But we know that his teenage love for Tom was always mixed with shame.

SWITZY is less driven by action or plot and more concerned with meaning and meaning-making. Suffering the loss of his memory and everything that entails, David is grieving for the imminent loss of his life as well. Through his unreliable first-person perspective, it is hard to know who David was, but Cline allows us to be with him as he grapples with that himself. She has composed a challenging heartbreak of a novel.

Full of literary allusions and word play, language clung to by David but also now escaping him, the narrative flows as he moves slowly but steadily from the moments he continues to linger on, savor, regret and still strive to understand toward his chosen end. SWITZY is a thoughtful, poignant, affecting and finely crafted examination of ordinary life and what may remain at the conclusion of it.