Emma Cline’s first novel, The Girls (2016), sold more hardback copies than any other debut novel published in the UK that year. It was an atmospheric treat of a book about young women in a Mansonesqe cult. Her next novel, The Guest (2023), was a haunting story about a beautiful, brittle grifter trying her luck in the Hamptons and coming unstuck. In between came Daddy (2020), a collection of short stories united by their exploration of toxic masculinity.
This latest novel, Switzy, which won her her first Booker Prize longlisting, is quite a departure, in that it is about a man with dementia contemplating the end of his life. Cline is attempting something even more difficult here than producing an interesting story about a boring man in the style of, say, John Cheever. She has written a profound book from the point of view of someone who is not only dull and dislikeable but also unintelligible, particularly to himself. David Hastings looks at notes in his notebook written in handwriting he no longer recognises and later wonders: ‘Where had the other words gone? Vaporised. When he turned the corner in his brain, there was just an empty room.’ Cline has explained: ‘I wanted to try to drop into a consciousness pressurised by its own ending. And what if that consciousness was already slipping away – what remains of the self? What to make of our lives, all that has passed through us?’
