Alex, the young woman at the center of Emma Cline’s second novel, The Guest, spends a day at the beach among the wealthy residents on the East End of Long Island, appearing like she belongs. She’s staying with Simon, a man in his fifties, who has invited Alex to his house—with its high ceilings and expensive paintings—as a guest for the month of August. Alex is not new to this world: it’s her work. She engages men as a kind of escort, taking great pains in each quasi-relationship to appear amenable, pleasant, and gracious. After all, “That was the point of Alex—to offer up no friction whatsoever.”
Only: Alex can’t escape the friction of her life. An ex won’t stop harassing her. Her roommates in the city kicked her out, which makes her stay with Simon more pressing than she can let on. The moment she feels comfortably at home in the East End, she makes a mess of things, falling from her precarious role as guest to the exposed position of intruder. From the outset of The Guest, Alex has already overstayed her welcome, uninvited from the life she was hoping to inhabit more permanently. The story—at least the one of Alex in Simon’s life—is a foregone conclusion.
To everyone, that is, except Alex. She spends the days leading up to Labor Day trying to regain an invitation to a world that has already forgotten she exists. Cline places Alex in a series of increasingly unnerving situations with little hope for resurrection, a Christ figure at the hands of a merciless god. In each of the ensuing scenarios, Cline pokes at the thin surface of class as a primary marker of membership status, forcing an examination of what it means to buy your way into belonging and suggesting that community can’t exist where money is the primary connection between people. “So much of getting away with things,” Alex thinks, “was the outward insistence of normalcy.” When Alex pretends to be a nanny at a country club, she is welcomed back into the fold, if only briefly, as a caretaker for a child she doesn’t know. Her ability to slip by relies on her ability to perform gendered labor.
Alex becomes a different kind of caretaker for Jack, a young man on a shaky line between adolescence and adulthood, whose vague threats of self-harm belie “the certainty that the world would be generous in its orientation toward him.” Following Cline’s story collection, Daddy, in which various men feel unsettled in their masculinity within their families, Cline introduces Jack as a contrast to Simon, the latter of whom seems to have smoothed out any of his rough edges in order to live a comfortable life among the wealthy. There’s a sense that Jack will join him someday, or else that the shallow life his parents have presented to him has already irreparably cracked his exterior.
The harder Alex tries to regain access to this closed group, the more she affirms her nonexistence within it, feeling like “the ghost she had always imagined herself to be.” Her labor is expendable, offering a service not unlike the cooks and cleaners who work for the rich in their summer homes with private pools by the beach. Alex’s liminal position in the murky deep end of unequal power dynamics leaves her entirely adrift. She is ejected from a “life she had gotten right up to the edge of,” yet still she imposes on people more firmly situated within the margins of the in-group.
Alex is in some ways a lot like Evie, the narrator of Cline’s first novel, The Girls. Both are transient, drifting from one place to another while trying desperately to identify with an in-group. But where Evie narrates her time as a teenager from the distance of middle-age and the security of reflection, Alex is stuck in the terror of the present tense, a young woman without any reprieve from her circumstances. Worse, she can’t tell if she’s blowing her life up on purpose or because she has no choice. Her ongoing self-destruction is too close to gain perspective.
In The Girls, when Evie wasn’t staying at a cult ranch with other drifters, she was back with one of her parents, eventually sent to boarding school, and somewhat settled by the time she tells the story. But in The Guest, while the other girls Alex worked with had “defected for their hometowns, making a grab at a normal life, or else disappeared entirely,” Alex seems stuck in a kind of forward motion that only propels her to a cliff’s edge. There’s no mention of her family, and the only reference to her hometown describes its context as “negative, a vortex.” Alex seems utterly alone in the world, her only option—if one can call it that—to return to an abusive ex. Evie possesses the privilege of looking back, but for Alex, there is no past to comfort her, no escape hatch from the onset of the narrative. Cline’s narration is purposefully stifling, a suffocating and eternal present tense that offers no room for Alex to find respite. The plot is fated from page one, but Alex must suffer it.
There may not be any direction for Alex to go, and her feeling that it’s all her fault could only exist in a context of capitalism where service work is only valid so long as its characters stay invisible. But in The Guest, Cline makes Alex visible page after page, compelling us to follow her with an increasing sense of dread, considering Labor Day in the context of a rebuked laborer with a face and a name: not quite a savior, nor able to be saved. Alex tries not to flail while drowning, sure that someone in this beach town will see themselves in relation to her and do something to help. But the summer is ending, and comfortable people don’t tend to look beyond themselves.
The Guest, by Emma Cline. New York, New York: Random House, May 2023. 304 pages. $28.00, hardcover.
Ben Lewellyn-Taylor is from Kennedale, Texas, and lives in Chicago. He is a graduate of Antioch University’s MFA program and writes book, film, and music criticism. His work appears in Electric Literature, under the gum tree, Colorado Review, and elsewhere, all of which can be found here.
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