The Guest by Emma Cline
Editorial Assistant Book Club: June 2023
How to Tell if a Book is Good
Before we get into The Guest, what it’s about and its deeper themes and ideas, the first box always worth checking with contemporary literature is how good the book is on technical level. With classics you can—usually—assume, given they’ve stood the test of time, that the writing is good enough to go right into talking about theme, ideas, and construction like you’re in an English class. With contemporary books it’s not a given that any book you pick up will be executed at a high level. Cliché, bad style, clunky diction, or just plain meandering, boring storytelling (I like to call this the curse of the quotidian; I recall one writer describing it roughly as “watching characters walk up and down steps”).
The Guest, Emma Cline’s second novel and third published work, passes this first crucial test. Cline has a modern, glassy and direct style that plugs right into your head and just plain moves. She’s in, probably, the 90th percentile of writers in terms of talent. You can see why any editor or publisher reading her debut The Girls (2016), which has the same level of writing as her latest, would flip when seeing this kind of technical ability from someone in their 20s. Not that ease-of-reading should be the only measure of execution, but The Guest took me less than two days to read.
This interesting this with this direct, smooth style, which is the dominant one among high-level contemporary literary fiction writers today, is that its simplicity often belies how difficult it is to pull off. Whether it is Emma Cline or paragon-of-the-Millennial-novelist Sally Rooney, it’s the kind of writing that fools readers into thinking because it’s not erudite or complicated that it would be easy to do. But make no mistake: Cline is a rare and very good writer. Here’s one such simple but musical sentence among many in The Guest:
“The thin sunlight caressed my memory, sugar bright on the cedar-shingled houses.” (pg. 21)
Or, this description, taken at random from the middle of the book:
“Alex curled around her bag, waiting to feel tired. The lightning, wherever it was, had stopped. The ocean look still, softened by mist. It was pretty at night, she decided, and probably too few people saw it like this, the indifferent beach empty. of humans. It was just itself: a stark edge.” (pg. 100)
One way to know a book is written at a high level is if you find yourself talking about a book’s ideas instead of its construction, which is certainly the case with The Guest. This is one way your mindset slowly starts to shift as you read hundreds of unpublished and contemporary novels as an editorial assistant and editor. You stop thinking in terms of immediate, personal like or dislike and begin to appreciate books that are good enough to be worth your time and make you think, even if you don’t end up falling in love with them.
The Guest by Emma Cline (May 16, 2023)
The Guest follows a young woman, Alex, who could probably be most accurately described as a sugar baby (not quite a prostitute or sex worker). The novel takes place over a summer week, when Alex goes out to a wealthy part of Long Island with her latest catch—an emotionally detached, much older investment professional—who she believes will be her salvation and ticket to a better life. When he kicks her out of the house and tells her to go back to the city, she instead decides to skip the train and wait out the week surviving in this cloistered, monied town by her sheer wit, grit, and sexuality, until the date of the older man’s Labor Day party, where she convinces herself she will win him back. The plot of the book is essentially a series of tasks of survival and combatting poverty (calling this book a thriller, as some reviews have, is a huge misnomer): how Alex will find food and shelter in the blistering summer elements, how she will obtain enough drugs and alcohol to get herself through this harrowing experience, and how she will cajole or steal from wealthy people of the town for all of the above.
A stunning neon-green cover, no notes
The Guest is worth reading no question, but when a writer passes the first test of executing a book at this level, they deserve a critical appraisal of a different kind. For as good of a writer as Cline is, the overall setup and dynamics of the story are fairly recognizable. Our protagonist is a pill-addicted, beautiful young woman; her sugar daddy, Simon, is a cold and detached, rigorously-regimented man in finance; and Alex’s former “lover,” a looming threat in the background, is a violent, big-bad guy named, obviously, Dom. Alex, our narrator, has no backstory. And, as if in an attempt to avoid cliché, we are told that she does not trade sex for wealth because she has been traumatized in the past and that she comes from a normal, stable family. Yet Cline never makes the alternative case for what in Alex’s past brought her here, why Alex has chosen this path, and how someone gets to her position without trauma being the driving force. Instead, the reader is left in a void to decide themselves how, who, and why this character is.
The lack of backstory or flashbacks in The Guest is an inspired, daring choice by Cline—it tosses aside the crutch of filling in easy motivations and characterizations that these devices can allow for. And it does have the tertiary benefit of giving the novel a relentlessly forward-driving momentum. However, in making this choice the writer has to meet her own challenge, giving characters depth and personality through action and dialogue instead of history. In this regard, the same effortless prose that is Cline’s strength also creates a kind of affect-free flatness to the people that populate her novel. The descriptions of the characters above are exactly how they are introduced and exactly how they remain, as if they are in a fairytale. Especially Alex, who we spend the most time with, and yet whose drug-soaked mind and aimlessness doesn’t actually reveal much about her at all. Over the course of 300 pages the animating force of her character is only her immediate need to solve her next problem—to practically survive while maintaining her only asset, her youthful beauty, the best she can. The overall register of the novel becomes something like a perpetually intoxicated, fogged-out nihilism.
The strongest evidence of this flatness of character surfaces in the dialogue, which at first is unnoticeable but then emerges as workmanlike in comparison to Cline’s finely constructed descriptive writing. Dialogue in The Guest is not used to express a character’s view or way of speaking, but as narrative putty to get to the next piece of description. As to avoid cherry picking sentences, my least favorite thing done among book critics, I chose two entirely random exchanges of dialogue in the book to illustrate this:
1) “Are you a rewards member?” the cashier said. “I just need the phone number.”
“Oh, no. No phone number.”
“If anyone in your family is a rewards member,” he said, “you can just use their phone number.”
When she shook her head, the man smiled at her, conspiratorial. “Tell you what. You can use mine,” he said scanning the laminated card. “And we just won’t tell, will we?” (pg. 137)
2) “Maybe try this way,” Alex said, the first day she was here, showing Simon a stroke that would lessen the strain on his tricky back. “It takes the pressure off.”
Simon corrected his stroke for a few lengths reining in his wild effort, then reverted back to his old form.
“You’re doing it again,” Alex said, making her way to Simon through the water. “Let me show you.”
“It’s fine,” Simon said, his voice clipped, shaking off Alex’s hand. (pg. 25)
These are just two of many instances where the dialogue is ordinary to the point of feeling perfunctory. While this dialogue is realistic to how people might actually speak, the choice to never deviate from this mode, much like the choice never to indulge in backstory, keeps us at arm’s length from the characters.
My guess is that many readers will not like what is—without saying or spoiling too much—an unsatisfying ending in traditional terms. But the bigger contention I have with The Guest is not the rendering of the story, but what the novel does not do in terms of sparking new angles or ideas about the world of the wealthy (checking the old boxes instead: vapid, banally evil, selfish) or the relationship between sex and power. When something is written flawlessly, we’re left to ask the deeper question: what was the purpose of telling this story in this way? The lack of building out these characters beyond their archetypes led to a familiar story of women holding power in their youth and sexuality until it clashes with wealth held by men or violence held by men, proving that this power is illusionary and second best. In a modern way, Cline paints Alex as not helpless or lacking agency, while still showing the reality that less power means less comfort and more danger. Who Alex or Simon or Dom are and how they as individuals or we collectively arrived to this place in society remains a mystery trapped under this glassy surface of The Guest.
The Girls & Daddy & Emma Cline’s Oeuvre
While The Guest didn’t hit the bestseller list, thus fulfilling our criteria for editorial assistant book club (no already giant, popular books!), it’s worth noting that Cline’s first book The Girls was a massive bestseller. These three books were acquired for a reported two-million dollars back in 2015 by Random House and The Girls was set up to be the huge, tent-pole book of this massive deal. Miraculously, it delivered on its promise. Technically a historical novel, The Girls is a take on Charles Manson from the perspective of one of the young girls in his compound, and covers many of the same themes in The Guest in terms of power dynamics, sex, and drugs. The Girls was an example of brilliant publishing—buying a book for a lot of money to galvanize attention, utilizing the young genius strategy we’ve talked about before here at Dear Head of Mine (Cline was 25, when they bought the books), and perfectly hitting on a kind of cool-girl, 60s rock-n-roll atheistic way before Daisy Jones was a thing.
Two bestsellers, three years apart, both published by imprints of Random House
Because The Guest was such a quick read on account of Cline’s writing, there was time to complete the troika of Cline’s published books with her short story collection Daddy (2020). Reading Cline’s stories, it is clear that she is a writer driven by obsessions, returning to the same ideas over and over. Primarily the two subjects of her stories, as with her novels, are young, desirable women in danger and powerful and/or middle-aged and/or wealthy men who treat women as disposable. Other random motifs emerge as well with the collection next to the two novels: drug-use (specifically pills), beautiful women with one long braid down their backs, and eye issues (many of the women in her stories as well as Alex in The Guest have persistent styes they are battling).
What’s refreshing about the stories is that while they cover similar ground, the shorter form seems to give Cline more freedom to deviate from the removed style of writing and get into peculiarity. Additionally, she appears to be more at ease with sketching a scene or scenario in the context of the short story form rather than adhering to the plot strictures of a full-length novel. While touching on similar themes as The Guest, in the first few stories in Daddy there are already a couple of sentences that, to this reader, are less reserved and stake more claims about the world than just about any of the sentences in her latest full-length novel. Here’s one:
“The employee entrance was around the back of the store, down an alley. This was before the lawsuits, when the brand was still popular and opening new stores. They sold cheap, slutty clothes in primary colors, clothes invoking a low-level athleticism—tube socks, track shorts—as if sex was an alternative sport.” (pg. 33-34)
“As if sex was an alternative sport” is an observation that carries weight and puts a stake in the ground. It articulates some kind of world view and the character’s view on sex and commerce.
Or take this description, which you can compare to the earlier description in The Guest at the start of this newsletter (the ocean seen from the beach: “a stark edge”).
“She walked the ten blocks to the parking lot. Even the cheapo apartment buildings were lovely at that hour, their faded colors subtle and European. She passed the nicer homes, catching slivers of their lush backyards though the slats of the high fences, the koi ponds swishy with fish.” (pg. 50)
Subtle parts of these sentences like “cheapo apartment” and, my favorite, “swishy with fish” are anything but removed. Even in description, they let the reader in on what kind of person we are following and what we might think critically about their environment, not simply moving through an environment that’s inflicted on us/them. The Guest was a bit disappointing in that Cline hadn’t seemed to evolve much in the seven years since her debut The Girls. But with so much talent it will be interesting to read what she writes next. Hopefully, whatever that is, it will be a little more swishy with fish.