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A Cure for Suicide

A Novel

Author Jesse Ball
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On sale Nov 17, 2015 | 7 Hours and 48 Minutes | 9780735205765
***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.
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.
“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 strengths as a deeply questioning writer at home in fact as much as abstraction . . . There is yearning at the core of A Cure for Suicide and in that yearning is the reason for carrying on when doing so feels impossible. Balls asks whether, given the chance to 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 . . . Ball deftly explores questions with the eye of a poet and the logic of a philosopher, revealing new facets with perfect timing and acuity. At each unforeseeable turn, A Cure for Suicide is a story Ball ensures we understand and, because it is subtle and breathtaking, we are happy to be told.” —Sarah Gerard, The New York Times Book Review

“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 . . . There are echoes of the Peter Weir movie The Truman Show and the Tom McCarthy novel Remainder . . . Seeded with humor . . . Ball also weaves in romance—the sweet triumph of a resilient heart . . . Hypnotic.” —Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe

“Ball . . . craft[s] a full, satiating story . . . A rich, tragic love story . . . The heart of the claimant’s motivations—a dense kernel buried and reshaped by the Process of the Villages—is revealed, richly adorned with sensuous scenes . . . Ball is commenting on the texture of our strongest memories—jagged rocks that jut out amid the steady tide of daily life . . . An enthralling thought experiment that considers the value of memory versus the pain of grief.” —Maddie Crum, The Huffington Post
 
“Ball, also a poet, writes with a restrained specificity, his language so precise and clinical that it compounds into lyricism.” —Natalie Beach, O Magazine

“This dystopian novel from Ball is both a puzzle box and a haunting love story . . . 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 . . . 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)

“There are few things more tantalizing, more compelling, than wondering what the hell is going on… Hushed, enigmatic . . . Elegant . . . This turns out to be a love story about a penniless man and a rich, dying woman, and it’s one of the finest things Ball has ever written, a magical, gripping burst of emotional history, which interrogates the book’s ultimate subject, suicide and the desire for oblivion . . . In Ball's best and eeriest work, it gives him the power to touch deep, luminous emotions.” 
—Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune 

“The juxtaposition of the commonplace and the darkly bizarre has become something of a specialty of the author's, as has his books' skill at reflecting the ongoing struggle of the individual in a society based on conformity. In his latest novel, A Cure for Suicide, Ball hauls another of his strange-yet-familiar worlds into vibrant life.”
—Kevin Nance, Chicago Tribune 

“Its tone and soft, murky edges make me think of Margaret Atwood's Gilead — a place where it's the quiet that haunts you, the incredibly short distances between the real and the fictional… With semiotic precision… it is in the small space between the truth and the lie that Ball's dystopia festers… the precision of the language ticks along, as lulling as a clock.”
—Jason Sheehan, NPR

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

“A Cure for Suicide
, Ball’s fifth book, begins without providing any context: we’re plunked down in a tiny, unnamed town, as a woman teaches an male amnesiac how to be human again. At first the lessons are basic and literal—this is how a chair is used, here is how to greet a stranger—but they grow in difficulty and complexity… A vision of a society that flees from hurt, numbing the tormented in order to save them.”
—Joe Fassler, The Atlantic
 
“Jesse Ball is a master of dialogue . . . The book prompts a conversation about life—how we enter it, how we navigate its shoals, and how we exit it.” —Tara Sonenshine, New York Journal of Books  

“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 . . . Ball slyly exposes the survival-focused aspects of human interactions, from small talk to shared meals . . .  a tragic love affair further complicates the disquieting and profound mystery of it all.” —Booklist

“Ball’s disorienting novel takes its time revealing the scope of its philosophical concerns, but it rewards patience... Patterns emerge—the claimant has disturbing dreams and keeps meeting a woman with whom he seems to have had a relationship. When the novel unveils some of its secrets, the result is unexpectedly moving.”
The New Yorker

“The School of the Art Institute writing professor follows his well-received Silence Once Begun with this experimental tale of a man simply known as the ‘claimant,’ who, with the help of a mysterious woman, must relearn how to function in society.” —“Great Summer Reads,” Chicago Magazine

“A poet by trade, Ball understands the economy of language better than most fiction writers today. His poignant Silence Once Begun uses each word and margin with precision, so his next book promises to interest those with a penchant for brevity. [A Cure for Suicide] begins with a man who's relearning everything the way a child might, asking questions like, ‘What is a painting?’ ‘What is imagination?’ But soon, urged on by unpleasant dreams, he discovers the truth behind his state.” 
—“18 Brilliant Books You Won't Want To Miss This Summer,” The Huffington Post

“Jesse Ball's A Cure for Suicide is a novel about learning to forget the past . . . It also functions as a kind of mystery . . . a beautifully written quest for meaning that challenges assumptions about the tie between memory and the creation of meaning . . . a quiet poignancy . . . heartbreaking and hopeful . . . it is important not to let the search for answers get in the way of the constant, subtle pleasures of its language . . . devastating.”
—John Anspach, Bookslut

 “Elegant and spooky, dystopian and poetic, Jesse Ball’s follow-up to the well-reviewed Silence Once Begun follows a man known only as ‘the claimant’ as he relearns everything under the guidance of an ‘examiner,’ a woman who defines everything from the objects in their house to how he understands his existence. Then he meets another woman at a party and begins to question everything anew. A puzzle, a love story, and a tale of illness, memory, and manipulation, A Cure for Suicide promises to be a unique novel from a writer already known for his originality.” 
“Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview,” The Millions

“Jesse Ball’s fourth novel is full of disquieting ideas and probing questions… Captivating… Ball’s slippery novel stubbornly refuses to be pinned down and tagged, and to synopsize it is, in a way, to simplify its riddles and dilute its inventiveness. A Cure for Suicide skillfully stokes feelings of paranoia and persecution… 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… It possesses more than enough momentum to keep disturbing and provoking. Refreshingly unconventional, the novel sees a highly original writer take another left-field leap in a daring and rewarding direction.”
—Michael Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“With A Cure for Suicide, Ball has successfully launched an intriguing sci-fi story arc while establishing a series of thematic questions: the nature of communication, the meaning behind names and the purpose of life itself… Poignant... Ball handles his intriguing premise with subtlety and authority, marching his plot through the momentous consequences-unexpected and inherent-of a truly life-altering decision. 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?”
—Eric Swedlund, Paste Magazine 
© Joe Lieske

JESSE BALL (1978– ). Born in New York. The author of fourteen books, most recently the novel How to Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

View titles by Jesse Ball

About

***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.

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.

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 strengths as a deeply questioning writer at home in fact as much as abstraction . . . There is yearning at the core of A Cure for Suicide and in that yearning is the reason for carrying on when doing so feels impossible. Balls asks whether, given the chance to 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 . . . Ball deftly explores questions with the eye of a poet and the logic of a philosopher, revealing new facets with perfect timing and acuity. At each unforeseeable turn, A Cure for Suicide is a story Ball ensures we understand and, because it is subtle and breathtaking, we are happy to be told.” —Sarah Gerard, The New York Times Book Review

“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 . . . There are echoes of the Peter Weir movie The Truman Show and the Tom McCarthy novel Remainder . . . Seeded with humor . . . Ball also weaves in romance—the sweet triumph of a resilient heart . . . Hypnotic.” —Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe

“Ball . . . craft[s] a full, satiating story . . . A rich, tragic love story . . . The heart of the claimant’s motivations—a dense kernel buried and reshaped by the Process of the Villages—is revealed, richly adorned with sensuous scenes . . . Ball is commenting on the texture of our strongest memories—jagged rocks that jut out amid the steady tide of daily life . . . An enthralling thought experiment that considers the value of memory versus the pain of grief.” —Maddie Crum, The Huffington Post
 
“Ball, also a poet, writes with a restrained specificity, his language so precise and clinical that it compounds into lyricism.” —Natalie Beach, O Magazine

“This dystopian novel from Ball is both a puzzle box and a haunting love story . . . 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 . . . 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)

“There are few things more tantalizing, more compelling, than wondering what the hell is going on… Hushed, enigmatic . . . Elegant . . . This turns out to be a love story about a penniless man and a rich, dying woman, and it’s one of the finest things Ball has ever written, a magical, gripping burst of emotional history, which interrogates the book’s ultimate subject, suicide and the desire for oblivion . . . In Ball's best and eeriest work, it gives him the power to touch deep, luminous emotions.” 
—Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune 

“The juxtaposition of the commonplace and the darkly bizarre has become something of a specialty of the author's, as has his books' skill at reflecting the ongoing struggle of the individual in a society based on conformity. In his latest novel, A Cure for Suicide, Ball hauls another of his strange-yet-familiar worlds into vibrant life.”
—Kevin Nance, Chicago Tribune 

“Its tone and soft, murky edges make me think of Margaret Atwood's Gilead — a place where it's the quiet that haunts you, the incredibly short distances between the real and the fictional… With semiotic precision… it is in the small space between the truth and the lie that Ball's dystopia festers… the precision of the language ticks along, as lulling as a clock.”
—Jason Sheehan, NPR

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

“A Cure for Suicide
, Ball’s fifth book, begins without providing any context: we’re plunked down in a tiny, unnamed town, as a woman teaches an male amnesiac how to be human again. At first the lessons are basic and literal—this is how a chair is used, here is how to greet a stranger—but they grow in difficulty and complexity… A vision of a society that flees from hurt, numbing the tormented in order to save them.”
—Joe Fassler, The Atlantic
 
“Jesse Ball is a master of dialogue . . . The book prompts a conversation about life—how we enter it, how we navigate its shoals, and how we exit it.” —Tara Sonenshine, New York Journal of Books  

“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 . . . Ball slyly exposes the survival-focused aspects of human interactions, from small talk to shared meals . . .  a tragic love affair further complicates the disquieting and profound mystery of it all.” —Booklist

“Ball’s disorienting novel takes its time revealing the scope of its philosophical concerns, but it rewards patience... Patterns emerge—the claimant has disturbing dreams and keeps meeting a woman with whom he seems to have had a relationship. When the novel unveils some of its secrets, the result is unexpectedly moving.”
The New Yorker

“The School of the Art Institute writing professor follows his well-received Silence Once Begun with this experimental tale of a man simply known as the ‘claimant,’ who, with the help of a mysterious woman, must relearn how to function in society.” —“Great Summer Reads,” Chicago Magazine

“A poet by trade, Ball understands the economy of language better than most fiction writers today. His poignant Silence Once Begun uses each word and margin with precision, so his next book promises to interest those with a penchant for brevity. [A Cure for Suicide] begins with a man who's relearning everything the way a child might, asking questions like, ‘What is a painting?’ ‘What is imagination?’ But soon, urged on by unpleasant dreams, he discovers the truth behind his state.” 
—“18 Brilliant Books You Won't Want To Miss This Summer,” The Huffington Post

“Jesse Ball's A Cure for Suicide is a novel about learning to forget the past . . . It also functions as a kind of mystery . . . a beautifully written quest for meaning that challenges assumptions about the tie between memory and the creation of meaning . . . a quiet poignancy . . . heartbreaking and hopeful . . . it is important not to let the search for answers get in the way of the constant, subtle pleasures of its language . . . devastating.”
—John Anspach, Bookslut

 “Elegant and spooky, dystopian and poetic, Jesse Ball’s follow-up to the well-reviewed Silence Once Begun follows a man known only as ‘the claimant’ as he relearns everything under the guidance of an ‘examiner,’ a woman who defines everything from the objects in their house to how he understands his existence. Then he meets another woman at a party and begins to question everything anew. A puzzle, a love story, and a tale of illness, memory, and manipulation, A Cure for Suicide promises to be a unique novel from a writer already known for his originality.” 
“Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview,” The Millions

“Jesse Ball’s fourth novel is full of disquieting ideas and probing questions… Captivating… Ball’s slippery novel stubbornly refuses to be pinned down and tagged, and to synopsize it is, in a way, to simplify its riddles and dilute its inventiveness. A Cure for Suicide skillfully stokes feelings of paranoia and persecution… 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… It possesses more than enough momentum to keep disturbing and provoking. Refreshingly unconventional, the novel sees a highly original writer take another left-field leap in a daring and rewarding direction.”
—Michael Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“With A Cure for Suicide, Ball has successfully launched an intriguing sci-fi story arc while establishing a series of thematic questions: the nature of communication, the meaning behind names and the purpose of life itself… Poignant... Ball handles his intriguing premise with subtlety and authority, marching his plot through the momentous consequences-unexpected and inherent-of a truly life-altering decision. 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?”
—Eric Swedlund, Paste Magazine 

Author

© Joe Lieske

JESSE BALL (1978– ). Born in New York. The author of fourteen books, most recently the novel How to Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

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