The week’s best book criticism takes on dementia, male insecurity, and a few big literary swings. Emma Alpern reviews Emma Cline’s Switzy, T.M. Brown looks at Danny McBride’s Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, and more from Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
A Booker Longlist and a Mind in Fragments
Alpern writes that Switzy is “Cline’s big swing, already longlisted for the Booker Prize.” The novel follows David, whose Alzheimer’s-inflected thoughts piece together the narrative. When he is tired, his thoughts “mumble and loop,” with song lyrics and stray words drifting in and out.
Alpern compares the book to Ben Lerner’s Transcription, this year’s other notable book about dementia. In both, memory loss reads “primarily like a language disorder.” David renames people — the liaison Anna Gould becomes Ghoul, a black-car driver is called Meatball. The prose pulls from Moby-Dick and The Sound of Music, plus a nauseous memory of the Stanley Steemer man and his toxic cleaning agent (“Suck, suck, suck”).
The result is a puzzle, but not a cutesy one.
Cline’s Loops Finally Find Their Character
Cline has long resisted tidy plots. Alpern quotes a 2020 Paris Review interview in which Cline said she resists “a neat narrative arc” and hopes instead for “resonance, or a slow circling-around of a moment or an emotion.”
Her earlier books — The Girls, about a fictionalized Manson Family, and The Guest, about a scammer in the Hamptons — had lurid set pieces but let the action go slack. In Switzy, about a man realizing “with shame, how little human contact he’s actually had,” that approach finally coheres.
David is not alone in losing his mind in the internet era. Alpern quotes the novel: “Now there were a million mental jaunts available to you in every moment, consciousness in a constant state of fracture.” Unlike Transcription or George Saunders’s Vigil, this book does not diagnose collective ills. What remains is “something smaller, more tense and tender: an old song, Cody’s watchful presence, one last wag of the eyebrows.”
McBride’s Men and Their Fatal Flaws
T.M. Brown reviews Danny McBride’s Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. The stories are not misandrist, Brown says, but they “poke fun at male woes” without being flippant or overly serious.
The standout is “The Institute of Men,” told from the perspective of Mitchie, a balding forty-two-year-old who undergoes an experimental treatment to get his hair and swagger back. It is an “if only” story — if only I were braver (“The Book Burner”), if only I were younger (“Dad’s Way”), if only I wasn’t losing my hair. Brown notes a brief echo of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 collection Men Without Women.
Envy runs through the collection. McBride told the Times‘ David Marchese in June that jealousy is “one of those flaws that says so much about someone because it shows what’s important to them and how they look at themselves and feel like they’re not complete.” McBride cranks up the volume on those resentments, revealing a new way to see the world.
A Frat-House Faulkner
McBride was born in south Georgia and moved to Virginia as a child; his stories sit between those two points. Brown describes his style as “a sort of thespian-bro argot, spiking locker-room jokes with rococo word choices like a frat-house Faulkner.”
The dialogue carries it. When Greg explains his plan to become a professional magician to friends on a fishing boat, he bristles at the suggestion he’d entertain children. “No, I won’t be doing kids’ fucking birthday parties. Jesus. I’m doing real magician stuff. Things of spectacle and scope,” he says.
Brown credits McBride with refreshing the discussion around masculine self-pity. Instead of reinforcing the idea that women are the natural antagonist, McBride “encourages guys to loosen up a bit.”
The Other Reviews
Sara Collins reviews Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World. Joy Williams reviews Lance Richardson’s True Nature. Tembe Denton-Hurst reviews Marlon James’s The Disappearers. Book Marks assembled the full set of reviews this week.
- KEY FACTS BOX
- Switzy: longlisted for the Booker Prize
- Men Without Women: Hemingway’s 1927 short story collection
- McBride’s interview with David Marchese: published in June
- Mitchie’s age in “The Institute of Men”: forty-two
How the Novels Compare
| Novel | Author | Central Subject | What the Critics Say |
|---|---|---|---|
| Switzy | Emma Cline | An aging man with Alzheimer’s | A “big swing” that coheres through looping narrative; does not try to diagnose collective ills |
| Thrilling Tales of Modern Men | Danny McBride | Male insecurity and envy | Satire that pokes fun without misogyny |
| Transcription | Ben Lerner | Dementia | Reads memory loss as a language disorder |
| Vigil | George Saunders | A rich old man heading to the underworld | One of the books Switzy is unlike in its refusal to diagnose collective ills |
The full reviews are available through Book Marks. Alpern’s closing image for Switzy — “one last wag of the eyebrows” — suggests a novel that ends not with a diagnosis but with a gesture.
Source: lithub.com
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