By: Sariya Camp

Over the past year, I have come across countless glowing reviews of The Guest by Emma Cline. But it wasn’t until a fellow writer recommended it to me that I finally decided to pick up a  copy from my local library. Within the first few pages, I was utterly bewitched by Cline’s writing, which pulled me from the reading slump I had recently fallen into. The combination of  lean, tense prose, an unsettling atmosphere, and an antiheroic protagonist was the perfect recipe  for a late summer page-turner. Indeed, The Guest is masterfully defiant of genre, functioning as  both a fast-paced thriller and a work of literary fiction with a great deal to say on the subjects of  class, identity, and gender power dynamics. It’s impossible to put down.  

Cline’s The Guest follows a week in the life of Alex, an aimless young woman who has just been turned out by her boyfriend Simon, a rich older man she’d lived with during the summer at his house on Long Island. Over the next six days, Alex drifts between pools and private beach clubs, worming her way into the homes of strangers, and biding her time before  she can reunite with Simon at his Labor Day Party. Heedless of the destruction she leaves in her wake, Alex is all the while running not only from her own uncertain identity, but also Dom, a dangerous ex to whom she owes money and whose attempts to contact her are growing in  assertiveness, his presence ever looming over her shoulder.  

Alex herself is one of the most fascinating figures I’ve encountered in contemporary fiction. As an unreliable and oftentimes unlikable character, she holds her own against the likes of Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne and The Talented Mr. Ripley’s namesake protagonist. She is a drifter and an escapist, with no discernible past or future, only an impulse to keep herself upright in the moment, even if it results in deceiving and betraying the people around her. Alex’s actions are always morally questionable, driven by survival and a compulsive need for the company of other people who might provide her with a temporary purpose, a place to go, and a new way to define  herself in relation to them. Despite her crimes, Alex’s hopeless plight and overwhelming sense of  loneliness are easy to sympathize with. She is delusional and damaged, and the way Cline  renders this perspective softens her edges for the reader, helps rationalize the destruction Alex leaves in her wake. Her aimlessness epitomizes the feeling of being in your twenties and not  having anything figured out yet, which I couldn’t help but relate to while I was reading. Moreover, her ability to maneuver her way into foreign social circles is nothing short of impressive. Throughout the narrative, Alex showcases an expert understanding of the human psyche, as seen in the quote:  

“…wasn’t it better to give people what they wanted? A conversation performed as a smooth transaction — a silky back-and-forth without the interruption of reality. Most everyone preferred the story. Alex had learned how to provide it, how to draw people in  with a vision of themselves, recognizable but turned up to ten degrees, amplified into something better. How to allude to her own desires if they were shared desires. Somewhere, deep in their brains, the synapses fired, chugging along in the direction she  set out for them. People were relieved, grateful to click into something bigger, easier. And it was good to be someone else. To believe even for a half moment, that the story was different” (Cline 20).  

Alex knows precisely how to appeal to a person to get what she wants. In order to survive her week alone in the Hamptons, she uses her particular blend of pity and girlish charm to trespass class and wealth boundaries that would otherwise have been closed to her.  

For all the simmering horror that lurks under its surface, The Guest is equally a  commentary on privilege and class disparity. Cline cleverly pokes at the shallow nature of the  Long Island residents that Alex comes into contact with, those who exist within the safety bubble of the 1%, which Alex is only able to penetrate by weaponizing her sexuality, compromising her dignity to play to male fantasies. Alex’s motivations in The Guest entirely hinge on her desire for a security and stability she herself has never possessed, only ever tasted during brief stints with wealthy men like Simon. In this way, she is representative of the female experience; through her character, Cline calls attention to the fact that power looks much different for women than it does for men, especially for women who are economically underprivileged.  

While Cline inarguably excels at developing character and tactfully exploring societal issues in The Guest, a common criticism of the narrative is its abrupt ending, which deprives the  reader of any closure regarding Alex’s uncertain future. Over the course of the novel, the plot  impatiently hurtles toward the fateful Labor Day Party that Alex intends to crash. Once there, however, Cline drops a strange bombshell that caught me entirely by surprise on my initial  reading. After taking some time to process everything I had read, I came to accept the ending as a testament to Cline’s skill in subtlety and ambiguity. So much is implied about Alex’s character  throughout the novel, especially among its final pages, that there is no single way to interpret The Guest. But perhaps you should read it and decide for yourself.