Today we’re reading Emma Cline’s newest release, The Guest, and talking about the picaresque novel, the intersection of precarity and privilege, and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
This book has been a little bit difficult for me to place within my own (highly-subjective) rating scale. On one hand, I hated it…but on the other, I think Cline has done something really interesting here with her main character. Part of me wants to say it’s overhyped (hailed as the beach read of the summer, everyone seems to give it the same vague but positive review), but I think it’s more-so that this book just didn’t work for me—at first.
Emma Cline is one of those authors that I don’t necessarily love, but her work is always on my radar. I read everything she puts out and I have a fairly-decent time reading it, but then I mostly forget about it.
My notes lead me to believe I was enraged by the nothingness while reading The Guest, but maybe enough time has passed (it’s been about 2 months) for me to approach this novel with a clearer, more objective (lol) mind.
Synopsis
“Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.
A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.
With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.”
Review
The Guest is best taken as a picaresque novel: a grifter character wanders aimlessly from incident to incident, always finding themself in trouble, with no goals outside of surviving and continuing on to the next predicament. They are outsiders, they are precarious, they are troublemakers—though usually by accident or necessity of the moment, rather than by strategy.
picaresque (adj.) : relating to an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing anti-hero.
Alex is the grifter character in this novel—”the guest” in the wealthy world of The Hamptons. She’s a 22-year-old sex worker (unspecified, but it seems like she works as an escort), a petty thief, months late on her rent, and directionless. She spent the last couple of years in NYC, but took the nearest escape route after stealing from a client/boyfriend*. She found her exit with a wealthy businessman, and has been living in the lap of luxury in his Hamptons mansion. When this client/boyfriend kicks her out, her plan is to spend the week bumming around until she can return to him—surely he’ll change his mind by then, right?
(*Note: I refer to them as client/boyfriends because Alex doesn’t seem able to decipher the difference—and the difference is maybe semantic at best in many relationships, anyhow—which makes her slightly more sympathetic, but even more frustrating. )
We don’t get much more information about Alex. We know she’s a transplant from some other, more boring, locale. It’s hinted that her life was just fine before, but uneventful. Cline refuses to use a tragic backstory to build this character, or to explain Alex’s behavior. I can appreciate this choice on a meta-level: the poorly-behaved white girl narrators with trauma as an explanation/excuse for their behavior is a tired trope.
However, my initial frustrations with The Guest were these sorts of refusals. Is Cline playing with reader expectations, or is she just giving us, quite frankly, nothing?
The hazy atmosphere, aimless wandering, and sense of suspense all worked for me, and yet the story fell flat. It felt like it was all in service of nothing. Every pitch of this novel gave it the air of an eventful thriller, and while reading, you are left with an uneasy feeling that something big and bad is about to happen. Each episode is rendered with increasing intensity, putting you on the edge of your seat, worried about what will ultimately happen to Alex—or what she’ll do to someone else. Yet here we get another refusal by Cline: there is no climax, no explosive event, no satisfying ending*.
(Note: I don’t actually hate the ending. I think it’s fitting, but nonetheless leaves the reader itching.)
If it’s a plotty novel, give me a plot. If it’s a character-focused novel, give me a character. If it’s a meta-novel, give me commentary.
There were inklings of each of these, but none fleshed-out to (my) satisfaction. By the end, I was left wanting, wondering if I wasted a weekend reading another run-of-the-mill, hot/sad girl, no-plot-just-vibes novel.
But then I returned to the idea of the picaresque.
~
Cline references The Talented Mr. Ripley in interviews, and I can see her inspiration there. TTMR is one of my favorite movies, and a great book too, because Tom Ripley is the perfect picaresque character. Ripley is a shadow, but not depthless. Every aspect of his character is hidden, but hinted at in strategic ways. We are always in the moment with him yet outside of him, unsure of when he is telling the truth. His drifting, his outsiderness, his many faces all make him boundary-less and alluring.
Ruminating on TTMR made me rethink The Guest’s Alex. Originally, she didn’t seem the least bit interesting to me as a character. However, the more she marinates in my mind, the more she makes sense. I wasn’t thinking of this as a picaresque novel while reading, so her undefined edges and lack of interiority frustrated me. But her precarisouness as a sex worker, and general lack of power as a young woman in a patriarchal society, are precisely the factors that would create a character like this in contemporary contexts—or, specifically, in the context of a 2023 sad girl novel.
~
Alex’s main source of survival is her appearance. Not specifically her “beauty”, but everything that allows her to fit into society, especially the society of The Hamptons. She is poor, homeless, and constantly engaging in near-criminal acts, but her Whiteness*, her youth, her beauty, and her perceived class position seems to erase all of that, and even renders her invisible—meaning, in this environment, safe. Though it’s also fair to say that all workers in the environment of the uber-wealthy are invisible, as an unwritten part of their job description, and Alex toes the line with her behavior. Nevertheless, without her appearance (she looks like she belongs), she probably wouldn’t be able to get away with most of her escapades. She wouldn’t even be able to exist in the places she saunters into without suspicion if she looked any different.
(*Note: I don’t think Cline ever explicitly refers to Alex as being White—and I suppose she might not be—but it would be difficult to imagine Alex passing through this novel the way she does if she weren’t.)
Throughout the novel, she sneaks into pools, beach clubs, and house shares; switches between identifying with “the help” (though she is also a worker, the other service workers—nannies, personal assistants, personal chefs—see her as something different from them) and the wealthy; manipulates children and teenagers; and is, in some way, always performing a part. She knows how to use people and get what she needs in order to keep going, and never seems to feel anything whatsoever about how her actions affect others.
There is no attempt to absolve Alex. However, while many of her actions are appalling, there’s still a strange hope she’ll finally get the upper-hand. And that’s the draw of the picaresque novel: we always want the underdog to win.
I wonder how aware she is of her place, of her (relative) privilege, and how purposeful she is in her actions. It benefits her to be perceived as lacking agency, and she might find that useful. But perhaps she has a blind spot when it comes to her own position, and the way she benefits (at the expense of others) in the situations she unwittingly creates. In fact, lacking self-awareness benefits her more than having any. There is no telling what the ratio of helpless vs. scheming she is, because her complete lack of emotion or interiority reveals nothing—yet another thing she relies on to get by (and yet another refusal on Cline’s part).
~
When looking at Tom Ripley and Alex side-by-side, I wonder why it was so hard for me to find a full character in Alex the way I did with Ripley. Maybe it’s simply because I’m so familiar with Ripley now—I’ve had time to analyze and unravel this character, and in many ways create a more substantial version of it for my own use every time I read the book or watch the movie.
Alex is easy to overlook and ignore, which is her entire M.O. as a sex worker, as a grifter, as a young woman. This fact probably makes her better at surviving under her specific circumstances compared to Ripley, who sometimes makes such grave and bumbling mistakes that the plot rises to a near-farce. But this fact also makes her a little less fun to follow—partially because the stakes are relatively low, and partially because the consequences of her being found-out feels a little too real (i.e. mundane but imminent).
So am I giving her more or less credit than she deserves? I sometimes worry I am too critical, while at the same time worrying I am not critical enough.
Ah, how to remain in the safety of invisibility. How to push the boundaries without over-stepping. How to navigate a precarious state of being.
Book Recommendations
Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti
Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
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