In Emma Cline’s newest novel, The Guest, our titular guest is Alex, a 22-year old escort who’s fled a threatening ex and roommates that she owes rent payments in Manhattan, to spend the summer out east on Long Island with her wealthy boyfriend, Simon. Alex is literally a guest at the home of Simon, a man more than double her age, but also a guest in his ritzy Long Island fantasy life, full of expensive clothes, bags, dinner parties, art collecting, and languorous days at private beaches and pools. But when it becomes clear that Alex doesn’t quite fit into Simon’s insular world, she’s kicked out of his house and her situation becomes desperate.
Alex has no where to go, she has no home and she’s constantly dodging calls from a man whom she stole a significant amount of money from before leaving the city—thus setting off the sort of Quixotic quest for her to find a way to keep her barely sustainable life intact. She sets about tricking a group of friends to let her stay in their house, she sneaks into a private pool club pretending to be a nanny, and begins a deeply unsettling relationship with an unstable kid who keeps her company and gives her what she needs. Her end goal is to make it through the week to Simon’s Labor Day party, where she believes she can show up and win him back. Through the novel things are always on the verge of total chaos for Alex: her phone is broken, she has nowhere to sleep or shower, the man she stole from is close to finding her, but she always uses her chameleon-like abilities to get what she needs.
One of Cline’s more unique literary inclinations is to create a distance between the reader and the narrator. Throughout the course of the novel, we get very little personal info about Alex: almost no details about her family, her past, or any relationships. While it might feel alienating to some readers, this distance lends the novel a real sense of contemporaneity. We aren’t really concerned with Alex’s past because the present moment is so vividly conjured within the novel’s universe. It’s also a great way for Cline to ratchet up the tension that sustains the novel, by rooting the reader strongly in the present moment, she makes everything urgent.
Another advantage of the broadness with which Cline sketches Alex is the ability to use her as a vessel for ideas. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Cline mentioned that her narrator Alex, “is somebody whose experience in the world literalizes or exaggerates a lot of my interest in power or sex or the dynamics between men and women.” The novel has a great deal on its mind in terms of sex, power, gender, and class, and Cline uses Alex and her surroundings to explore the transactional nature of sex, the pervasive evil of wealth inequality and excess, and the ways in which women have learned to commodify themselves to survive.
As a reader, we assume Alex’s frantic quest to make every one of her problems disappear by winning back Simon at the Labor Day party is not likely to be successful, but that’s not really the point of the novel. Similar to the structure and mechanics of a good short story, Cline sets up a fairly simple narrative with not too much in the way of character explication, favoring subtle and impactful details with rich and nuanced subtext. The novel is a unique and cinematic piece of fiction, with a live-wire sense of tension and a sophisticated understanding of narrative structure.