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In the early pages of Emma Cline’s “The Guest,” Alex, the titular guest, wanders away from a dinner party at a palatial home on Long Island. She drifts into an empty, impersonal room, which houses an armchair, a flower in a vase, a fake log in an unused fireplace, and a few ugly but probably expensive knickknacks. She palms the one item that catches her eye, a small, pleasingly carved stone—perhaps an animal, perhaps just an abstract shape. It seems to be the only item of interest in this space, which is otherwise “a non-room, dead and unused.”
The room is a bit like Alex herself: studiously un-particular, with an undefined quality that intrigues the viewer just enough to inspect some contours. Alex is not dead, but she does sometimes imagine herself as a ghost, “wandering the land of the living,” or as an “inert piece of social furniture—only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman.” If this is a non-room, we might think of Alex as a non-heroine. She is neither a warm, strong character who engages hearts nor a prickly, charismatic one who provokes minds; she is simply a woman trying to glide safely through the world of the book. “That was the point of Alex,” Cline writes, “to offer up no friction whatsoever.”
We learn very few of the facts of Alex’s life, either directly or indirectly. She is a sex worker in “the city” (New York, never named), and has been since she arrived from some undisclosed, possibly rural place—she’s twenty-two now, and already worried about looking too old. She has shoulder-length brown hair and dirty fingernails, and is skinny, tall, and pretty, though “not beautiful enough to be a model.” It’s never stated, but Alex is white, or at least white-passing. Given what unfolds, she couldn’t be anything else.
As the book opens, Alex is spending the summer on what is apparently the ritzy east end of Long Island—hints of “The Great Gatsby,” again unnamed—with the affluent Simon, “a kind person, mostly,” though it’s immediately clear to the reader that the relationship is transactional in his eyes, whether or not he knows that she’s an escort. The escape is just what Alex needed. There’s nothing for her in the city, where she’s been kicked out by her roommates for thieving and failing to pay rent, and she’s passively on the run from Dom, a vaguely menacing man from whom she stole some large amount of drugs and money. When we meet her, she feels safe, cushioned by painkillers and the easy richesse of Simon’s life style—driving his expensive car to the beach, wearing the expensive new dresses he’s bought her.
But after a couple of missteps Simon tells her to leave. Alex is faced with a decision: she can return to the city, with a possibly dangerous criminal on her tracks, or she can wait out Simon’s anger. She decides on the latter, convincing herself that he’ll welcome her back at his annual Labor Day party in a week. All she has to do is get through six days on her own, armed only with her designer clothes, her sedated wits, and a mostly dead phone.
In another novel, Alex could easily fit into the heroine or anti-heroine category. Her situation is desperate, her self-deception profound, and her moral compass unpredictable: a good setup for sympathy, fascination, or both. Cline, however, is assiduously uninterested in molding Alex into one thing or another. This mutability is partly Alex’s job; she prides herself on her ability to case a client’s needs and smoothly be shaped by them. During her week adrift, this trait becomes a survival skill, allowing her to insinuate herself into social situations where she might find a bed or a meal. Because she is young, pretty, well-dressed, and white, the privileged people she meets believe that she is who they assume she is: a young city dweller reliving college debauchery at a squalid house share; someone’s trusted “friend of the family”; a perky graduate from upstate. These people let her unquestioningly into their house parties, their country club, their cars, and their homes, never seeing through the mist of appropriateness that surrounds her. The only characters who penetrate this narcotic, wealth-induced haze are the others in service positions, to whom her gambit is embarrassingly clear.
“The Guest,” like its non-heroine, is something of a shape-shifter. The book restlessly flits between familiar forms; during Alex’s sojourn, it seems equally plausible that nothing will happen and that a whole lot of violent something will. Will the novel turn out to be a take on the white-woman-in-peril thriller? A cool, provocative sketch of an unlikable protagonist? Leaning into its Long Island locale, perhaps a Gatsbyesque romantic drama?
There are stagy whispers of all of the above, but “The Guest” actually engages more closely with two other types of narrative. The first is the contemporary class satire: the post-“Parasite” turn, especially in film and television, toward punishing sendups of the one percent. Cline’s novel falls into a genre that could more precisely be called “the vacay bummer,” in which ludicrously rich people are reproved for their life styles while on ludicrously decadent vacations. Examples range in subtlety from the delicious, meticulous discomfort of Mike White’s “The White Lotus” to the heavy-handed comic butchery of Mark Mylod’s “The Menu”; in the middle of the spectrum, we might throw in Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” and Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion.” As Sam Adler-Bell wrote of this uneven crop of class-warfare entertainment, “hostility to the ultrarich has become a marker of modish cultural literacy.”
“The Guest” initially seems like an exemplar of the form, given its damning descriptions of the well-to-do. Alex, like Cline, is a consummate collector of details, deeply attuned to her moneyed environs. She learns the dutiful banter—“Everyone said it was beautiful out here. How many times could this sentiment be repeated? It was the polite consensus to return to, the bookend to every conversation”—and how to pass among the blandly interchangeable rich, the women in “white cropped pants, expensive sandals, pearl earrings.” Both the absurdity and the incredible dullness of this world are apparent to her. Some of the people she encounters are flatly loathsome, like the dinner-party hostess who, after hearing about a woman who murdered her children and kept them in a freezer, simply says, “The freezer must have been very big.” (She also asks for its brand.) Others, like the children, are pitiable, but not too pitiable: “Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.”
Yet Cline’s novel is also aware that the fantasy of eat-the-rich stories is just that: a fantasy. In a show like “The White Lotus,” this point is made through cutting, extravagant farce, but here it comes on like a bruise: slow, dull, and inevitable. Alex’s ambitions are limited to survival, and she has neither the cunning nor the bandwidth to blow up the system, or even to get a score from her marks. She doesn’t want to destroy the rich; in fact, she constantly tries not to ruffle their uniformly groomed feathers. She merely passes the time, day by day, pill by mind-dulling pill.
These qualities place her in direct opposition to one of the genre’s tropes: the female outsider who, much like the “final girl” in horror films, emerges triumphant from the ruins of her surroundings. Consider Lucia (Simona Tabasco) in “The White Lotus” or Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) in “The Menu”—keen, streetwise young women, on the make, whose class difference allows them to see the rotting core of a gilded world. Like Alex, Lucia and Margot are sex workers tangled in the lives of their clients. This figure often seems key to the form, a sharp edge that makes the unctuous smoothness of the rich look unnatural, unsustainable. Alex is more of a bumpy protrusion than a sharp edge, and her passivity, her lack of drive or guile, grinds down the edge of the genre itself. “The Guest” is not a caustic takedown of the rich, but a queasily unfunny reminder of their invulnerability.
In the 1984 study “Reading for the Plot,” Peter Brooks argued that desire was the engine of storytelling. Narratives were about desire, but they also relied on it as a dynamic—it was what kept us turning the page, immersed in the text. For Brooks, a model was the 1554 Spanish novella “Lazarillo de Tormes.” The book is one of the earliest examples of the other genre that Cline interrogates: the picaresque novel. “Lazarillo” tracks the adventures of the pícaro, or rascal, a character who willfully rejects social convention, and who navigates a loosely plotted string of dramatic episodes, making daring escapes using his wits and luck. The form lends itself to satire: the protagonist, who rarely changes through the course of the book, skips from one milieu to the next, exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of the people he encounters. This is precisely Alex’s function in “The Guest.”
But, for a character constantly gauging the desires of others, Alex can seem curiously devoid of desires herself, at least beyond the will to survive. As Brooks notes, later versions of the pícaro often feature a more relentless, specific motivation: the fuel of ambition. Alex has no plan or dreams, no deeper purpose. Rather than leaning into a ravenous hunger for more—more money, more sex, more adventure—she is perpetually turning inward, turtling in the shell of her anxiety. More an uncertain person than a defined type, she sometimes seems like she might be in the wrong kind of book. She is a bad pícara, Don Quixote without chivalrous fantasy, Becky Sharp without social aspiration. As with the vacay bummer, “The Guest” doesn’t simply reject the expectations of the genre; it picks them up, toys with them, and then sets them back down again.
But can a book run on the energy of what doesn’t happen, rather than what does? If both Alex and the structures of her story are emptied of desire, what keeps us following her through the sun, sand, and late-summer ennui? Throughout the book, it’s clear that no easy resolution will present itself when Simon’s party finally arrives, and Alex’s refusal to see what’s glaringly obvious renders her both more and less sympathetic, the novel’s early suspense fading into exhausted resignation. In the end, Cline relies on a perverse desire of the reader’s own, to see if a novel that promises so much can sustain itself on the negative space of character and event, on refusing straightforward satisfaction. Alex believes in surfaces, in the idea that wealth, like narrative convention, can tie up all loose ends, smooth any rough edges. Underneath what’s visible, though, the people who do the tying and the smoothing are always laboring, living lives that will never be as smugly conclusive as we’d like them to be. ♦
