A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball

The opening of Jesse Ball’s fifth novel, A Cure for Suicide, reflects both the clinical and the enigmatic overtones of the book’s title. There’s a claimant and an examiner—more simply, a patient and a nurse—brought together in the Process of Villages, essentially a series of convalescent homes in multiple identical villages, all constructed for the same purpose.
Ball pushes the reader into the disorienting action of the book’s early pages by holding back most characters’ basic facts. The claimant, unsure whether he is alive, begins a process of relearning, restarting and recovering.
The examiner goes from explaining the objects around him—“This is a chair” are the first words she speaks to him—to patiently explaining the world in simple formations: “Muscles are the way the body obeys the mind,” “One should not live in fear of explaining oneself,” “(imagination) is a tool for navigating life’s random presentation of phenomena,” and the “feeling of longing and sadness… is part of life’s balance, to give things their proper worth.”
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. Slower to recover, this time the man is named Martin and cracks appear in his world when he meets a woman who confides that she has tried to escape several times, that things are amiss, that she has experienced terrible things.