A Cure for Suicide

Starred review from May 25, 2015
This dystopian novel from Ball (Silence Once Begun) is both a puzzle box and a haunting love story. In the opening pages, the reader is dropped into a future world where brainwashed and childlike adult “claimants,” cared for one-on-one by mostly female “examiners,” are being systematically resettled in bucolic villages. One examiner, Teresa, is working to rehabilitate Anders, a claimant. However, memories of his previous life are intruding into Anders’s dreams—and eventually into his new life. In the next section of the novel, a new claimant and examiner are introduced. This claimant, Martin, progresses smoothly, until he meets Hilda, a female claimant who is keenly aware that something is wrong with their world. Each section illuminates the characters and situations from the previous portions, which draws the reader into the material more effectively and heartbreakingly than a traditional structure would allow. This method also gives Ball the opportunity to play with the conventions of the dystopian genre, addressing the surprising sociological cause of his alternate reality. Befitting the intricate premise, Ball’s prose, mostly dialogue between examiners and claimants, veers from precise to obfuscating and back again, as though the novel were a film rapidly going in and out of focus. 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.

May 15, 2015
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.

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January 1, 2016

A nameless young woman, known as the examiner, enters a house where a nameless young man sleeps. His role is that of the claimant. When he awakes, he knows nothing of how to live. The examiner's task is to teach him everything from the function of a chair to how to distinguish strangers within the course of 20.5 days. In lines spare as poetry, this section of the story unfolds in hypnotic progression; readers know little more than the hapless claimant. Why is this painting important? What is behind the claimant's recurring nightmares? Is the examiner's purpose for good or evil? There are jarring hints that the claimants are "processed" over and over until they are human shells. But before readers can come to a conclusion, the entire narrative switches course. In the second part, in one long rush of words, the young man who will become the claimant is telling his story to an interlocutor, who will determine if he qualifies for a cure for suicide. In contrast to the first section, this tale is circuitous and tangled, interrupted constantly by the young man's sorrowful recriminations. The final segment brings readers back to the examiners and the original claimant. An older examiner offers an explanation of sorts in the form of a short play before the tale ends on a satisfyingly surreal note. VERDICT Teens who enjoy innovative dystopian literature, such as David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks (Random, 2014), will appreciate this dark, clever tale.-Diane Colson, Nashville Public Library, TN

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2015
The examiner is explaining what a chair is and how to use it to the claimant, a grown man who not only doesn't understand chairs but also doesn't know who he is, who she is, or where they are. The pretty instructor, who is possessed of eerie, almost robotic patience, tells her attractive, baffled student that he was once very sick and that he asked for help, which is why he is in this strangely placid village, a veritable life-size laboratory. As in his elegant, enigmatic previous novels, The Curfew (2011) and Silence Once Begun (2014), Ball imagines a spare, spooky, muffled realm of continual surveillance and absolute control. It's difficult to discern if this excessively ordered, postapocalyptic republic, in which, one infers, suicide attempts have become rampant, is tyrannical or protective. As the lessons continue, Ball slyly exposes the survival-focused aspects of human interactions, from small talk to shared meals. As fake memories are used to erase genuine experiences, a sustained and mesmerizing flashback about a tragic love affair further complicates the disquieting and profound mystery of it all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)