The precarity of young adulthood—and of young womanhood in particular—is Emma Cline's stock in trade.
When her debut novel The Girls was published in 2016 to critical acclaim, it seemed to shock something into being. Perhaps it anticipated the start of the MeToo movement, or maybe people were just riveted by the salaciousness of a fictional Manson story which read as though it had been written by a young Bret Easton Ellis. Whatever it was, The Girls seemed to grant Cline a kind of saintliness among discerning young literati; just commercial enough to be talked about over the water cooler, just subversive enough to give it cult status.
In many ways, The Guest ploughs the same furrow: Lonely young woman alone in the world and seeking connection beyond the immediate gratifications of sex and money; running away from the responsibilities that inevitably come with trying to make it in a rich man’s world. Except the tone here is different. Where The Girls benefitted from a sense of perspective—we know, for example, that the protagonist survives because she narrates her own story years after the fact—in The Guest things are more immediate, more tensile. The entire story is told in the third person present tense, lending it a sick feeling that things could go wrong at any time.
The crux of the story is this: 22-year-old Alex is a professional escort; wining and dining her way around New York City with a plethora of wealthy men, who buy her gifts, keep her on their arms at expensive dinner parties, and create elaborate alibis to justify their behaviour to absent (and often indifferent) wives. Difficult as this can be for Alex, it also grants her financial stability and a level of access to high society she otherwise wouldn’t have had. She feels secure in this world, and having learned enough to hustle her way through the obstacles placed in her way, she possesses a savviness which diffuses challenging and even dangerous situations. So far, so American Gigolo.
Except like Paul Schrader’s 1980 classic about elite sex work, The Guest soon descends into turmoil. Having started a relationship with an older, mysterious corporate figure named Simon, Alex moves from New York into a beach house on Long Island. Emotion—which Alex deftly suppresses in all her encounters—clouds her judgement, and starts to blunt the edges of her seemingly unbreakable canniness. She finds herself making mistakes, revealing secrets she thought were long buried, and when certain indiscretions lead to the end of her life with Simon, some lingering threats from her past return to haunt her.
"Alex was missing the mark so often lately. Everything was jarred from its proper place, or maybe the problem was Alex. Maybe she should cool it with the pills. Even as she told herself she would try to be better, she was aware that she would not."
Finding herself cast back into the world with no money and no protection, Alex’s narrative quickly escalates into a moment-by-moment fight for survival; not so much how she might find a way out of her mounting predicaments as what she might do for food in the next twenty four hours, where she’s going to sleep that night. Coupled with an almost relentless pursuit from the abusive ex-john who Alex ripped off before hooking up with Simon - the Chigurh-like Dom - and The Guest has all the ingredients of a classic existential thriller in the mode of Richard Wright’s Native Son, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Albert Camus’s The Stranger.
This is a worthy follow-up to Cline’s debut The Girls, and one which I’m sure will captivate the same discerning readership that made the author so celebrated in the first place. Just commercial enough to ensure Cline’s ongoing rise into stardom, just subversive enough to ensure that she maintains her street cred.
The Guest is published by Penguin
