Clarissa's Blog

I knew Cline was a literary genius when I read her novel The Guest. But you never know. What if a brilliant novel is a flash in the pan? What if there is nothing left in the well of the author’s talent? I was worried that Emma Cline’s new novel Switzy would underdeliver on the promise of The Guest. I shouldn’t have worried, though. Cline is a genius, and she proved it once again.

The Guest was about an indigent, declassé woman in her twenties. Cline is so confident in her talent that she went in the exact opposite direction and wrote her new novel about a wealthy, elderly, ultra-civilized man. Imagine how many ways there are to mess up something like this. Make it preachy and politicized. Scoff at the old man for being uncomfortable with technology, for being a remnant of “the patriarchy.” But Cline resists the temptation of writing for the self-indulgent. As always, her writing is completely controlled. The economy of artistic means she employs is extraordinary. She never tries to explain anything, make a point, or preach.

Switzy is the perfect counterpoint to The Guest in another way, as well. The Guest shows the chthonic horror that arises from the depths of the souls of self-indulgent, undisciplined people. Switzy is about people on the opposite end of the civilizational spectrum. Once again, Cline writes like it’s 1991 and wokeness never happened. The novel is about a rich elderly man on his way to be euthanized for dementia. But even though his mind is failing him and he often finds it hard to know where he is and why, he is still fully immersed in the civilizational order.

In my opinion, Cline is the best writer in the English language today. She is only 37, which, in writer years, means she’s a girl-child, but already she has come out with these two extraordinary novels that are completely different yet are undeniably written by the same author.

I have to warn potential readers that Switzy doesn’t have a plot in the way that The Guest had one. Its goal is not to depict events, but to go into the depths of a fracturing mind at the end of a life. It’s done in an extraordinarily talented way, but this is heavy reading.