SWITZY, Emma Cline's latest and a Booker-longlisted smack in the face

SWITZY
EMMA CLINE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Shortlist will be announced on September 22.

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man’s last pilgrimage, from the New York Times best selling author of The Girls and The Guest.

A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.

A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.

This is what David Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.

His final destination is Zurich.

David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.

As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

And maybe it made sense that this task proved so difficult, that the attempt to write the letter only underscored the necessity of the letter: things really had become unmanage-able. Other words for it: unbearable; meaning-less.

Disconcerting, this mental ice floe, populated only by David, floating off into the polar darkness. He was some-times a figure standing on the shore, watching himself float away, and sometimes he was on the ice floe, losing sight of land.

The ice floe-he had tried to write about that. In the letter.

In his strange new child's handwriting, these fat, scratched-out blocks.

The ice floe. The white room in the brain. How he knew when he was smiling and it was an error.

This dark hour, this loneliness.

Fear which lacked a shape. A dark, crumpled coat thrown carelessly into the corner of an unfamiliar room.

It's not the creeping horror of the smartphone-reading generation's inability to see the meaning-carrying blocks of text I still call paragraphs this time, it's the unmooring, the complexification of a dementia-raddled mind that has these single-line statements progressing down the page exactly as David's mind progresses down the legibility scale. He can parse less and less information, understand fewer and fewer ideas and concepts as his mind decouples meaning and experience.

A life lived amid the intense and complicated whirl of global finance. A life lived without awareness of what he was undervaluing, like most of us lead. A life that, now that he's losing his Self to the unraveling of dementia, he's decided to end...seemingly without reference to anyone else, a final act of solipsistic capitalism as there are no other stakeholders left in his world.

An uncomfortable indictment of the entirety of the life he's choosing to end.

It's a story I read in fits and starts because I kept feeling the need to step away from David so I could (re)gain perspective on him; is he, was he, only ever a monster or has he lost the parts of his self-constructed identity that were warm and inviting and needing and needed to the ravages now making him feel the need to leave his world?

I never found an answer. I wonder if he did, and so disliked what he found that assisted dying sounded like a way out of the emotional reckoning that is the end of life.

It felt to me that it would be well within his character to choose that last for those selfish reasons. I support his decision, no matter how he arrived at it, because he like all of us deserves to choose what kind of ending he gets. But wow...to leave it until you've decided you're going to die to make the amends you should have made long ago?

So very solipsistic, fearful, cowardly, and typical.

A fascinating story richly deserving a place in the Booker Prize conversation for this year. Also deserving of praise for contributing to multiple societal conversations we very, very badly need to have.

OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel, masculinity's vast void after destruction

OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel
SINAN ANTOON
Other Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebbok, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this achingly beautiful novel of trauma, memory, and identity, two Iraqi men struggle to start a new life in the US after the Gulf War.

Sami, a retired doctor, lives with his son and grandchildren in Brooklyn. As he tries to navigate this new city, it becomes increasingly clear he is losing his memory due to dementia. Every day he sinks deeper into old memories of a life in Iraq before the war.

Omar arrived in the US with no family. He has run away from Iraq with a fake identity. As a deserter, he was punished by having an ear cut off. In Baghdad, this is an unmissable mark of shame. Omar works menial jobs, creates a new identity—comically passing as Puerto Rican—and dreams of reconstructive surgery to get his ear, and his dignity, back.

Their stories converge powerfully when it becomes clear they were connected in Iraq at a moment that was pivotal for them both. Deftly exploring the aftermath of war and relocation, Of Loss and Lavender creates a moving portrait of life in exile.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A novel of displacement. A story of male identity that, in centering differing...often competing...cultural notions of masculinity, shines a klieg light into the endless void at men's cores left by their "failures," inabilities, unwillingness to live measured by that toxic measure.

What Author Antoon did by bringing these oddly assorted immigrants to the US was subtle, clever, and tendentious. Omar is a chancer. He's blagged his way into and out of trouble since...well, who knows, we're not vouchsafed his whole life's story but I'd bet my very own United States dollars that he's been behaving this way his whole life. Omar is running even when he stands still, never at rest because rest is the point when "They" can get you in their sights to pin you in your place, the one "They" have decided you belong.

Sami's never run in his life. Towards or away from a goal or a problem, he's been steady. His aging mind has fractured from the weight of his memories. He's not agile, he's strong. Strength, unlike agility, breaks when overextended. He tries to comprehend Brooklyn, not an easy task for the native from the US, and fails. In his failure to become a Brooklynite, Sami becomes the dependent he was always responsible for, the helpless and confused neophyte he always guided...the not-powerful responsibilty in place of a lifetime as the powerful protector. Wandering in his memories he needs to build his identity Sami has no traction thanks to dementia. We meet him before the dementia robs him of enough capacity to know he's losing his battle. It is the hardest to endure of all dementia's thieveries. Sami is still Sami. Cruel is our word for this moment of struggle, outsiders who observe it; internally, no one who knows it intimately has ever told us, because they can't.

When you use these men as each others' counterpoise you get the fulcrum of the system located at masculinity. Lost, found, rejected, but "Achilles absent was Achilles still," in Homer's distillation of verity into aperçu. In bringing these wounded-by-past-lives souls to a country that shares none of their lived experiences, Author Antoon removes all the props we use to build identity from them. They have no obvious place in the cultural map they must now use to navigate Life. Omar loves this because it means he controls his narrative, he has no further need to resist the boxes he's forced to occupy because they don't exist to threaten him. It's liberation, yes, but it comes as always at a price. Belonging, the sense of purpose that it grants, is also in those boxes that confine, shape, define Omar (including his name, fictional though it is). Freedom isn't free. Never has that truth been more stark than to Omar in Brooklyn.

Living your life in translation is never easy. It is a hidden cost of Othering those not deemed "mainstream" or those who are immigrants in similar degrees. Author Antoon is an iraqi immigrant to New York, a novelist and (it says in his biography) poet who translates from (and/or to) Arabic; It shows in this very good novel. It feels like he is translating the experience of masculinity from one culture to another, like the characters are finding ways to make sense of the world that use words no longer part of their fluency. Sami's losses are structural intrinsic; Omar's are voluntary, elective; both are costly and exact significant emotional tolls on each man's journey through the maze of Brooklyn.

As a professor at New York University, Author Antoon is no doubt drawing on his own immigrant experience in the vast, bewildering social system of New York. I hope the world here has treated him with greater kindness than either of these characters received. I offer the story an incomplete fifth star because I was immersed in the flume of the story's canal, the high-pressure constriction that roils and directs but does not deliver to an end point the narrative waters. What, in the end, did Omar and Sami do as a result of occupying the same canal? They changed; but in tandem not in response to each other.

I derived a lot of pleasure from the story. I hope y'all will give it your time and treasure. I think the way each character experienced their quest after identity was so poignantly masculine, so painfully rooted in their manhood, that many women would get significant value from this male interiority.

THE DEADLY DREAMS PAGE: NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU, chasing dreams goes bad & AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT, chasing the bad dreams

AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT
JOHN VERCHER
Soho Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A harrowing and spellbinding story about family, the complications of mixed-race relationships, misplaced loyalties, and the price athletes pay to entertain—from the critically acclaimed author of Three-Fifths

Xavier "Scarecrow" Wallace, a mixed-race MMA fighter on the wrong side of thirty, is facing the fight of his life. Xavier is losing his battle with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), or pugilistic dementia—a struggle he can no longer deny. Through the fog of memory loss, migraines, and paranoia, Xavier does his best to keep in shape while he waits for the call that will reinstate him after a year-long suspension.

Until then, he watches his diet and trains every day at the Philadelphia gym owned by his cousin-cum-manager, Shot, a retired champion boxer to whom Xavier owes an unpayable debt. Xavier makes ends meet by teaching youth classes at Shot’s gym and by living rent-free in the house of his white father, whom Xavier has been forced to commit to a nursing home because of the progress of his end-stage Alzheimer’s. Dementia has revealed a shocking truth about Sam Wallace, and Xavier finally gains insight into why his Black mother left the family when Xavier was young.

As Xavier battles his aging body and his failing brain, each day is filled with challenges and setbacks. Then Xavier is offered a chance at redemption: a last-minute comeback fight in the largest MMA promotion. If he can get himself back in the game, he’ll be able to clear his name and begin to pay off Shot. But with his memory in shreds and his life crumbling around him, can Xavier hold onto the focus he needs to survive? After the Lights Go Out is a haunting, unflinching look at the aftermath of a career in MMA—as Xavier forgets everything around him, you'll want to remember every single word.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. **see content warnings**

My Review: This is one rough ride of a book. There are people whose road through life is not paved, has many potholes, throws up gravel and clouds of caliche dust as their bald-tired forty-year-old chassis bounces and shakes over to one ditch, down into another. And that is who we're with here. Xavier is not, was never, expecting a limo ride, not even waiting for a cab ride...he's still rollin' but the roll is slow and it's not getting faster.

The bad marriage he came from was made worse by its permanent poison-gift to him. His mother was Black and father white, so he knows something a lot of people don't have to: Not belonging to either side in a war isn't being neutral. That's a gift only those with a clear side, one that can't be denied, are given. He's mixed. He's mixed up, he's mixed it up in fights his whole life. No one wanted him on their team so he used what strength and speed he could find to go one-on-one with other rage-filled testosterone-poisoned Others.

Now nearing forty, he's sure he's got no future. So is everyone else but they never thought he had a present. His efforts to get one more headline bout in Mixed Martial Arts are, as we meet him, wavering in and out of existence in front of eyes that don't connect to his brain right anymore. The voices he hears clearest are the ones in his battered head, they aren't competing with tinnitus. At least they aren't the ones telling him things he doesn't want to hear...his father, foundering under Alzheimer's disease's heavy burdens, doesn't remember him but does remember how to hate, his chances to fight again, more, are steadily melting away and there's nothing else he can do to make a living.

The life of someone always on the margins is, realistically, never going to turn into a happily ever after. Xavier never once thought it would. He chooses his own adventure, like he always has, right up to the last bitter dreg from the cup.

Author Vercher tells this deeply moving, unbearably honest story in direct, immediate prose. He selects the small images...a texting app's continuation icon of dots keeping him on tenterhooks about his future, the feeling of hanging his hand out the window while driving his dad's old car bringing back the times he did the same thing as a kid...that make Xavier real. That keep him, however fleetingly, locked in to the present moment. They work very well, are sharp but still small enough to make them fit right on everyone.

What isn't quite as smooth is the passages where Xavier is learning his mother and father, very late in life from my point of view, are fully human people. What Author Vercher does to make Xavier aware of his mother's full humanity was a scene both a little long as well as underdeveloped. It needed not to feel rushed as Xavier learns Evelyn was a very different person than the mother he had. The issues around dementia were handled very well, in my experienced opinion. When Xavier realizes that disinhibition is part of the course of dementia, it rocks his world. It did not need to be played out in the over-the-top manner that it was. Honestly, the choice to make Xavier's pathology so very foregrounded wore on my patience at times. Every reader has their own crotchets...these are mine.

Perfection not being of this Earth, I can honestly say that your Yule gift cards, spent on this deep and emotionally honest journey, will not be wasted. This second novel tells me that Author Vercher is a gift to the readers who want to get into a story and come out changed.

Bravo, good sir.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU
SAM LIPSYTE
Simon & Schuster
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City.

Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.

One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack’s punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse’s outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret.

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a page-turning suspense novel that also serves as a love letter to a bygone era of New York City where young artists could still afford to chase their dreams.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU. **see content warnings**

My Review: Coming home to my era of Manhattan living in this story was a pleasure. It has Author Lipsyte's requisite snarky, biting wit. It felt like I was back in the after-hours club post-Save the Robots listening to the coke-fueled motormouthing. Oh my...I've said too much.

But it's true, this is the way it felt, and looked, and even smelled.

What I think makes this a good read, then, is its way of being in harmony with my own memories. It's an evocation of a vanished time and place. So how will it hit someone whose memories aren't like mine?

Right on the funny bone.

Later, we go get a drink at the Jew-Hater's bar.

The merry old pogromist, with his lovely shock of alabaster hair and craggy fascist visage, pours us free shots with our beers. Maybe he means to lubricate his audience.

"The Yids, they cut the penis," he says, casual, as though relaying news of an off-season baseball trade. ... "God makes people perfect. The penis, perfect. Why cut it up? Only the Yid thinks of that."

The bland face of evil, played for a few yuks...if you're going to work as this book's audience, you'll need to see that as humor. Offensive and crass and humorous.

Otherwise this isn't a story I think you'll get into. And you'll need to want to get into it...the blizzard at the end of the book needs to feel like we felt then, a suspended moment of possibility, a confusing intersection of many corners all hidden behind drifts and shockingly cold winds forcing your face away from the way you started out wanting to go. That moment in the narrator's life was one where there were many ways to go. He went too far away from the one he thought he wanted and it took a blizzard to show him where he had to be.

Author Lipsyte won't be going back to the days of wine and roses, as the old saying has it; he's fifty-four now, and this story just couldn't come from anyone not fifty-four. My viewpoint, ten years ahead of him, was different enough to make this fun trip to a time I loved familiar enough. I wouldn't have seen it from this angle but it was still speaking to me.

Over forty-five? Give this a read today. What else is that gift card for if not to try to time travel?

CARE GIVER, an inside glimpse of the steady march towards nothing that is dementia

CARE GIVER
RICHARD BLANCHARD
Livingston Press
$7.00 SALE trade paper, available now

Gordon Lish praises CARE GIVER!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Care Giver leads us through a kaleidoscope of events as a failing old man pens unmailed letters to his lost love from a nursing home bed. A caring paperboy aids the man for a passage to his promised land, and becomes the unexpected inheritor of the man’s hallowed highlands. As the boy seeks to build his own life on those gifted lands, he too is haunted by visions of a lost soul, and finally makes ready for his own deliverance in the high peaks.

This strange story unfolds as we consider the man’s letters, the boy’s writings, and the photos and clippings all found among the boy’s belongings. If you’ve ever been troubled by someone’s incurable suffering, then read Care Giver. It is at once a testament to forbidden mercies and to the power of enduring faith. For me, it rings of the utter truth.

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My Review: In the emerging literary genre of dementia fiction, this short novel stands out for its brutal, unsparing honesty of presentation. In alternating sections, too short to be chapters, Bob Brown's stream-of-consciousness narration of his deteriorating grasp on his own mind juxtaposes with the short, sibylline utterances of John Fulton, a kind-hearted and shy young paperboy who becomes the living anchor of Bob's world.

Bob writes letters, from his addled 81-year-old brain, to his long-lost love Margo Jones. The more letters he writes to her, the more we are treated to a ringside seat in the spectacle of a mind's disappearance. The mixture of times present and past is complete and the distinction, for Bob, is gone; for us, the strands of meaning are tightly twined and are mutually supportive narratives, often seeming to merge like hairs in the plaits of a braid: Tightly spaced, closely woven, touching all down their lengths, forming one constructed object and still made up of discrete parts. The book emphasizes this joined-but-separate quality of narrative with the two men's voices alternating and with the liberal use of photos throughout the book.

John, the boy who brings Bob his paper, is a shy kid of seventeen when he meets the old man. He's like all young people in that all things come back to himself in reference. He's a good man, though, because he spares moments of his life to spend with the slowly disappearing Bob. He listens. He asks questions, engages with the person before him. John straightens pillows and leaves the elder to sleep when he's been drugged and never flags in offering his precious gift of attention.

The beauty of writing this book from the PoV of the dying man and his care giver, his giver of caring beyond the physical, is wondrous. The end of the story is already known, the end is the ending...and the ending is a lovely thing. Only Bob speaks...we see the photos he cherishes enough to will them to his young best friend...we hear his letters, last ones ever, to his Margo....

This book is a lonely and frightened and confused old man's orison to the lost god of love.