Switzy
A bold and arresting departure from Cline’s earlier work ... Though Switzy can be tender, melancholy, and even commemorative at times, it’s far from canonizing and David is no saint ... Stylistically adventurous ... Stuck with me long after I finished.
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Assured ... A significant swerve from Cline’s female- and youth-centric earlier fiction, Switzy does so much so very well, starting with its title ... So why am I not completely head over heels for Switzy? ... Maybe because I’m a weary old hand at Alzheimer’s, questioning whether these narrative lurches...are even medically possible ... Maybe it’s this character’s underdetermined, peevish-seeming dismissal of animals and music ... Maybe it’s even mannered exclamation points like that, which heavily scatter David’s darkening sky, as if to ward off the ellipses that await us all.
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Switzy is Cline’s big swing ... At times, it’s sentimental, unfolding with a sense of its own importance. It’s also odder and more buoyant than you might ... The explanation for Tom’s importance is a misstep, a lapse of authorial confidence ... She’s a stronger writer on the sentence level here, and most important, she has found a character who rewards her impulse to write in loops ... This book doesn’t try to diagnose our collective ills. What’s left is something smaller, more tense and tender.
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