No way you’re not going to speed through Emma Cline’s spellbinding new novel, The Guest – an eerie psychological thriller set in The Hamptons that’s told from the point of view of a flawed, fascinating 22-year-old protagonist, Alex, whose last name no one knows, including the reader. Her confident use of sex to get money, her thefts from people and stores, her lies, her obsession with risky swimming, “conditioning herself,” as she says, “to wait out the fear of possibly dying” -- her skewed optimism-- reveal her to be a manipulating, psychopathic charmer, but also an accurate and astute observer, especially of the privileged moneyed class on The East End. They have it coming, and why shouldn’t it come to her? Cline gets the reader to feel some sympathy for Alex, despite her narcissistic, if not criminal, behavior. She’s particularly good with children because she sees how much like them she is. As Cline says, “Tolerated but not needed, not powerful.”
The writing is impressive, Cline often having one word or a simple comparison reflect state of mind. For example, Alex sees hydrangeas as “white flowers with the slightest tint of yellow. . . the glassy leaves with their serrated edges, like little animal teeth.”
The author also has a good ear for the way different social classes and ages talk, dress, eat, and cover up their deficiencies as partners, parents, and progeny. Though Alex’s destructiveness goes hand in hand with her desperation, she is a mystery to others and to the reader because the past is of no consequence to her. All that is known is that she comes from a hometown with a “negative context,” a place where “the arc of your life was already determined, its limits already visible.” And repellent.
Though Alex seems to do all right as a sex worker, she can’t seem to shake an angry stalker back in the city from whom she’s stolen money, or a dependence on drugs and alcohol, which she rationalizes she can control. She lives by the iphone, though it falls in the water. Still, she manages to borrow or steal others’.
It’s August when the narrative begins. Alex is living with her latest pick-up, Simon, rich, more than twice her age, and the owner of one of the great McMansions on the beach. She reads him well and is fast on delivering what she thinks he wants to hear --conversation being a “silky back and forth without the interruption of reality.” She met Simon in a bar in the city a week earlier. She had been wearing her outfit - a short, too formal dress, described as a “sad reach for elegance,” like a prom dress. All’s well until she makes a serious mistake at an upscale dinner party one night at a house of one of Siomn’s friends. Simon coolly tells her to leave immediately, buying her a railroad ticket to the city.
She does leave, but not for the city –she has no place to live, she ran out on her old roommates, owing them money, she has nothing, but she likes the East End scene and develops a belief that Simon will take her back when she shows up at his Labor Day bash a week later. . Meanwhile, her pick-up antennae, ever on, transmit a signal to a blond adolescent she sees on the beach with his friends. Younger, older, it makes no difference. She’ll get a place to stay, unload her back pack, survive, maybe even thrive.
The way the story ends will either satisfy or frustrate, but for sure, The Guest will prove memorable.
