No, I Haven't Read That: "The Guest" by Emma Cline
'Everything Is Sex, Except Sex, Which is Power,' The Hamptons, and The Miserable Plight of the Trust Fund Child.
Well folks, we are right back to me not getting this banner headline sizing thing right on the first or even the fifth try, so I guess when god smiles upon you it is both rare and fleeting and one must turn their face up to bask in the light when so ‘ere it arrives, knowing it will soon be dark again.1
I had a literature teacher in high school who told me that it was gimmicky to start an essay with a quote, and that mandate is burned so deep in my brain that it does pain me to say I will be starting this newsletter with, indeed, a quotation. Of song lyrics, no less! Sixteen-year-old me, get out of that Hot Topic and rejoice in your newfound five paragraph freedom!
The quotation in question, parsed in this issue’s subheading, is a lyric from Janelle Monaé’s song “Screwed,” a lyric completed by the coda:
“You know power, is just sex. Now ask yourself who’s screwing you?”
A sentiment that could be empowering, or at the very least, refreshing in how honestly it outlines the tacit agreement most all of us obliquely trade in: that beauty is power, and thinness is beauty, and sex or the idea of being able to have sex with beauty and thinness because you have money—which is also power—is doubly formidable. It’s an accepted notion in many, of not most all, Capitalistic societies. Or—call me coo coo bananas!—society writ large! We all know, even if we don’t say, that the accidental status of beauty and youth can be a shortcut to the harder, colder contours of wealth, and a bridge across the chasm of Summer Houses and mysteriously perfect skin and rarefied connections and wait, is that JLo singing at your wedding?! that such capital can create between you and those who won’t get so lucky. Or, “Lucky.”
The main character of Emma Cline’s The Guest, a waifish slip of a woman named Alex, lives by the rigid but delicate rules of the interplay between sex and power. Though it’s never overtly confirmed, it’s easily intuited that Alex is what some might refer to as an escort, or a high class call girl, or a sex worker, or a sort of living embodiment of the Only Fans agreement. Choose your verbiage. What makes Alex’s characterization complicated, and what makes Cline such a genius, is how blurred the lines are between what Alex does to make a living, and how Alex—in these five, feverish days we bear witness to—simply…lives. She lives, indeed, how many women (and some men) live, trading in the volatile stock of beauty for the sound investment of an older man with a priceless art collection, an Ambien addiction, and a deep-seated fear of death.2 Those people just aren’t getting paid for it. At least, not directly.3
We first meet Alex swimming off the costal beaches of what we can assume is East Hampton—that storied enclave juuuuust outside of New York City, full of golf and white sand and eighteen dollar lobster rolls on sourdough hot dog buns and Range Rovers driven by the children of off-duty hedge fund managers. She is caught in a riptide—a ferociously subtle current made all the more sinister for its utter randomness; its near-complete invisibility. After a momentary panic, a pleading look to the unconcerned faces peppering the beach, Alex remembers to relax, to go with the current, and eventually she is spit out of the apathetic Atlantic without fanfare, right back onto the clean, ignorant sand, surviving for another day to eat perfectly ripe cherries out of a Ziploc bag filled that morning with ice by a resentful assistant.
In many ways, this initial image is an excellent metaphor for the rest of Cline’s novel, and Alex’s journey through it. (And YES I am SURE that’s not an accident THEME METAPHOR ALLITERATION SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK!). The Guest feels, in many ways, like it takes place out of the joint of time; in the formless, gaping maw between how most people order their lives and utter, complete chaos. It is a dark reminder of the potential imminence of our fragile mortality. It is being caught in a riptide—an experience that, in hindsight, is either a good near-death story, or the worst and least expected and last day of your life.
Alex is the “guest”4 of Simon, a wealthy, well-kept man of massive but nebulous wealth, who wants the clean lines and hard edges of transactional accompaniment to avoid even one second alone with himself, devoid of work or companionship. A companionship which Alex—for the low, low price of free organic meals and new designer clothes and a beautiful place to stay and a nice car to drive—is happy to oblige. The only caveat is that she be absolutely nothing of a person at all. She must make no mistakes, exhibit no personality; she is a smoothed out, blurry facsimile of an attractive, young, thin, presentably subservient woman. She is nothing but exactly what she needs to be, whenever she needs to be it.
The problem is, however, that even Alex—or some latent, rebellious part of her—has too much personality to live by such oppressive rules forever. Or even, for a full summer. After a Series of Unfortunate and Embarrassing Events, it is suggested (read: demanded) that Alex leave Simon’s Daddy-ship, which Alex is reluctant to do for many reasons, not least of which that she’s been summarily kicked out of her old New York City apartment, has alienated most of her previous marks, and has zero friends or family to rely upon outside of Simon. But also because Alex is being haunted—via text messages, calls, and overt threats—by a man named “Dom,”5 a sinister figure who we can assume is either an incensed former conquest or a procurer-like6 figure. Again, it isn’t really made clear.
Alex, with all the rationalization-sodden decision making of an early-twenties something with fantastic skin and very precious little left to lose, decides that rather than leave East Hampton on the train ticket purchased for her by Simon’s assistant, she will find a way to survive in East Egg for five more days, with a busted phone, no friends, no money, and no prospects—just a giant bag of her old designer clothes, filched anti-anxiety medication, and one stolen Rolex of Simon’s—until Memorial Day, when Simon hosts his annual End-of-Summer bash and would, surely, love to see her turn up unannounced. A perfect plan! No notes. Two thumbs way up! Yaaas, Queen! What can go wrong? Literally nothing!
Thus begins the real journey of The Guest, an unwelcome interloper who can only find refuge with those as alienated and in pain and as greatly alone, as her.
Emma Cline, as always, writes brilliantly, with such sparse, poetic devastation as I’ve not experienced outside of Joan Didion, another seedy underbelly-ist of California. She writes with all the close range precision penetration of a bayonet. About class, beauty, sex, wealth, and their particularly female implications; Cline is a wonderfully morose satirist, if the satirist was vulnerable enough to be seen desperately wanting to belong to the class they lampoon.7 But in the same way that many details of Alex’s life—her past, her motivation, how she got here—are kept fuzzy, purposefully blurred, so too does Cline’s novel never really come into focus.
Alex is difficult to have affection for precisely because she is so formless, liquid—simply flowing from one low-lying area to the next, and next lowest. Even Alex’s name (Simon’s name, too), feels like a name given to someone whose identity you want to protect or obscure, a pseudonym in a loose fictionalization or true crime retelling. Most of the time I found myself wanting to shake Alex, to get her to awaken to the part of herself that was, however feebly, refusing this fate. I both saw myself and my own dealings with older men in Alex, and found her obvious sexual manipulation to be off-putting and painful to witness. But, perhaps, I saw it as so abhorrent precisely because I, like other “upstanding” members of society,8 would like not too fine a point be put on such clandestine ways of manipulating status when you have none.
At the end of The Guest I was left unsure as to what Cline was trying to say. Or if, indeed, she was trying to say anything moralistic at all. There are seeds of ideas: that this “fate” of Alex’s is incredibly ordinary; easier than one would think to fall into, as frictionless and left to chance as is being born into enormous wealth. That nothing needs to go bad for everything to go wrong. That one poor choice has more momentum than many good ones. Who knows. There is so much inertia, here, of being pulled along with the tide, taking the passive risk of either being returned to the world, unharmed, or left to drown.
In many ways, Cline’s “Alex” feels like an ideological predecessor to Ottessa Moshfegh’s heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation—a woman on the cusp of starting over; molting; becoming new. Perhaps this is the message of The Guest, that we are all, all time time, on the cusp of reinvention. That in any given moment, we have the capacity to choose differently, to change our lives. Or to keep going in the exact same way. Either way: it’s so much easier, and so much harder than we think.
READ THIS BOOK IF: You enjoy the schadenfreude of the miserable rich, and want to examine the parts of yourself that covet the same things you hope the rich grow to despise. Or if you like Emma Cline, and TBH we should all really like Emma Cline. Also, it would be pretty baller to read this whilst lying on East Hampton sand, so if you’re traveling out that way this year, let me live vicariously through your experience of this book and buuyyyyy it.
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF: You don’t wanna be a little sad and a little stressed out for 200+ pages (Safdie lovers don’t pretend you’re not out there), and/or if don’t enjoy short story-esque (a.k.a: potentially vague) endings.
NORA’S RATING: 7/10. Still worth the read, but maybe don’t let this be your first Emma Cline. I recommend “What Can You Do With A General” or, her debut classique, The Girls.
Truly: lol. L O L. loooooolllllll!
I think it was in a “Sex and the City” episode (or some movie? Wow my memory is totally failing me) that someone asked: ‘Why do men cheat?’ and an older woman responded ‘They cheat because they are scared to die.’ Or something like that. Look, the source material is muddy but the sentiment remains crystalline. Let me cook!
I want to be very clear here: NO tea, NO shade. Life is hard and a lot of bargains have to be struck. Live however is best for you within the confines of the painful consciousness of our own imminent mortality. WHEEEE!
Do you…do you get it?
Do you………..do you get it?
You better fucking bet I just googled “what is the P.C. term for ‘pimp’” because I realized that, outside of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” I am not sure if it is, indeed, okay to say p*mp. Maybe not even in that song is it okay. Wow I have typed p*mp a lot just now, huh?
AND I AM JEALOUS! I DON’T MIND SAYING IT! SHE’S SO FUCKING GOOD!
lol. LOL. LOOOOOllllooooll.
great review. i feel like i might need to read it this summer. when in rome!!!
You cook like a P.I.M.P., of the literary persuasion; and I am Moonstruck. (Get it?) And now I have to read Cline. Damn you!