Like Emma Cline’s celebrated 2016 debut The Girls, The Guest has a deceptively simple premise, and its achievement is to wring much nuance, tension and contradiction from it. It is a novel of precarity and excess, moving chaotically from beach to beach and pool to pool over the course of a late-summer week on what seems to be Long Island. This watery setting is navigated by a curiously liquid protagonist, Alex, a 22-year-old escort, as she improvises and adapts to survive.
Alex is introduced as a guest of Simon, a rich man 30 years her senior, whom she has recently begun dating in “the city”. She was losing clients, had got terminally behind on rent and had just stolen a large amount of money from a regular, when she met Simon and saw an opportunity. When Simon asks her to spend August at his summer house, she abandons her room and her debt and sets about making herself a permanent part of his luxurious life.
However, two weeks in, Simon buys her a one-way ticket back to the city after a faux pas at a party in which she falls in the pool with the host’s husband. From this point the narrative explores the contemporary logic of an old maxim: sink or swim. Alex decides not to return to the city, and instead to grift her way through a week, attaching herself to various groups and individuals, hoping ultimately to return to a forgiving Simon at his long-planned Labor Day party.
Cline uses the metaphorical possibilities of water, pools and beaches deftly. These are conspicuous leitmotifs that, because of their symbolic richness, never feel overdetermined. The novel opens with Alex swimming at the beach near Simon’s house, where the water is a kind of camouflage in which there is “no way to tell whether she belonged here or didn’t”. But soon she is caught in a rip tide and only makes it to shore by swimming sideways with the current. This foreshadows the intuitive moves she makes to merge into the lives of various island-dwellers. Though Alex is repeatedly found out or seen through, she keeps “swimming” – and surviving. At times she seems to slip successfully into the wealthy world she sees as an escape from a life of hustling, but mostly she is rejected. In one scene late in the narrative, Alex again heads into the ocean and the waves violently knock her over. She braces for wave after wave, wondering how long she can stay afloat while simultaneously feeling “she could swim for ever”. This current of cruel optimism proves alarmingly strong despite the brutal divisions of social class that grow starker as the narrative progresses.
Attempted social mobility is a foundational and recurring theme in American writing, and yet The Guest feels fresh. Early sections depicting the absurdities of the grotesquely rich do echo recent satirical narratives such as The White Lotus or Glass Onion, but give way to powerful scenes of rough sleeping and survival sex. Cline’s vision of wealth also gains complexity through the way Alex both desires and is disgusted by it. Her party faux pas occurs, tellingly, when she feels a “desire for the night to sharpen into action”; this scene is echoed later when she impulsively marks a valuable painting.
These contradictory impulses enrich a character who is both insightful and naive but also strangely spectral and blank. We learn she comes from a place where “the arc of your life was already determined”, but no details emerge. She has feelings of being ghostly or “inhuman”, at one point noting “with certainty, that she did not exist”. This is partly about class-based humiliation, but it also constitutes an openness that makes her relatable. She is a sex worker, and this has a critical bearing on some of her relationships, but Cline’s approach to this is never lurid or crude. Ultimately, Alex is a poor young person struggling in a world where material wealth is highly visible and where the pernicious ethos of meritocracy is ubiquitous.
The Guest does not share the violent historical context of The Girls – the mystique and crimes of the Manson family – and may not receive the same plaudits and coverage. It is a better novel, though, and cements Cline’s place as one of America’s great contemporary stylists.
• The Guest by Emma Cline is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
