Random House
Review by Walter Cummins
I’m very late for the long list of people eager to review Emma Kline’s Switzy, so much so that initially I decided to drop out. Then I read Jessica Crawford’s online reaction that said something I had wondered about: “The biggest factor pulling it down from 5 for me is that David, though the reader sympathizes with his plight, seems to never have been a particularly likable person. Hard to love spending that much time in his head as a result.” Despite overall praise, her assessment, unlike most others, isn’t a total rave. It made me realize that I have a few things to say that haven’t been noted by others, though I’m not up on every one of the accumulating commentaries.
David Hastings’s unlikability is less of a defect than an indication that Kline isn’t writing a case study of a man escaping Alzheimer’s. She captures what’s going on inside the head of a man with fading memory and muddled thinking not as an end in itself, but as a means of creating a character study of a very flawed individual who lives in a realm of wealth without really having accomplished much in his life. This failure is inseparable from his flaws as a human being that include his disappointents with his ex-wife, his alienation from his daughter and grandson, and his unrecognized betrayal of his roommate and supposed best friend in prep school. David is blind to his flaws. The confusions of his Alzheimer’s is a culmination of those that have marked his entire life.
The title word, Switzy, is a play on his final destination in Switzerland, the novel structured on the stops of his journey to reach it. That ultimate destination is portrayed but never identified by name. It’s Dignitas, the facility that embodies Switzerland’s right to die laws, located in a suburb of Zurich and enabling those who choose euthanasia to undergo injections that end their lives.
Dignitas has been the subject of several other books and movies, including articles and documentaries. One significant book is Amy Bloom’s autobiographical In Love that also involves Alzheimer’s. Her husband, Brian Ameche, diagnosed with an early stage of that disease, opts for death over deterioration. Bloom, detailing the complex process of having him accepted by Dignitas, narrates from her perspective, although her husband is an active participant, his Alzheimer’s not having progressed as severely as that of the fictional David Hastings.
Unlike Switzy, In Love is not a character study, although both Bloom and Ameche are strong presences. As the title indicates, they are good people in a happy marriage, which makes his fate and hers especially sad. Although Bloom’s descriptions of the involved processes for acceptance are objective, deliberately holding back on emotion, that approach adds a power to the unsaid.
Both Bloom and Kline take readers into the room of dying, with intimate descriptions of what happens in the final minutes of life, from the patient’s final agreement to die through two injections, one painkilling, the other fatal, and then actual termination. Bloom just describes Brian’s from her point of view: “I hold his hand. I can still feel its weight and warmth. His skin color changes, from ruddy to paler pink. I sit there and sit there, as if some other thing will now happen. He is quite pale and I see that he is gone from this world.”
Kline’s realization is complex, seeing David’s inner thoughts from the third-person, and then an abrupt closing change to the first-person: “He sent this message out into the vibrating air, a message to join the other messages. / I am holding out my hand.” Bloom does not attempt to tell what is in the vanishing mind of her husband.
Unlike Kline’s, death is not the end of Bloom’s book. She continues by describing the affection at her husband’s two crowded memorial services and then repeating the vows from their wedding. These are the book’s closing words: “We are holding hands, pressed against each other, holding each other up. I whisper to him, Every day of my life, and he whispers to me, Every day of my life.” With this conclusion, Bloom restores Ameche to life and validates the title, underlining the fact that her role in his dying was itself an act of love.
The troubled David Hastings is denied such love, essentially abandoned at his end, his passing a release and a relief from a hurtful life.
