So many cars parked along the gravel driveway. So many guests, already here. It was all happening. Alex made her way to the entrance of the walled property. Her body carrying her along with the fluid quality of a dream. Did she expect some resistance? There was none. The big wooden door was wide open. As if everything was working in concert to allow for Alex’s arrival. To urge her forward. Already she had forgotten the walk there: couldn’t say how long it had taken, what roads she’d passed. The slate was wiped clean.
Having previously loved Emma Cline’s The Girls, I was really looking forward to The Guest; and it did not disappoint. I think that what they have most in common — and what works the best for me — is a tone of disturbing uncanniness; things aren’t quite right, but you recognise the truth of them all the same. With an unlikeable (and pretty much unknowable) main character who drifts and grifts her way through life (surviving on transactional sex and petty theft, dulling her senses and reactions with stolen prescription drugs), as the past threatens to catch up with Alex and we watch tensely as she uses a string of unsuspectingly useful fools to meet her needs in the moment, the reader (this reader) couldn’t help but care for her and want things to work out in the end. Like a mashup of Patrica Highsmith and Ottessa Moshfegh — set in a Gatsbyesque summer playground of the rich on private Long Island beaches — The Guest appealed to a sense in me beyond the heart and mind, as though Cline plucked some deep chord that resonated on an infrasonic level; I felt this more than I can explain it and will acknowledge that might be an entirely personalised reaction. Absolutely worked for me; slight spoilers beyond. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
This thing with Simon. She leaned into Simon and he kept talking but dropped a hand to her low back. On the ride home, he’d tell her about his friends. Their private lives, their hidden problems. And Alex would ask questions and egg him on and he’d flash her a smile, his pleasure suddenly so boyish. This was real, her and Simon. Or it could be.
We don’t end up learning much about Alex’s background — she is circumspect with the people she encounters; likewise circumspect with the reader — but we know she is twenty-two, has worked as an escort in NYC (after moving there for a failed modelling career), and after burning her bridges with friends, clients, and a certain ex-boyfriend that she ripped off, Alex was literally saved from homelessness by a rich middle-aged art dealer she met in a bar. This Simon impulsively installed Alex in his Long Island beach house, and after spending the summer buying her designer clothes, showing her off at parties, and allowing her to spend lazy days swimming in the pool or ocean, a misstep on Alex’s part sees Simon buying her a train ticket back to the city. But with no home or prospects to go back to (and that angry ex-boyfriend apparently looking for her everywhere), Alex convinces herself that if she can only find a place to stay for the six days until Simon’s famous end-of-summer Labour Day party, he will have cooled off and be relieved to see her walking back into his life.
The tension comes from this ticking clock: Will Alex find shelter for the six days? Will Dom track her down? Would Simon even want to see her at the party if she makes it that far? And the details are painted in grippingly and with pathos: Alex uses everyone she meets — some of them fragile and all deserving of better — but I never thought of her as a sociopath; Alex was focussed on survival and I understood that she was going to do whatever it took to survive.
So many nights she remembered only as a sour feeling, a bartender’s cold look, strangers trying not to stare as a man squeezed her knee. The men always wanted people to be aware that they were with Alex, wanted eyes to follow them as they headed toward the elevators. Did they imagine that they looked like anything other than what they were? As if anyone would have done the math and come up with a different explanation.
Maybe it’s because we never learn anything about Alex’s background or childhood, but I never felt sorry for her path to sex work — with youth, beauty, and an ability to “read” people and transform into what they need her to be, Alex is simply using her strengths to make her way; there isn’t a big difference between advertising as an escort and being a rich man’s permanent sugar baby and she always seemed to be in control of her choices; but would someone finally choose her? Again: beyond plot and character, it was the vibe that really worked for me here; Cline’s writing just speaks to me and I am all ears.
