The Guest: A Novel
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 "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.
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Community Reviews
When we first meet Alex, we know she is an imposter. We equally know that her reflections on this are simply an observer measuring the success of her disguise. Cline’s incisive narrative will dig into Alex’s head, exposing for us the sociopath within, a chancer who will manipulate and exploit without so much as a blink at conscience. Survival. A woman who can outwit a riptide.
The mystery of Alex, slowing unfolding, taps into our negativity bias, our hope for a dopamine fix as we puzzle out who this woman is, why she behaves as she does—the Pavlov dog that salivates when an opportunity to make a bad decision confronts her. We fear for her safety, that ever-looming Dom threat, indulge a morbid interest in watching someone self destruct.
The narrative will maintain a hum of tension as Alex works her way through Simon’s pill stash, until she snaps the end of her tether by disrespecting the fragile bubble in which May-December romances dwell. Where aging rich buys young love and will not suffer mockery. We cannot sympathize with either of them, Simon or Alex. They are both users.They differ in one way: he is the one with money. But let us resist the temptation to elevate this work to social commentary—wealth inequality, power imbalance. We must bookmark in our minds how they meet. Alex studies Simon, thinking he is not a good use of her energy. He is a civilian, she decides, a man whose self-conception embraces casual sex, not the kind for which he pays. She will have a change of heart when she realizes he can offer protection, give her some breathing room to turn things around. He is merely a mark. He happens to be a rich one, and that serves Alex’s purposes.
Alex is dispassionately aware that she burns every bridge she crosses. With a shrug, she knows there are always more bridges. This time, her self-delusion, the other devil on her shoulder, will convince her that Simon will cave. This is the point in her story when the vortex that began in her hometown, the one that etched the arc of her life, begins to lose momentum. She will circle a drain in this rarified beach enclave, with each loop a rerun of the prior con. At some point, we’ll tire of her, of her indecency, moral blankness. The swindle will wear thin, no matter how beautifully Cline writes it.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing this eARC.
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