Emma Cline’s The Guest packages rich liberal guilt for poolside consumption
Hannah Rowan
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Emma Cline, the author of the bestselling Manson cult novel The Girls, has a type for her leading ladies: “Pretty but creepy,” Kirkus Reviews calls it.
In reference to Alex, the antihero of The Guest, the first part may be too generous. As Alex descends from hot grifter to homeless has-been at the end of a long losing streak one summer, she blames a rigid class system. But Alex is also a pretty bad girl, and the pair’s self-indulgent class resentment turns Cline’s new novel into a pretty creepy book.
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Alex starts out on top of the world: She’s been picked up by an older man in a bar and is lazing away the summer at his beach house in the Hamptons. She knows how precarious the situation is, but the risk is worth it. She’s on the run from a former client and drug hookup after making off with his stash and his cash. At a dinner party with her boyfriend, Simon, she says she “felt some camaraderie with the men — here, like she was, to perform.” An almost implausibly seasoned hustler at age 22, she’s not overly worried when he dismisses her for flirting with another man. She’ll let him cool off and make up with him at his Labor Day party in a few days.
Except those few days end up passing more slowly, and painfully, than she expected. After emptying her closet, full of Simon’s gifts, into her beach bag, she charms and sneaks her way into college ragers, abandoned vacation houses, and exclusive country clubs, struggling through the last dog days of summer until she can return to her man.
Cline, who titled her previous book of short stories Daddy, has her brand of post-sexual revolution, late-capitalist class whining down pat. In six days, Alex hoovers enough painkillers and alcohol off of rich strangers that at least she doesn’t have to face down all this inequity sober, but still, she assumes that anyone who doesn’t own a swank second home like her enablers is as bitter as she is.
Yet despite all the mind-altering substances, the days pass slowly for Cline’s readers, too. It turns out that “waiting for my sugar daddy’s house party” is not the most gripping of plot devices. Cline’s prose doesn’t help: She never tires of reminding readers, in a vigilantly jaded tone, how much of a loser Alex believes she is — less because she’s a kleptomaniac drug addict and borderline prostitute than because she came from some nowheresville upstate. Alex enjoyed Simon’s parties because they allowed her to “believe, even for a half moment, that the story was different.” Spoiler: It never will be for a lower-class girl like her.
Girls who fail to become women are Cline’s great theme: girls who weren’t fortunate enough to be born as the daughters of the rich and powerful and now find that they have a hard time even selling themselves to them. “Girls dressed in drag as girls,” Cline calls these B-listers, with their cheap clothes and caked makeup. But arrested development, too, grows old.
It’s not just Alex’s adolescent self-absorption or her humorlessness but her inhumanity to two potential friends that finally becomes truly creepy and reveals Cline’s own cheap tricks as a novelist. A few days after being dumped by Simon, Alex meets a lonely teenager, Margaret, at a country club and spends a few hours with her to kill some time. Alex drinks Margaret’s wine and gives her a makeover. The girl, anorexic and miserable and pathetically grateful to be hanging out with an attractive older woman, begs her to stay. Alex recoils and runs off, justifying her cruelty by saying, “People’s unhappiness could so quickly infect you.”
This point, that misery does not after all breed company, could lead to a profound insight into the current vogue for sentimental class-martyr narratives. Hitting rock bottom doesn’t necessarily produce greater self-understanding or an ability to help one’s fellow sufferers. In reality, people often become all the more ruthless in stepping on others in their attempts to climb back out.
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And that’s precisely what Alex does: Her final masterstroke is abandoning Jack, the mentally ill son of a famous producer she’s been sponging off of, after he fails to deliver money he promised to steal from his father to pay back her drug hookup. “They’d both gotten something out of this. A fair exchange, in the end”: sex for him, a bed for her. A neat, transactional relationship. Heartless — but with a doomed girl such as Alex, how could it be anything else? In the end, Labor Day promises to offer neither labor nor leisure, and what Alex really needs is not commiseration or a new wealthy connection but help. She won’t get it.
Cline knows this is exactly the kind of glamorous ugliness many readers want with their mimosas this summer. But The Guest would be much less creepy if Cline, too, weren’t playing Alex’s game, critiquing the lifestyles of the wealthy while pandering to them by selling America’s class tensions in a way that’s palatable for poolside consumption.
Hannah Rowan is the managing editor of Modern Age.