A Cure for Suicide

by Jesse Ball

Overview

***LONG-LISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD***

From the author of Silence Once Begun, a beguiling new novel about a man starting over at the most basic level, and the strange woman who insinuates herself into his life and memory.

A man and a woman have moved into a small house in a small village. The woman is an “examiner,” the man, her “claimant.” The examiner is both doctor and guide, charged with teaching the claimant a series of simple functions: this is a chair, this is a fork, this is how you meet people. She makes notes in her journal about his progress: he is showing improvement yet his dreams are troubling. One day the examiner brings the claimant to a party, where he meets Hilda, a charismatic but volatile woman whose surprising assertions throw everything the claimant has learned into question. What is this village? Why is he here? And who is Hilda? A fascinating novel of love, illness, despair, and betrayal, A Cure for Suicide is the most captivating novel yet from one of our most audacious and original young writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101870136
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/21/2015
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

JESSE BALL is the author of four previous novels, including Silence Once Begun and Samedi the Deafness, and several works of verse, bestiaries, and sketchbooks. He has been named a finalist for the 2015 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and a 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Ball received an NEA creative writing fellowship for 2014 and the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, and his verse has been included in the Best American Poetry series. He gives classes on general practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Master of Fine Arts Writing program. A Cure for Suicide is long-listed for the National Book Award 2015.

Read an Excerpt

It was a good situation, thought the examiner. He appears young and strong. He had woken remarkably soon after the shot—only eighteen hours, if the report was to be believed. The examiner had been at this job long enough to know that not all information was correct.
 
In fact, she thought, often it is wrong on purpose.
 
She busied herself making some tea. How should she start with this one?
 
The usual method? Or another approach? Lately she had been favoring the original way, the first way, although she had made her career with her unusual treatments. This time, she would stick to the original method. No speech until the claimant speaks. It was a measurement of sorts. The examiner believed very fervently in measurement.
 
She set the teapot down on the table and took a pen and paper off a shelf on the wall.
 
+
 
Arrived in Gentlest Village P6.
Received claimant. He appears healthy and ready for treatment.
 
+
 
The two could be seen through any window of the house, sitting together. He would sit in one chair and she would sit in another. They would sit for long hours, practically motionless.
 
Through another, they might be seen practicing skills. The old woman would mime the donning of clothes, and help him again and again and again to perform the basic tasks. No matter how he tried, the man could not button the buttons of his shirt. He failed again and again. But, if he was failing, the expression of the old woman seemed to say: This, what we are doing, it is the hardest thing in the world. No one has ever done it. No one until you. And now it has fallen to you to try. Let us try. Let us try again.
 
One could see them practicing the use of the stairwell, a thing to which one clung with both arms, while lowering leg after leg up and down. It was used for getting to and fro—for going from the top of the house to the bottom.
 
One could see the man standing in a tub while the old woman poured water over him and scrubbed and scrubbed until he was clean. And soon, he had learned to scrub as well. Soon, he could do it by himself.
 
If one waited some days and looked through the bottom windows, a different scene might present itself. The two sat at a long table, and blocks with pictures of things were passed back and forth. Large bound sheets full of pictures were shown and shared.
 
Sometimes a task would be terribly difficult—terribly, terribly difficult, and the man would cry. He would sit down on the floor and cry. Then the old woman would sit down beside him on the floor and wait, and when he was done crying, they would try again.
 
Her patience was the heart of it. She was as patient as a person could be.
 
++
 
The house was a tall Victorian house. That meant it was nicely made, and with good proportions. The rooms had high ceilings. The windows were large and bore many panes within their cavities. The floors had long wooden boards that ran the length of each room. Many were covered with fine carpets. When a person trod on the floors, the boards creaked, and in this way the house was a little bit alive.
 
Along the stairs there were photographs. At each step there was another photograph. By walking up and down the stairs one could find a sort of history—but of what it was hard to say. There were many photographs of machines. Winged machines, wheeled machines, farm machines. There were many people with somber clothing and blurry faces. Sometimes there were many people together in one photograph, and when there were, they usually all stood facing in the same direction. How could the photographer stand in front of them—so many, and not be noticed?
 
The banister was of a swooping brown wood and felt very pleasant under the hand. One could run the hand along it, all the way down the stairs, and then one would be at the bottom. All the way from the top to the bottom.
 
The bottom of the stairs faced a long, narrow hall—and at its end a door that was never open. This door was set with colored glass of every sort. It would be a nice place to lie, to lie flat on the back in the hall and be covered with the colored light.
 
There were two paintings in this hall—one of a bird with long feathers, and another of a woman who wore clothing that made her look very much like a bird. She was angry, and her face was cruel, and she filled the area around the door with her anger.
 
Many of the windows in the house had seats in them. The seats were covered in cushions, and a person could sit there as long as they liked. Eventually, the sun might become blinding. Or, the sky would become dark. Then it would be time to go to a different place.
 
The woman who walked about in the house was very old. She was always watching everything that happened, and always listening. She was a comfort because she would be there in an instant to help, or she would wait for hours until the next time she should be there in an instant to help. She wore dark stockings of wool and no shoes. Her clothes were the same color as the walls.
 
The kitchen was the airiest room in the house. It had many windows, and they looked out on a garden full of plants. Some things from the garden would end up in the kitchen. There were many times when one could leave the kitchen happily, and one would often come into it with great happiness, too. The kitchen was the best room in the house.
 
There were many places in the house for putting things. One could put things from one place to another, and they would go back to the place they had been before. This was a sort of game. As many times as one would do it, the things would return. Even paintings that were tilted, or hairs placed under small statues.
 
The man would get up and go to the stairs at first, and he would wait there, and wait until she came and then they would go down the stairs together. Or, later, he would go down sitting, go down sitting all the way. He had a hard time making his legs and arms work like the old woman could. Whenever she wanted to do something, she did it.
 
Finally, he could go down the stairs just like her. In fact, he could go down faster than that. He would go down the stairs and the old woman would find him and they would have things to do all day and then it would be time to sleep.
 
Whenever he didn’t have things to do, the old woman found something for him to do. But when he had something to do, she was never there.
 
The man liked the pants that he wore, and there was a day when he put all the clothes on by himself and came down the stairs by himself, and worked on a thing he had decided to do by himself and ate by himself and it was not until the evening that he saw her. Then they sat on the closed porch and she lit a candle and it was a sort of celebration.
 
++
 
And on the seventieth day, the man spoke.
 
++
 
—Can I, the water.
 
The examiner sat quietly looking at the claimant. She said nothing.
 
—Can you give me the water?
 
His words were clear and distinct.
 
She picked up the pitcher of water with both hands and gravely presented it to him.
 
—Here you are, she said.
 
—Thank you, said the claimant.
 
The examiner nodded and went back to what she had been doing as if nothing remarkable at all had just happened.

Editorial Reviews

…elegant, spellbinding…With the simplicity of a fable and the drama of a psychological thriller, Ball tells a story about starting over from nothing, reconstructing life from its most basic elements. These acts of narrative deconstruction highlight his strength as a deeply questioning writer at home in fact as much as abstraction…Ball asks whether, given the chance to shed our pain and start over with the mind of a child, we would want to do so—to what extent pain informs identity, and what parts of us would remain were we to shed that pain. In the hands of a less skilled writer, these questions could be mistaken for science fiction cliché, a riff on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but Ball deftly explores questions with the eye of a poet and the logic of a philosopher, revealing new facets with perfect timing and acuity.

The New York Times Book Review - Sarah Gerard

Spellbinding . . . [Has] the simplicity of a fable and the drama of a psychological thriller.” —The New York Times Book Review  
  
“One of the finest things Ball has ever written, a magical, gripping burst of emotional history.” —Chicago Tribune 
 
“War doesn’t exist anymore, and neither do prisons, in the seemingly not-so-distant future where Jesse Ball’s magnetic, suspenseful, occasionally heart-rending fifth novel, A Cure for Suicide, unfolds…. Hypnotic.” —The Boston Globe
 
“[A Cure for Suicide’s] tone and soft, murky edges make me think of the Gilead of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale—a place where it’s the quiet that haunts you, the incredibly short distances between the real and the fictional.” —Jason Sheehan, NPR

 “Captivating. . . . Ball’s lean, clinical prose puts us in mind of Samuel Beckett, and his heady concoction of unsettling atmosphere, sterile environments and authorial obfuscations and distortions is redolent of the potent brew that powered recent dark fables from Chang-rae Lee and Howard Jacobson. . . . Refreshingly unconventional, the novel sees a highly original writer take another left-field leap in a daring and rewarding direction.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“Ball deftly explores questions with the eye of a poet and the logic of a philosopher, revealing new facets with perfect timing and acuity.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A rich, tragic love story . . . . An enthralling thought experiment that considers the value of memory versus the pain of grief.” —The Huffington Post

“The juxtaposition of the commonplace and the darkly bizarre has become something of a specialty of [Ball’s], as has his books’ skill at reflecting the ongoing struggle of the individual in a society based on conformity.” —Chicago Tribune 

“Both a puzzle box and a haunting love story . . . Whatever the source of this book’s elusive magic, it should cement Ball’s reputation as a technical innovator whose work delivers a powerful emotional impact.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Profound. . . . Ball performs the remarkable task of pruning away layers of readerly skepticism in order to find the inherent beauty of small moments.” —Flavorwire

“A vision of a society that flees from hurt, numbing the tormented in order to save them.” —The Atlantic

 “Prompts a conversation about life—how we enter it, how we navigate its shoals, and how we exit it.” —The New York Journal of Books 

“A spare, spooky, muffled realm of continual surveillance and absolute control . . . Ball slyly exposes the survival-focused aspects of human interactions, from small talk to shared meals.” —Booklist

 “Elegant and spooky, dystopian and poetic.” —The Millions

“A Cure for Suicide ponders memory, identity, love, desire and choice. The question that remains is a heavy one indeed: Would you choose to start over?” —Paste

From the Publisher

2015-04-30
A man and a woman are locked in a strange therapeutic cycle in this speculative fiction by literary experimentalist Ball (Silence Once Begun, 2014, etc.) Though he often protests that he doesn't want his books to be considered "trickery," Ball once again uses a fair amount of deception, smoke, and mirrors to draw readers into his poetically nimble but characteristically peculiar story. He borrows a bit of science fiction's flexible plausibility and a few twists from the likes of M. Night Shyamalan and sets his story in a remote village that wouldn't be out of place on AMC's recent remake of The Prisoner. A man awakens in a Victorian house in "Gentlest Village D4." He has no memory, not even of his name—the novel calls him "Claimant." A woman lives in the house; she is "the examiner," who tells him that he was very sick and nearly died. Over the course of the first section, the examiner teaches the claimant about all manner of things and records his troubling dreams. Eventually, the claimant and the examiner take on names, but once the cycle restarts and they move to a new village, they take on different names, and the claimant keeps encountering a woman in the village who stirs unfamiliar but persistent feelings in him. Ball is playing with a lot of conceptual territory here, contemplating memory, identity, and isolation, among other themes. The novel eventually pulls back the curtain on "the Process of Villages," this strange therapeutic transformation invented to allow men to start over completely with different identities. There are times it feels rushed between the spare, meticulous play going on between the claimant and the examiner and other breathless sections with unbroken waves of narrative exposition—the shift in tones can be jarring. This may be Ball's most self-contained work, but it's also one of his most fragile and one that may not hold up under focused scrutiny by a wider audience.

Kirkus Reviews