Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Switzy'

0:00Gregory Cowles: Sometimes that one thing you've been putting off becomes the thing that can change your life. Whether it's earning a master's degree, building leadership skills, or preparing to take your career in a new direction, Southern New Hampshire University can help. With flexible online graduate programs designed for working professionals, SNHU makes it possible to earn your degree while balancing your busy life. So stop putting off your education. Start today at snhu.edu slash NYT.

0:30Parul Sehgal: Gather around, friends, because Book Club is officially in session. Hello, and welcome to The Book Review from The New York Times. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at The New York Times Book Review and the host of The Book Review Book Club. And today, I'm with...

0:45Gregory Cowles: Jen Harlan. I'm an editor at The Book Review.

0:48Parul Sehgal: And our fantasy columnist.

0:49Gregory Cowles: And also, yes, and that's less relevant to this book, I suppose, but I am also our fantasy columnist.

0:54Parul Sehgal: You do a great many things. Thank you for joining us. And I'm also with...

0:57Emma Cline: Emily Aiken. I'm also an editor at The Book Review.

1:01Parul Sehgal: And you also do a great many things. You edit reviews, you edit essays, you...

1:04Gregory Cowles: Sing my praises. And wrote your own great book, which came out earlier this year.

1:08Parul Sehgal: A round of applause, The Frenchman. Congratulations. Thank you so much.

1:12Gregory Cowles: Go read it, go find it wherever books are sold.

1:14Parul Sehgal: This week, we are all in the studio to talk about Switzy by Emma Klein. This is the latest novel by the author Emma Klein, and it's a buzzy one. Just personally, whenever I've mentioned that I've read the book or I've posted about it online, I've just gotten a wave of enthusiastic responses. People really seem to be resonating with this. This book also was nominated for the 2026 Booker Prize, and so it has acclaim as well. A returning author that people are excited to talk about and has been met with acclaim, that sounds like a book club book to me. So we're going to discuss the novel, but before we do that, I have my typical admin notes.

1:52Parul Sehgal: First, there will be spoilers in this episode, but we want to keep this conversation accessible. So the first half will be spoiler-light. We'll talk about some foundational stuff. We'll introduce the characters. We'll talk about themes. But we're going to save the spoilers, the details of where the book goes, where it takes us to the second half, which will be spoiler-filled. So that's note number one. Note number two, at the end of the episode, we will reveal our November book. So stay with us to the end to find out what we're reading next. Without further ado, let's dive into Switzy. To get started, can someone give us a brief synopsis introduction?

2:28Parul Sehgal: What is this book? What is Switzy?

2:30Emma Cline: I can do that, MJ. So Switzy is Emma Klein's third novel. It follows a man in his 70s, a former executive named David Hastings, who is suffering from Alzheimer's and is on his way from his home in the United States to Switzerland, where he has an appointment to end his life through medically assisted suicide. We inhabit David's consciousness as he experiences this trip and goes about some unfinished business related to his relationship with his daughter and with an old friend from his days in prep school whom he has not seen in decades.

3:09Parul Sehgal: That's a great setup. Would you add anything, Jen?

3:13Gregory Cowles: I think the other thing I would say about this novel is, because of David's state of mind, we sort of move very fluidly between the present and this journey that he's in and also these fragments of memory. And so you piece together this collage of who this man is because he himself is getting lost in these moments from his past and then tuning back into the present. And he's accompanied on this journey by an assistant named Cody, who he often refers to as the boy. Even though he's in his 30s. Yes, he's a full-grown man. But I suppose when you're a former executive in your 70s and anyone under the age of 40 is a boy.

3:51Gregory Cowles: And so Cody also plays an important role in his journey.

3:54Parul Sehgal: To give a sense of the book, can someone read the opening paragraph?

3:57Gregory Cowles: Oh, I would love to.

3:58Parul Sehgal: Just because the voice of this, I think, is such a feat of the book itself. It's such a notable component. I want to hear a little bit about it. Thank you, Jen.

4:08Gregory Cowles: It was always nighttime there. Or in his memory, he had only ever been there at night. the cobblestone streets and the strangely empty sidewalks, the black vastness of the lake as seen from the backseat of a town car. It was a city that existed in a perpetual hush, a chilly dark, as if the place had been built for these kinds of shadowed errands. There would be snow on the ground, the middle of February, the flat, sad month, like a house when no one is home.

4:36Parul Sehgal: It's such an atmospheric intro. we get a break and then it's the steady hum of the plane's engine carried them along and you get a little bit of the plane and then interspersed you get these brief little lines the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog the quick brown fox later he says rose chair apple he's just remembering stuff so like in addition to the atmosphere and in addition to the storytelling you're just getting these bits of consciousness interspersed.

5:05Gregory Cowles: You're like tuned into the radio channel of David's brain and anything that flits into or out of his consciousness, we also get to hear.

5:14Parul Sehgal: Oh, love that metaphor.

5:16Emma Cline: Yeah, talk about metaphor. I think this is one of Klein's incredible gifts. And right there in that first graph, we get the evocation of Switzerland, his destination as the void, as this dark place. So it's the place of death. And then there's this wonderful line, like a house when no one is home, which is sort of a metaphor for David himself as he's becoming something like a house with no one home. So setup is all right there.

5:44Parul Sehgal: The other thing I wanted to mention is it was always nighttime there or in his memory. In the first two sentences, you get a setup and a contradiction, which is kind of the instability that David's mind has. I just I love that intro.

6:00Gregory Cowles: Yeah, and also this sort of already we're blurring the lines between the present and the past, which will just get blurrier and blurrier for him as he goes on. What an intro. On this journey, like you were saying, Emily, towards a physical destination, which is Switzerland or specifically Zurich, but also on this kind of Styxian journey towards the end of his life.

6:20Parul Sehgal: Styxian. Let's get some fantasy columnist going on.

6:24Gregory Cowles: I guess I did make it relevant after all.

6:26Emma Cline: I just thought this entire conceit was so ingenious because, of course, to qualify for a medically assisted suicide, you have to be rational enough to make a conscious, deliberate decision. You have to be somewhat compass mentis. So here's this man who's losing his mind literally, and we're going to experience this with him. But he's also coherent enough to be the consciousness through which we actually experience the story. And so I think that this conceit is also the basic condition for narrative. It can't be totally incoherent. And so there's just, it's a genius move on her part.

7:02Parul Sehgal: That's the conceit, though. But that leads me to my first question, which is our vibe check. Brilliant conceit. What about the book overall? I want to know, what were your top-level thoughts about Switzy? Loved it? Hate it? Feel mixed?

7:16Emma Cline: A masterful performance. Such superb control. Every sentence is so well thought out and crafted. Hands down, the novel with the most impressive control I've read this year. I really admired it. Totally.

7:29Parul Sehgal: What about you, Jen?

7:30Gregory Cowles: So I'm in a little bit of a unique position with this one. I've spent a lot of this year with this book living in my head. Not only did I read it for myself and for this podcast, I also wrote a story for our desk about how the audiobook for this book was made. I felt a little pressure, actually. I got to say, reading the opening, having been there in the recording sessions, when Robert Petkoff, who was an incredible audiobook narrator, read the version for the actual audiobook.

7:53Parul Sehgal: I want to say you did brilliantly, too. Thank you.

7:55Gregory Cowles: I'm not changing careers yet. And I got to interview Emma for that story also about her process and experience with this book. And I would say something that has been really striking is that my first impression of this book as this immaculately executed, elegantly written, completely moving, but also never maudlin or treacly in a way that I feel like so many books about this sort of like journey towards death could have been. That impression has only grown stronger with every time that I have reread or re-listened to this book. I think it is both so exacting because of the way that Emma chose to write the book.

8:41Gregory Cowles: Every single word on the page really counts. It's not just the dialogue or the scene setting, but all of these little fragments that come together to form David and his experience. And also all of the blank space on the page, I think, says almost as much as every word.

8:55Emma Cline: I wanted to talk about the title for a second, Switzy, which sounds like, talk about candy. It sounds like a child's candy or a board game. And it turns out, of course, to be a euphemism for Switzerland itself, something that David's corporate executive buddies call Switzerland, where he used to come with them on business trips. And so there's this, it's perfect for this book because it's a euphemism for death. And hanging over the book is this kind of inability to talk about death, right?

9:25Parul Sehgal: One thing I'm interested so far in this conversation is we've talked about control, the control of the prose. Jen, you mentioned exacting. We've talked about the richness of the title, the richness of the first paragraph, but we haven't necessarily talked about the stakes here, the emotion of the story. The story is the most heightened thing that you can get. Someone is losing their mind and they're approaching their death. I'm like, I'm speechless because like it feels so overwhelming. I'm curious, what was your initial response when you heard this is what the book was about? What was your first impression?

10:01Parul Sehgal: And then can you tell me about your first steps into the novel?

10:05Emma Cline: I guess I assumed it would be kind of a morbid, depressing, melancholy read. And it's totally not that. So that's one of the paradoxes of this book for me is that for a book about death, for which death seems to be the ultimate destination, it's teeming with life. There are so many inputs into David's mind. So remember, we're in his consciousness. This book is written in what I guess a lot of listeners will remember from English class is called Free and Direct Style, which means it's a third-person narration that slides seamlessly into the first person, into the consciousness of a single character.

10:41Emma Cline: And they're just like the details of color and smells and textures and fabrics. Everything is so exactingly described. And so this book is not actually morbid. And there are stimuli throughout every page.

10:58Gregory Cowles: There's also so much humor in it. So much humor. It is, on its surface, like a very bleak situation and bleak setup. And yet, she finds so much, yeah, humor and humanity in the kind of misunderstandings, disjointedness, and disconnection between David and the world around him. And we as the there are moments where David himself realizes the awkwardness or humor and things, but also where we as the reader can see what is happening in the ways that he is misunderstanding or misinterpreting or misaligned with the world around him.

11:35Parul Sehgal: That leads me to ask, because we've mentioned the humor, the misinterpretation, this journey. Can you bring us a little bit deeper into the book? What is it that we're seeing? Tell me a little bit more about what David's up to as we unfold the book.

11:47Emma Cline: I think at first you're just really aware of this world in the airplane that he's in, which is, again, meticulously built. So we get all of this stuff about the quiet luxury.

11:58Gregory Cowles: We should say, yeah, it's also not just a plane, but a private plane that his former colleague has lent to him. Exactly.

12:04Emma Cline: So we're starting to understand David not just as an any man heading to his death, but as someone who comes from an upper middle class background of quiet luxury. There are the dove-gurry blankets and the crisp white sheets just on the private jet.

12:18Gregory Cowles: The silver mid-century salt and pepper shakers with the pleasing weight in the hand.

12:23Emma Cline: The puppy tooth. The puppy tooth, right. Houndstooth jackets. Everything is bespoke and just so. There are lavish descriptions of the food he's served. She's incredible at food descriptions. And I have to admit, it put me in mind a little bit of that famous takedown by Andrea Longchoo about Hanya Yanagihara's little life. Which she called an unapologetic lifestyle novel. And that phrase flashed through my mind. Yet all of this is in the service of building not just a kind of physical reality, but an emotional one, too. And you start to understand David as someone who is padded emotionally. He's stifled.

13:02Emma Cline: That all of this soft, cosseted world is also one in which he hasn't expressed his deep feelings to anyone. And this becomes part of the book.

13:11Gregory Cowles: also we've talked a lot about the sort of the the elegance of the writing and like these this emotional debt but also in terms of the actual plot in some ways it also reminds me a little bit of like a video game like we see like we are david and we see him like he gets off the plane he enters the airport or he like comes to the hotel he tries he goes down to the pool and it's like how will david navigate this scene yeah and i think that's also where a lot of the humor and that sort of frisson comes of, oh, how is, oh no, now David's at the bar and these women are sitting now next to him who are very drunk and possibly working in the world's oldest profession and how we know what's going on, but we don't know.

13:50Gregory Cowles: But David doesn't know what's going on and watching him kind of bumble through every level of this journey on his way is very, is entertaining and also moving and evocative.

14:01Parul Sehgal: Yeah. The entertainment factor was one thing that surprised me. I really, really loved this book quite a lot. I think it's a typical MJ book now. The prose is spare and stylish. The stakes are heightened and emotional. And I just got lost in the technical aspects of it. I'm with you, controlled, exacting. I just got lost in the prose of it, which sometimes feels like poetry to me.

14:28Emma Cline: There's so much beauty to this book for a book about something so sad. And it is such an aesthetic experience. And I think we should underscore that. I think we should read some more from it, actually.

14:39Gregory Cowles: One thing we haven't touched on yet that also brings so much texture to the book is all of the pop culture references. There are so many song lyrics and movie lines and things that are kind of the, like, detritus of a life that really sticks with you, particularly the media that you consume as a young person. And it made me think a lot of the line from You've Got Mail where Kathleen Kelly says, when you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of you in a way that no other reading in your life does. And similarly, these movies and these songs that David encountered as a young person are kind of, I think of it as like you poured like all of his life into a sieve and you're like panning for what remains.

15:18Emma Cline: The book is littered with all of this mental flotsam and jetsam, like this little bits from Edelweiss and The Sound of Music. White Christmas. And advertisements, the no more tangles, no more tears, which is that shampoo. I had that as a kid, and he used it on his daughter's hair when she was little, and that keeps coming up. And even lines from novels, there's a line from Moby Dick. I don't know. I think it's pretty famous. The invisible spheres were formed in fright. And this sort of debris just keeps popping into his head. And this is so typical of what she does. I wanted to read you guys. There's almost a metaphor for it at one point.

15:55Emma Cline: This is actually early in the book. Klein has a paragraph about, we're learning about David's habits. And he kept the cords to old electronics, she writes. He kept the empty boxes that had once contained CD-ROMs for accounting software and a digital wine encyclopedia and a plastic briefcase of cassette tapes. He kept little plastic bags with replacement buttons and a forlorn twist of thread. charging cords for non-existent cell phones, those empty, puffy mailers that the packages arrived in, flattened and stacked on the bedroom floor. And it's like, this is kind of like the inside of his brain.

16:29Emma Cline: Yeah. It's like all of this stuff.

16:30Gregory Cowles: And it's like all of the chunky bits and junk that are left in his mind when you sift it out, whether that's like a T.S. Eliot poem or a Frank Sinatra song or an advertisement. There's this bit in the first chapter where he's talking about what he packed for this trip, how he selected the sweater and the shoes and the overcoat and the suitcase and then thinking about, wait, after I go through, if I go through with this appointment, what's going to happen to all of that? It's all just going to sit in a hotel room because I will go to this appointment and I won't come back. And it's the sort of like physical detritus that is left from Elijah also.

17:04Gregory Cowles: There's so many funny lines.

17:05Emma Cline: It's also that moment where he says he was shocked that he couldn't put his fee for the medically assisted suicide on a credit card. He couldn't get miles. He said, what, no miles? And of course, the idea is he won't be needing them. But he's a very ironic person.

17:20Parul Sehgal: I was going to say the word rye. The passage that I was going to read is from early on. And it is a little toilet humor in that it's literally him going to the bathroom. But it's a final trip to the bathroom before landing. Anytime that word, when you're talking about death, the word final, and because it's the start of a new section, A final trip is in all capital.

17:41Gregory Cowles: I mean, that's literally what he's on is a final trip. Right.

17:44Parul Sehgal: A final trip to the bathroom before landing. The toilet lid was a fat square of beige leather that lifted to reveal the silver basin. Boyd pressure, not good. Aim, poor. Dot, dot, dash. He was basically pissing in Morse code. A pretty feeble distress signal. It's so good. It's grim. It's funny. It's descriptive. perspective but then a few pages later emma klein cuts through with these just like pressing questions and one of the things is david just asking why did certain things remain that for me is why i love this book the way she is able to craft weave a spell through her prose and then all of a sudden you just get this line that stops you in the tracks and makes you think i want to ask though we've talked about the style we've talked about some of the emotion to it one of the things I was stumped with this book, not in a bad way, I'm just, I was thinking about is what is Emma Klein up to?

18:41Parul Sehgal: So some biography of Emma Klein, she hit the scene in 2016 with her debut novel, The Girls, which incredible, incredible book. I still think about that opening line from that book, which is the Hall of Famer. I might get it a little bit wrong. I'm doing it off the top of my head, but it's off the dome, but it's, I looked up because of the laughter and kept looking. No, I looked up because of the laughter and I kept looking because of the girls. So good. And so she hit the scene with this book, which is about a girl who gets kind of ensnared in a cult, basically.

19:14Emma Cline: Like a Manson family cult, right? It's the late 60s, right?

19:19Parul Sehgal: Then she had this story collection, Daddy, which came out in 2020. She had a huge book in 2023, The Guest, which is about a young woman scamming her way through the Hamptons party scene. It was like the it book of the summer. Everyone was reading it. Everyone was talking about it. Whether you loved it or you hated it, you couldn't help but discuss it. And now she's back with Switzi, which is so radically different. I think she's made her name thinking about writing about the vibrant interior lives of young women who are doing deranged things intentionally or unintentionally. but there's a sense of striving and i think in her books and of trying to find belonging there's all of that in her books tied to young women this however is an older man at the end of his life the style is different i'm curious what do you think emma klein is just up to not necessarily in comparison to her previous books but just with switzy in itself what's the project

20:19Emma Cline: of this book i'll just say in comparison to the others that i think this is a big step forward She obviously was already a technically really accomplished writer with her debut. She broke out with the girls. This is, you're right, the first book in which the protagonist is a man, not just a man, but an older man whose mental state is one of increasing forgetfulness and he's on his way to oblivion. And so this is a bold and risky move for her. And I think technically she's advanced as well. I'm just I'm really dazzled by this book, MJ. This is her absolutely her best. I love that.

20:58Parul Sehgal: I'm going to go on the line for that.

20:59Emma Cline: And what can be bigger stakes than the existential stakes of what does a life add up to? What does it all mean?

21:05Gregory Cowles: I think it's also interesting thinking about the sort of there are some through lines like she has written about these sort of worlds of privilege before and the way that people move through them. And in a lot of ways, David is a person who's going to say he's like a for like a striver made good who is now kind of detaching from this world but in a lot of ways he has really been such a passive kind of passenger in his life he as he revisits his memories you realize that he has spent so much of his life kind of with like a film between him and his experience he never really was never able to fully access or express his emotions he never fully connected in his relationships and seem to like coast along on like white male prep school privilege to these like upper echelons of the finance world and so there is a very different kind of energy to to this book and I think as a I don't know what Emma's like what her what she would say her like project is with this but to me it seems like as a writer I was so impressed by the big swing of a fully embodying in this completely fleshed out and textured way a mind that is so different from your own and also setting the additional challenge of the style which is there's no quotation marks the negative space on the page says as much as the words themselves and so you're sort of putting yourself on a like a on a tightrope while also like balancing two plates on sticks and she totally pulls it off and like doesn't stumble once the whole way you mentioned not being sure what the

22:44Parul Sehgal: project that she had in her mind. But you interviewed Sam McLeod. Did you learn anything about the book through that process?

22:53Gregory Cowles: I think something that was really interesting to me when I was talking to her about, I guess actually about her, yeah, her process for this is that for her, she said it really started with that opening image of a man sitting on a plane on his way to the end of his life, which in a way we are all on the road to the end of our lives. We just don't know how long that is. Hate to bring you down. But there's something really striking and interesting, I think both to her and I also found this, about the plane. Whoever you are, whatever is going on outside, it's this place where you are kind of disconnected from the regular, you're literally disconnected from the everyday world on the ground and also kind of disconnected from the flow of normal time.

23:35Gregory Cowles: You're in this space that's kind of... It's also a kind of neutral

23:38Emma Cline: Neutral impersonal space, which I think is perfect for David because neutral impersonality is his MO of how he's moved through his life.

23:46Gregory Cowles: Yeah. And so she said it started for her with this image of this like old man on a plane. And then she just had to kind of like trust in him. She had this great line that she said to me when I was talking to her. She's like, I have to just trust that the floorboards of the story that is coming to me are sound and I can just walk through the book as I'm writing. And that was kind of how it came together for her.

24:10Parul Sehgal: I have a slight pivot, which is we're talking about the floorboards of the story. We're talking about how she brings us into this idea of someone dying. This book really seems to be connecting with a lot of readers. a lot of readers who talk about her portrait of someone in decline, of dementia, about how she kind of gives someone like David space and kind of sinks you into the emotion of it all. How did you grapple with, how did you think of the emotion? And why do you think this is resonating with so many people?

24:49Emma Cline: I'll say something about how she brings emotion in, because I think the book very deliberately doesn't start in an emotional register. We've talked about that neutral impersonality of the airplane and all of this attention to the environment and its details from the plexiglass of the airplane window to the little chocolate-covered figs that are nestled in their box on the airplane table, all these surfaces, and I could see a reader kind of saying, what's up with all of this sort of luxury class detail, but it's because only gradually, and I think this takes so much confidence, does she tip us beyond the surfaces to what lies beneath.

25:32Emma Cline: I mean, everything is a reflection of this man who's conducted himself on the surface. And only halfway through the book do we start to see the deep emotion underneath, beneath the irony, when we get into a recollection of his honeymoon in London. So moving. So he recalls being in London, which is the first stop on this trip, ultimately, to Switzerland. He and his wife didn't know how to talk to each other. There was so much silence between them that they made a game.

25:59Parul Sehgal: For me, this gets at why I think this is connecting with so many people and why I loved the book. One of the things that really stood out to me is not necessarily the idea of David on his way to die, but there's a sense of profound alienation. David is almost like a living ghost on this journey because he this is a great way to put it he knows that he is about to do dignitas and die but he's not told really anyone else other than his assistant and so it's a huge tell he has he

26:30Emma Cline: can't tell anyone about the most important decision of his life yeah but the effect of that is that he

26:36Parul Sehgal: feels so separated from everything he seems so the word yeah alienated is the thing that keeps coming up. And that feeling, whether you are dealing with Alzheimer's or dementia, whether you're at the end of your life, the middle of your life, the beginning of life, is something that I feel I think is so universal. We all feel sometimes a part of and yet without. And she taps into that in this very freighted, beautiful way.

27:04Gregory Cowles: I think also another thing that I found interesting in talking to Emma about the book is that one of the like germs for the idea was actually that she had read, I think one, maybe a few books by people who are caregivers for someone with Alzheimer's or memory loss and coming into the experience that way. And I think that is both, sadly, something that a lot of people have personal experience with having someone in their life who has gone through some sort of experience, some sort of dementia or memory loss. And so this idea of trying, I feel like so often it's like the person that you know and love kind of disappears into this wilderness that you cannot access.

27:37Gregory Cowles: And so the idea of this book being something that could help you understand or at least trying to imagine what it feels like to be in that territory and then to also be written in this totally propulsive way where you get sucked into the story and at least for me like I couldn't couldn't put it down like I think that is a really

27:56Parul Sehgal: kind of magic combo totally that's a beautiful and poignant note and I want to dig in more but first I think we should take a quick break

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29:49Parul Sehgal: And we're back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm with Emily Aiken and Jennifer Harlan, and we're talking about Switzy by Emma Klein. Before we return to our conversation, though, I want to share some thoughts from our book club community online. We have up an article headlined, Book Club, Read Switzy by Emma Klein with the book review. We've been collecting reader observations about the book in the comments section there, and here are a few thoughts I wanted to share. Daniel from Berkeley wrote, I've read and loved all of Mrs. Klein's books. With Switzy, she has elevated her writing to an exponential level.

30:27Parul Sehgal: Virtually every sentence, every paragraph has brilliance in it. One of the big conversations about the book was the portrait of dementia and decline. Readers are divided. Some people believed the portrait of dementia, and others don't think that David would have qualified for this procedure that he's about to do. Marcia from Portland wrote, As the widow of a man who chose to end his life in Switzerland due to dementia, I have very mixed feelings about Switzy. I found the novel to be very well written, but extremely ill-informed. Given the degree of cognitive decline that David has, he would not have qualified for an assisted death at any of the Swiss clinics.

31:07Parul Sehgal: Constance from Colorado said something similar. She said, I'm a nurse and a longtime advocate of assisted dying. I know that the laws in Switzerland require that people have decisional capacity. David's dementia seemed to have progressed beyond the point of him meeting that standard. Others, though, just got swept up in the spell of David and his story. Juliana from Portland, Oregon wrote, The book weaves through the intimate journey of a man's dignity to choose. And then, one last one that I just wanted to read. Aubrey from Toledo, Ohio writes, I'm in love with a work of fiction that connects humanity at such an animalistic, visceral level.

31:52Parul Sehgal: Regardless of your personal opinions toward David or his choices, Klein guides readers through the raw emotions that makes us human. So those are just a few comments. Please keep up the conversation. But now, back to our conversation in the studio. I think we should pivot to spoilers shortly. But before we do, I'm curious, do you have any last things you want to say to our spoiler-free friends? Anything that you want people generally to know about the book?

32:18Gregory Cowles: I think we've sort of talked about the like emotional and kind of intellectual and stylistic journey but something I think I also really enjoyed about this is how the like physical details of the world that Emma brings in she is so good at like in just a few phrases capturing something that is so evocative like the the tray of chocolate covered figs that Cody presents. I'm practically salivating. To David on the plane that looks so I was going to say unappetizing.

32:48Emma Cline: I wanted to eat almost all the food in this book.

32:50Gregory Cowles: And there is a lot of it. And there's so many, yeah, just really striking physical artifacts or moments that stick with me. I think a lot about also the poor young secretary at his company. He has this line about how Christmas presents should always flow from like the top down. But she didn't realize that. And so she presents him this grocery star bottle of wine with a bow on it in this trembling voice says, Merry Christmas. And then when he has this realization that that young secretary is probably like 60 years old now, there's all these like, it's only a couple sentences, a tiny image, and yet they say so much.

33:26Parul Sehgal: Yeah. And what you just said, though, also made me think of there's a generosity in this book. Maybe David wasn't generous in his life. And in fact, I think there are teasers that he was not. But as he's looking back, there's a warmness and a generosity of like, oh, I get it now. This is what that person was trying to do. I don't know if he, I don't remember if he scoffed at the wine then, but like now he's looking back with such an open heart to it, which is really moving to read.

33:56Emma Cline: I love that you use that phrase, MJ, because I think that's what this book is about, is that the kind of almost tragic, poignant irony of a man at the end of his life flying to his ultimate destination at the moment when he's becoming most open to life. he's a man who's only half lived a ghost as you say and yet the openness of his heart it's beginning it's happening throughout this journey and you're on it with him as a reader not to make this sound

34:24Parul Sehgal: too much like uh it's a wonderful life or tuesdays with maurie which also is a movie that david would

34:30Gregory Cowles: have watched as a child and would have informative there's a beauty and a poignance to the story and yet in a way that i also want to be clear to readers like it's not it is never cheesy it's so well calibrated. Like it gives you like just enough of that, but it never goes over the top.

34:47Parul Sehgal: What about you, Emily? Anything you want to say to our spoiler free friends? Yes.

34:51Emma Cline: I've already mentioned all the food imagery that really stuck with me that she's just brilliant at depicting on the page. But I wanted to read you guys a description. This is just a room service order in the hotel in London where David ends up because one thing I think she's always doing is not although we're describing surfaces they always have another level of meaning like the empty puffer packages in david's apartment are kind of like what's happening to his brain i just when i read this if you'll indulge me a room service cart draped in a tablecloth a little vase with a pink rose baby pink the silver dome with its center hole covered the plate when he lifted it, there was a soggy exhale, a hamburger underneath still warm, a little dish of acid limp gherkins, the flat pat of burger underneath the seeded bun, the dish of spinach in a wet, dark tangle.

35:43Emma Cline: Suddenly I realized that too is David's brain. Okay. I know this sounds far-fetched. The soggy exhale, the limp burger still warm. He's still with us. He's been playing with this idea of tangles, which is, of course, part of the Alzheimer's features of brains that get tangles. So we've been introduced to that word. Amyloid plaques, he has a funny name for it. He calls them Amy Lloyd.

36:07Gregory Cowles: We haven't even talked about the wordplay. There's so many fun versions of the Amy Lloyd. And there's the woman at Dignitas whose name is Anna Gould, I think, but he calls her ghoul in his head.

36:19Emma Cline: And that's his coping strategy is to kind of make a kind of joke to himself. but this is what she's always doing so nothing is just a gratuitous description it's always serving sort of the larger themes of the book and this just impressed the hell out of me

36:35Parul Sehgal: oh i love that and i love the quote i love bringing in a passage but on that note should we pivot to spoilers i feel like it's looming it's time it's time so anyone who doesn't want spoilers now is your break

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38:28Parul Sehgal: And we're diving in. We're digging in. I'm going to walk us through what happens. Please do. So David is on this multi-city trip throughout Europe as he's saying goodbye to people in his life. And there are two people who loom large in his brain. One is his daughter. And the other is this childhood friend, Tom, who he hurt and really betrayed in school and it's haunted him for the rest of his life. So he tries to set up this meeting with Tom and there's some scheduling snafus and like you can tell that Tom is a little bit hesitant to meet up with David. But it finally does happen and it happens in this pretty inglorious way.

39:08Parul Sehgal: He's not allowed inside the house. He's able to come and sit in the back of a car that Tom is being driven around.

39:16Gregory Cowles: No, I think David stays in his car and Tom comes out and sits in the backseat with him.

39:22Parul Sehgal: But there's definitely like a forced distance where he's like, you're not welcome in. And David really wants to have this heartfelt, not even a reunion, but he wants to settle things up. He wants to apologize. I think he wants absolution. He wants a sense of finality with this relationship. And you realize Tom is like, I... We're good, man. I don't want to be here.

39:43Gregory Cowles: Is there something so heartbreaking about you? Like this relationship, which was not just a friendship, but seems to have had a romantic component to it also. And then that then ended in this horrible incident of bullying where David sides with the rest of the boys at this prep school is in again in this sort of like passive go along mode that he's kind of lived his life in. This is all loomed so large for him. and when you meet Tom, it becomes clear to the reader much more quickly, I think, than it ever does to David that this does not hold the same significance for him.

40:23Parul Sehgal: Do you think it's that it didn't hold the same significance or that Tom had so greatly written off David and he's like, I don't want to forgive you. I think we should emphasize

40:32Emma Cline: just how brutal what was done to Tom by the rest of the classmates, including David. So Tom was really a social outcast and you get the sense it was partly because he was smarter than the other kids and he wasn't a conformist he was actually a cool and interesting young man who knew how to talk to the teachers and have tea with the professors and they take him into the woods and do terrible things to him scare the hell out of him and leave him there and david goes along with this i think also critically

41:00Gregory Cowles: tom also doesn't come from the same kind of privileged background as the other boys at the school and so that's another way in which he is an outsider that is one thing that happens he sees

41:09Parul Sehgal: Tom. He also sees his daughter, I think, yeah, first in London. And he doesn't tell his daughter that he's doing Dignitas. He just wants to like...

41:18Gregory Cowles: Or even that he has Alzheimer's. He's kept the entire thing a secret from her.

41:21Emma Cline: So his daughter really does not know him, nor he, her. And this is like the most tragic recurring leitmotif of this book. He doesn't know his wife. They're divorced.

41:31Parul Sehgal: And that's been part of the regret in his life, which is he was so focused on his career that he let his family fall by the wayside. And so he wants to have some connection with his daughter before he ends his life. He has dinner with his daughter and then meets up with her again at her house, leaves his phone, and so he has to go back unexpectedly. And while he comes back, he sees that his daughter is having an affair with a woman and that she has this secret life. And he is seeing this, clocking all of this, but doesn't, again, share that he is ending his own life. Then he goes to the Dignitas facility and he starts undergoing the procedure.

42:08Parul Sehgal: This is not a He walks into the building and then they shut the door and the novel ends. Like it kind of walks you through.

42:13Gregory Cowles: No, it really walks you through step by step.

42:15Parul Sehgal: Step by step what that's like. And then I just want to read the last paragraph.

42:19Emma Cline: Oh, it's so beautiful, MJ. It's so beautiful. Such, she really lands this ending, listeners.

42:25Parul Sehgal: Because he meets with the nurse, checks in, makes sure he is still eligible to do this, that he still wants to do it. She gives him the two pills that he'll need to take and some chocolate. and she's like, in your own time, we'll be here. We'll do this for you. You do what you need to do. And you're sitting with David as he's thinking. And then the last few lines are, the tears ran down his face, but they weren't from sadness. Here, at the end, there had been no need to strain after all. It contained its own meaning. He sent this message out into the vibrating air, a message to join the others.

42:59Parul Sehgal: I'm holding out my hand. That's the end of the book. My question - That's so beautiful. So beautiful. I'm getting like chills. I am getting chills too.

43:08Emma Cline: I mean, the poignancy of this man who wants to communicate. Yeah. And wants to connect. Wants to connect and who never did.

43:15Parul Sehgal: And he's holding out his hand.

43:16Emma Cline: And he's holding out his open hand, like his open heart.

43:20Parul Sehgal: My question to the room is, what did you make of the ending? What did you make of the final plot points? Where the book takes us? What did you think? Emily, you're shaking your head in lost in thought.

43:30Emma Cline: It's impeccably well handled. I didn't know how this book would end. I didn't know how she could conceivably walk us through a medically assisted suicide. And she does it with just the right amount of detail and the right amount of white space. It's perfect.

43:46Parul Sehgal: Yeah. What about you, Jen?

43:47Gregory Cowles: Yeah, I was completely moved by it. And I think also the contrast between the meeting with his daughter and then the second time with his daughter and his grandson, who was also, who's like nine or 10 years old, I think. where there's so much that David is not saying to them and you see this disconnect. And then the contrast between that and the conversation with Tom, who is the first person we've seen David meet where he tells him everything. He tells him what's happening. He tells him why he is in, he has come to Switzerland. And so it is this kind of act of reaching out his hand. And there's a lot of lines about Tom squirming, Tom hesitating, and he just, this David has kind of built this moment up in his head as it's going to be this big like moment of catharsis and then he will be ready that's like the last bit of his earthly business that he will handle and move on and then it just is it I don't think there's any way it could have lived up to the kind of weight that he had given it in his head but then at the same time there's also this really beautiful kind of stripping away and clarity that David gets in the last few days as he is, you know, starting to realize, wow, all of those things that I cared about that I thought were so important in the day-to-day of my life actually don't matter much at all.

45:06Gregory Cowles: There's a paragraph from the scene with Tom that I was completely bolted over by. So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to read that one. Yes, please. He, yeah, has just told, he's just connected with Tom. They're sitting in the back of the car and David thinks to himself, our lives were so little, our little human lives, but there was always this song in the background, this melody, and you'd start to hear it more clearly when the end was near. You realized it had always been there. Whatever foolish things they'd done, not done, everything crumbled away. He had forgotten how to tie his shoes. Soon he would leave even his own name behind.

45:43Gregory Cowles: Was it to make space for other knowledge, the truer things? He had loved him once. That was in the song too.

45:50Parul Sehgal: I'm just like...

45:52Emma Cline: there's a really beautiful echo too of his relationship with tom at the very end when he's not alone when he dies he's holding cody's hand and cody of course is the boy and you just get it's very lightly done but it's just there's this evocation of the boys who whose hand he did once hold which was tom yeah as he's going out and i just thought that

46:15Parul Sehgal: was i found the ending breathtaking yeah the scene with tom in the car is i think my favorite scene of the book partially because it is so messy it's so uncomfortable and i was reading it and i was like isn't that how life is right there never are neat tidy answers there are only the answers that we can glean that the closure that we can bring ourselves from what we've encountered we can't demand someone respond to us in a certain way. And that's what that scene captured for me. David wants and needs so much from Tom, but Tom is on another journey. And Tom says, I will give you a few minutes of my time in the back of this car.

46:59Parul Sehgal: And here's what I can give you. Here's what I want to give you. And then I'm going back to my home and my life and my story.

47:07Emma Cline: And the gift that David has decided to give to him, which was originally for his son, his grandson is then dropped through the mail slot because the door is shut. And that also becomes this kind of unavoidable symbol of the door really is shut.

47:21Parul Sehgal: But it's all so messy. It's all so awkward. It's in a realistic way. I loved it.

47:30Gregory Cowles: I think there's also something really beautiful about how David kind of, even though he is unsatisfied in the moment, I think in the final moments of his life and of the book realizes that it is not like the satisfaction or the like the catharsis the closure it doesn't come from Tom responding to him in a certain way but that just reaching out his hand and saying making that gesture and saying what he being honest about himself and what's going on with him like that is that's all he can control and that is you do get this sense of self acceptance yeah all my flaws here I am with my hands open.

48:08Emma Cline: to the universe i'll probably start to cry so it is no i i cried when i read the book and actually

48:15Gregory Cowles: it's like this is i put this is in the story that we wrote or i wrote about the audiobook um so it's not like a spoiler now but when they were recording the audiobook so robert petkoff who reads the audiobook his father had advanced dementia and died from it a few years ago so he was bringing i feel like so much of this book is about like the worlds that we all carry within and with ourselves and that was part of the world that he was bringing to this recording and the first time that he tried to read that last line he's like a pro he's done hundreds and hundreds of audiobooks and his voice broke on the last line because the emotion like overwhelmed him and they ended up having to do three takes i think of that last line i think it's appropriate for his voice to yeah i think the one that it was interesting they did the first one where he like couldn't get through the line because he was so emotional and then they tried one that was really that was more sort of like drawing and pulled back and more neutral and then one that like had that emotion but where he was able to get every word out and that's the one that made it into the final recording can i just say this is hard to do death is such a universal experience death has been

49:22Parul Sehgal: written about so much in literature to write about death in a way that feels genuinely emotional without being over the top, without being too saccharine, which actually pierces us, is a hard thing to achieve. And I think frequently there's idea that a book is good or it's emotional. A book plays with your heartstrings or it's well-crafted. And I don't think that's true. And I think this book is a prime example that the two can work together in concert and become transcendent. It's hard to achieve what she has done here. And I think it takes a tremendous amount of intent

50:01Gregory Cowles: and skill and yeah I really really like she took a big swing which is like a gamble that doesn't always pay off I think sometimes we find books that have like really ambitious premises or trying to do something really exciting and creative with structure and it just doesn't quite work and with this book I feel like she took a really big swing she hit a home run it like I think There's a consensus here, folks.

50:28Emma Cline: I think we're saying that this is a stunning novel.

50:31Parul Sehgal: Well, on that note, let's pivot to some book recommendations. I want to know, what would you recommend readers pick up after reading Switzy? This can be for whatever reason. Maybe it is another end-of-life novel. Maybe it's another novel with stream-of-conscious prose. Maybe it's—who knows? I defer to you. But I just want to know, what would you recommend readers pick up next? I'm going to start with you first, Emily.

50:54Emma Cline: Okay, a couple of books. The one that came to mind a lot while I was reading this book was a separate piece by John Knowles, the 1959 classic novel about a man returning to his prep school and reliving this shameful episode from his past about his role in injuring a classmate who was also a close friend. So it too is a beautiful lyrical novel about grief and guilt.

51:20Parul Sehgal: I haven't read this.

51:20Gregory Cowles: and I read it as a freshman in high school and remember not loving it. I think I was like too young to really appreciate it. And this is making me think I should go back and revisit it as a fully fledged adult.

51:32Parul Sehgal: Well, we have one endorsement and one person says, I'm convinced I'm going to go read it.

51:38Gregory Cowles: Awesome.

51:38Parul Sehgal: What about you, Jen? Do you have?

51:40Gregory Cowles: I have a few. One book that I thought a lot about while reading this is one that will be familiar to readers of this podcast, which is Aetna by Paul

51:48Parul Sehgal: Oh, last month.

51:49Gregory Cowles: Which, yeah, similarly, I feel like there is a, it is also a book about someone who has been through a difficult experience and is in a difficult mental state. In that case, that someone is a dog. And on a journey. It is about, yes, it is about a journey to some sort of unknown final destination. And also I think that what I found so striking about that book is how evocative and all of these tiny little sensory moments that build like the texture of the world. And also you have a character who is moving through the world with a limited, with a very particular perspective and sort of limited understanding of what's happening in the realm of like the humans.

52:26Gregory Cowles: And I feel like David similarly is moving through the world with a disconnected and limited understanding of what the grownups and people around him are doing. And yet what you are left with is kind of the sensory input.

52:39Parul Sehgal: I do have to clarify, as someone who chose both books for book club, I did not consciously realize that connection. I was like, we just did a book about a dog going through war. Let's do something totally different. And I chose something very similar.

52:52Gregory Cowles: The other two things I thought about were Flesh by David Soloy, which is a book which is similarly kind of about a man who is a bit of a passive passenger in his life. perhaps to even more of an extent than David is. And this idea of someone who's being kind of born along by events that are happening around and to him and who has real difficulty accessing his own emotions and forming real connections with people. And that also has a really moving ending. And then the last thing I'll mention is actually an essay or a couple essays, which is Nora Ephron, One, What I Will Miss and What I Won't Miss, which are two lists that she made as she was, unbeknownst to most people in her life, nearing the end of her life, she'd been diagnosed with, I think, cancer.

53:43Gregory Cowles: Made a list of all of the beautiful everyday things from life that she would miss and things that she would not miss. It is a beautiful, beautiful read to give you a little taste. things that she would not miss included dry skin bad dinners like the one we went to last night email and that bras funerals and then what i will miss my kids nick spring fall waffles the concept of waffles bacon a walk in the park the idea of a walk in the park the park shakespeare in the park And it goes on from there. And again, I think this idea of like the tiny, maybe overlooked moments or the like detritus that makes up a life.

54:28Emma Cline: Should I do one more then? Yeah.

54:29Gregory Cowles: Sorry, I got two excited. Because I do have one more, one issue.

54:32Parul Sehgal: This is a pro-recommendation podcast. The more books that you want to recommend, the better.

54:37Gregory Cowles: And I'll just say the Nora Ephron essays, if you want to find them, are in I Remember Nothing, which is one of her essay collections. Which is also weirdly appropriate for this book.

54:47Emma Cline: Yeah, now that you think about it. The other novel that came to mind while I was reading Switzy was Atonement by Ian McEwen, which I think probably is his best novel. And it was made into a famous movie with Keira Knightley and Saoirse Ronan. James McAvoy. And James McAvoy. It is also a novel about guilt and the desire to make amends. And the protagonist, played by Saoirse Ronan, whose deceptions have ruined at least one life, is revealed at the end of the book to be suffering from dementia. And so there are just a lot of interesting resonances with Switzi.

55:26Gregory Cowles: I love that. I wouldn't have thought of that. But it totally does have a lot of resonances with this one. What about you, MJ?

55:34Parul Sehgal: I have a few. The first book that came to mind is one of my all-time faves, and that's Tinkers by Paul Harding.

55:40Gregory Cowles: I love that book.

55:42Parul Sehgal: It is about a man who is on his deathbed, and as he's dying, he's thinking about his relationship with his father. And then you get the father story, and then that father starts thinking about his relationship with his father, and you get his story. paul hurting though has a an ability to write the quiet calamitous hush of life that is on full display and tinkers it is so good and poetic and there's this line where one of the characters just says haven't we had a wonderful life together and it's so moving i first heard about this book i want to give this is a long overdue shout out by the way i first heard of this book through this podcast called The Literary Disco, which ran years and years and years ago.

56:29Parul Sehgal: I was listening to this show more than a decade ago, and they mentioned this book, and I picked it up because of that. And they mentioned that line, too. And I've just absorbed it. So I wanted to give credit where credit is to. Shout out Literary Disco. I know. The podcast is no longer, but it was one of my... R.I.P. for Literary Disco. So I wanted to mention that. A book that came up in this conversation I hadn't thought of until listening to us, listening to you to chat is Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Oh, totally. That's a book also talk about distance alienation. But the way that book focuses on these specific beautiful details and textures of life, it's an ode to living in a way that Twitzy is.

57:10Parul Sehgal: Twitzy is about someone dying, but it's an ode to being alive. And about human

57:13Gregory Cowles: connection. And human connection.

57:15Parul Sehgal: So Orbital.

57:16Gregory Cowles: And flying through space.

57:19Parul Sehgal: they're on a uh on a space station different altitude but same um then i thought of small rain by garth greenwell who is another fave of mine his book small rain is about someone who has this tremendous at first mysterious illness he doesn't know what's going on he just knows his body is in pain and he's in the hospital and it's covid and he's thinking about his life but also like what it means to be ill that leads me to i'm gonna make it a bit on this podcast to mention virginia wolf as much as i possibly can i'm here for it she has this essay called on being ill which she's asking why don't novelists write about illness more and she does make a distinction that like matters of the mind do seem to come up i don't know how she'd feel about if writing about dementia fits into what she's talking about it is an illness but it's also a matter of mind but also physiological, all this stuff.

58:14Gregory Cowles: It has both mental and physical symptoms. Exactly.

58:17Parul Sehgal: But like the idea of, if you want to hear someone very smart write and think about illness as a literary concept, as a literary preoccupation, read Virginia Woolf. And then, and this is my last one, is read Hermione Hobby's essay in The New Yorker recently. I was going to mention that. Yeah, you take it away then.

58:37Emma Cline: No, about this literature of illness. And she's someone who has struggled herself with chronic fatigue. I think. And so she talks about Virginia Woolf and a little host.

58:47Parul Sehgal: It turns out it's the centennial of that essay. Oh, it is? Oh, fantastic. There you go. So those are my recommendations. And on that note, Jen, Emily, thank you so much.

58:57Gregory Cowles: Thank you, MJ.

58:58Parul Sehgal: This is a heavy book, but a delightful conversation.

59:00Gregory Cowles: So delightful. I love spending this tiny crumb of my life with you all.

59:06Parul Sehgal: The feelings mutual.

59:07Gregory Cowles: Totally.

59:08Parul Sehgal: I want to say thank you to everyone who read with us this month as well. Again, please keep up the conversation. We have an article up online titled Book Club Reads Switzy by Emma Klein with The Book Review. Continue the conversation there. And now is the time to reveal our November book. Drumroll, please. Drumroll. In November, The Book Review Book Club will be reading The Calamity Club by Katherine Stockett. Wow. This is a, it's a long, but I promise it goes so fast. It's like 700 pages, but you're in for it. I could not put that book down. Endorsement here. It's a historical novel about the intertwining storylines between two strivers in Mississippi.

59:48Parul Sehgal: And I don't want to say more than that. Go check it out. We'll be talking about it.

59:51Gregory Cowles: Two remarkable young women. It's rollicking fun.

59:55Parul Sehgal: It really is. We hope you'll read with us. Up Online is an article headlined book club. Read The Calamity Club by Catherine Stockett with The Book Review. We're inviting readers to leave their thoughts about the book there. and we will be talking about the book on the Book Review Podcast episode that airs on November 27th. We hope you'll join us, and in the meantime, happy reading.

1:00:14Gregory Cowles: Happy reading.

1:00:19Emma Cline: Mont Blanc invites you to pause, to reflect, to write. What does it mean to write? A note, a scribble, a novel. It doesn't matter what you write, just that you do. because when pen meets paper, we connect with ourselves and the world around us. Montblanc writing instruments like the Meisterstück are crafted for the words that matter. Montblanc, let's write. Find your perfect writing companion at montblanc.com.