“I knew from the beginning the emotional temperature of the ending, how I wanted it to feel,” said Emma Cline of writing her new novel, The Guest. “I didn’t know what the specifics were, but I knew where I wanted the book to leave this character.”
When we first meet that character, 22-year-old Alex, she is spending August at her boyfriend Simon’s Hamptons house. He’s in his 50s, and during the day while he works Alex takes his painkillers and floats in the pool or the ocean. “The light—the famous light—made it all look honeyed and mild,” Cline writes, “the dark European green of the scrub trees, the dune grasses that moved in whispery unison.” A man on the beach is “tanned to the color of expensive luggage.” Simon’s place is “near enough to the ocean.” High ceilings, polished concrete floors, a freezer stocked with halibut that he’d grill “with so much lemon that Alex felt her mouth vibrate.” It’s a book with the dog days languor of a Sofia Coppola film and the chilling tension of a Patricia Highsmith novel.
Back in New York City, Alex did sex work, placing ads for services in exchange for “six hundred roses” or “six hundred kisses.” Her relationship with Simon is also transactional—as perhaps most relationships are—but less blatantly; he buys her a buttery leather bag and designer silk dresses, and is apparently unaware of her history. By the time she’s met Simon, New York has tarnished for Alex. She has left behind angry roommates to whom she owes months of back rent, hotel bars in which she is no longer welcome, and a violent, shadowy contact named Dom who is trying very hard to get in touch. Simon is her way forward, her beam of light. But narrative storm clouds gather when Alex engages in a mild flirtation with Simon’s friend’s much younger husband; it lands Alex in a pool, and puts both her phone and relationship on the fritz.
Kicked out of Simon’s—temporarily, she believes—Alex begins hustling her way into other living arrangements, planning to surprise him at his annual Labor Day party, just six days away. By then, she believes, he’ll have cooled down. What follows is a beach vacation by way of an anxiety dream: Alex meets a house manager and wiles her way into a night at the mansion; she finds a group of young people with a beach rental and convinces them she belongs there too. But these encounters spoil, like milk left out on a hot day, and for all her strategy she remains incredibly vulnerable to the whims of others; the men she hopes will protect her do not.
“She’s a character who distills a lot of my natural interests as a writer,” Cline said of Alex. “There is something mysterious about what you’re drawn to, any creative person.” Alex, she said, “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.”
Her 2016 debut novel, The Girls, sold in a three-book deal worth $2 million and was loosely inspired by the 1969 Manson family murders, focusing on the psyches and sexuality of the girls and young women who live at a Spahn Ranch–like commune under the control of a charismatic, volatile, Manson-like leader. Daddy, her collection published in 2020, explores gender and generational tension in 10 taut stories of upper-class discomfort. The Guest reads like the ambitious logical next step in the continuum.
“In a lot of ways,” she said, the book is “a reaction to The Girls, which was so much about the way the past informs the present. With this book, I knew from the beginning that I really wanted all the action contained over a few days but also, for the reader, that you stay very close to this character in the moment.” Alex’s past isn’t accessible; Cline said that she wanted to resist providing what she called “trauma math.” When someone asks Alex why she is the way she is, Cline writes: “And he was really asking. Expecting some explanation, some logical equation—x had happened to her, some terrible thing, and so now y was her life, and of course that made sense. But how could Alex explain—there wasn’t any reason, there had never been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.”
Keziah Weir
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