The Guest

by Emma Cline

If The Guest were set in Faerûn, the Dungeons & Dragons world currently dominating the hearts and minds of video game nerds the world over, then Alex, the identity of the very-much-not-a-fantasy-world main character, would be almost too archetypal to care about. A charming rogue, she wanders rootless from vignette to vignette, pocketing just enough to survive till she stumbles into the next instance of the moneyed elite, and the cycle begins again. Each encounter could be its own serial entry in Dragon Magazine.

“best of luck with that”

The Guest is set in the contemporary kingdom of what I am assuming is the Hamptons—“the city” is never quite named, but there is a passing reference to geographic directions (Alex is quoted as “out east”) and I spotted at least one ubiquitous Citarella shopping bag. It projects an aura of sadness; When Rand al’Thor is wandering around without any money and sleeping in hedges, it’s an expected part of an epic bildungsroman. When Alex does it, here at the beach, she’s tragically lost.

gotta be

the only named brand in the book.

Even though she is completely absurd, I found Alex both compelling and believable. I read Emma Cline’s fiction piece Upstate and liked it enough to search out more of her work, but I don’t think I was completely prepared for the depth of bleakness in The Guest. It struck me as barely exaggerated—having lived in NYC for a decade and found myself, at least 3 times over the years, living through a month where I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay rent, I fully understand that the precipice is a lot closer than most people realize. Alex’s slow decent isn’t because she’s a sex worker, it’s because she’s a human. “Certain hours of the night where doom made a terrible sense, where it seemed like the only possible outcome.” 

And while I trusted in her characterization, I didn’t always love the way Alex’s naïveté was conveyed: when presented as from the narrator’s voice, it lent her banal takes a sheen of reality that glossed over how truly limited they are. These were not universal truths unveiled to the reader through hardships not their own. Nor were they the voice of the author suggesting subtle interpretation or taking a stab at truth through metaphor–they were simply idle teenaged insight:

Somewhere on the property, she heard someone operating a leaf blower, then the sound of a lawnmower…[s]o much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.

This is a clever-adjacent way of showing how structurally uninteresting Alex is–this duck-paddling-furiously imagery is like, Creative Writing 101, and I refuse to believe a talent as strong as the author doesn’t trust we’d see the metaphor, that it needs to be explicitly pointed out. Have repeated references to the omnipresence of the landscapers with some visceral imagery, or a non-stop deluge of sound from their tiny motors, maybe. But putting both the image and the interpretation next to each other so explicitly must mean it is not per se the inference that is important, but that Alex has made the connection. In the mind of the character, we must recognize she’s an adolescent just beginning to realize how the world is set up. Still, though, you’re hitting a reader with a boring, uninteresting observation, even if in service to a rounder understanding of who Alex is.

It happens more than once:

Amazing how little you had to give, really. People just wanted to hear their own voices, your response a comma punctuating their monologue.

Presented so directly it brushes up against insightful. It is again given false prominence because it comes from the narrative voice, trading off the borrowed authority inherent in a reader submitting to fiction. Perhaps it is a nod to how in fiction the exchange on offer is that we must pretend the events are real to be allowed access to it. Alex’s simple presence in this rarefied world of tedium and implicit whiteness is also one of exchange based on pretense—she is accoutrement, given access by allowing access to herself—and all the characters know it. These twin deals—between Alex and the world, and the reader and the page—are perhaps jarring or disjointed because we, like Alex, must be unsettled by them. And as Alex is our only keyhole into the page, and her access depends on how others choose to use her, then our narrative must only be allowed to know what Alex knows. She relays fact, dispassionately: when her real observations bubble up, unclouded by social masking and untamped by pills, we can see she is just a kid. She is in that world. She is not a part of it. There is a hair’s breadth between insulated luxury and beachside vagabond—on one side: chance of birth; social invite. On the other: deceit; plain theft.

The book also reminds us it is a book by following an inverse trajectory from something like acclaimed power fantasy and video game Baldur’s Gate 3: Alex gets weaker as time goes on, her ability to charm or seduce or outright trick begins to fade as a few hard weeks take their toll:

The party was still days away. If she considered how many days, the panic started to rise up. Better to just try and figure out what this afternoon would look like. What Alex would do tonight. Keep the sphere limited.

As time wore on, The Guest became claustrophobic to me, oppressive: Alex’s options began to close, and I felt the hopelessness. When she was with the teenager, I needed to get through it. Not because I wanted the book to be over, but because I wanted Alex’s time in the Hamptons to end. The tension was palpable, and I needed it to be released. I needed her to get out of there.

The Guest is a great reminder that tropes in fiction, by and large, twist the outcasts and the upstarts in our stable modern society into the heroes: gentleman thieves, unseen Cassandras, charming rogues, daring rebels. Whatever your personal relationship is to being on the outskirts of civilized society, you’ve rooted for an Alex in some other piece of fiction. The Guest is a strong reminder that it’s hard to watch our main characters lose.