The Guest
A Novel
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3.4 • 536 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A young woman pretends to be someone she isn’t in this “spellbinding” (Vogue), “smoldering” (The Washington Post) novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.
“Under Cline’s command, every sentence as sharp as a scalpel, a woman toeing the line between welcome and unwelcome guest becomes a fully destabilizing force.”—The New York Times
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Glamour, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Slate, Time Out, Chicago Public Library, Electric Lit, Bookreporter
“Alex drained her wineglass, then her water glass. The ocean looked calm, a black darker than the sky. A ripple of anxiety made her palms go damp. It seemed suddenly very tenuous to believe that anything would stay hidden, that she could successfully pass from one world to another.”
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.
Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline’s The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, revealed her as a master of menace and character, gifts that are even more pronounced in her disarmingly creepy follow-up. Alex is a 22-year-old grifter on the run, summering on the posh Long Island estate of her latest mark, fiftysomething finance guy Simon. A week before Labor Day, Simon throws Alex out, leaving her to drift around the wealthy beach enclave, reinventing herself over and over as she attaches herself to random strangers. We can’t quite explain it, but Cline somehow manages to make the blankly amoral Alex sympathetic—or at least a character we’re concerned for. Suspenseful, witty, and filled with a low-key sense of dread, The Guest feels like a blend of Patricia Highsmith and Joan Didion. It kept us hooked till the alarming end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A 22-year-old woman loses her apartment and her grip on reality in the provocative latest from Cline (The Girls). After Alex's sex work dries up, she gets kicked out of her place in New York City and takes up the offer from Simon, an affluent older man, to spend the summer in the Hamptons. All goes well until a week before Simon's Labor Day party, when Alex dings his car, and Simon suggests she head back to the city. Hoping to preserve what luster she can in Simon's eyes, she doesn't mention she has nowhere to go and convinces herself she'll be welcome at his party. She then launches a series of schemes to get through the next five days, taking advantage of strangers' assumptions that she belongs. As Alex wanders from a rental full of hard partiers to a pool house on property left vacant for renovations, she draws on her sex work skills to keep herself welcome and leaves a trail of destruction. Before the first couple days are out, she's slept with another girl's boyfriend and damaged a blue-chip painting, while holding out hope, however misguided, that Simon will be happy to see her again. Cline has a keen eye for class differences and makes Alex into an intriguing protagonist who has learned to be observant, but must also recognize she's losing her judgment if she wants to survive. Like watching a car crash, this is hard to look away from.
Customer Reviews
Overall the book is a bit awkward— just like being a guest who has overstayed their welcome
This book isn’t for everyone— it squeaked out a three from me simply because there were a few instances that the writing pulled me in, but there were also plenty of awkward parts that didn’t seem to fit— stood out like a sore thumb. It’s difficult to write about this book in detail without spoiling it. Upon reflection I understand the symbolism of the first major event which is her almost drowning and the title is apropos because she doesn’t fit in anywhere— she doesn’t belong— thus she is the perpetual guest in any situation. Reading those around her to reflect their values and fulfill their needs to prolong her stay— her acceptance.
Should’ve been a short story
A short story stretched into something vaguely resembling a novel—at least in length. “That’s it!” I cried when I reached the end. Disappointing.
The Ultimate Anti-Heroine
The reason that there’s no standard “character development” in “The Guest” is because Alex is trying to erase who she really is. The point of this book is, I thought, to criticize the vapid emptiness of consumer culture, especially among the very rich, to whom people from lower socioeconomic classes only exist in terms of how they can better serve the Simons of the world. Simon will never see Alex in any other way, because she lacks the one thing that makes a person valuable in his eyes—money.
Alex’s week in the Hamptons (an ironic reference to the “West Egg/ East Egg” of “The Great Gatsby”) is an epic journey of standing still. She goes from person to person in search of some safety, some shelter, seeking protection from the menacing “Dom” (read: former pimp), only to screw up each time she manages to ingratiate herself to the random strangers she encounters after being kicked out (politely) of Simon’s life. A woman on the same social level as Simon would’ve recognized his brush off as a break up, as a moment of finality, but Alex can’t recognize it as such because she needs what Simon has too much. How long would the relationship have gone on before Simon found out how she’d really been supporting herself in “the city” (the thinly-veiled New York)? Alex’s conflict is mostly internal, yet, as with everyone compared to the super rich that are Simon’s ilk, her position in society is ultimately dependent on his approval.
Also, it felt to me that through the whole novel that Alex is hiding something about herself that is never explicitly revealed to the reader or to any of the characters in the story—it could be a whole host of things, from mental illness to a physical disfigurement—and I couldn’t help but think about the gender-neutrality of her name as being either a subtle clue or a red herring, but the fact that Cline gave her anti-heroine a name that can be used either by men or women was not lost on me.