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Emma Cline’s Latest Heroine Is a Call Girl on the Run

In “The Guest,” a 22-year-old traipses through the rarefied spaces of Long Island, N.Y., where she will never be fully welcome.

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By Liska Jacobs

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THE GUEST , by Emma Cline

All is not as it seems in Emma Cline’s latest novel, “The Guest,” a deceptively simple story about a young woman kicked out of her rich lover’s Long Island beach house in the final days of summer after embarrassing him at a party. Convinced that her breakup is only temporary, Alex plans to saunter back into Simon’s life at a Labor Day party he is hosting at the end of the week. All she has to do is wait out five days until then. What follows could be read as an entertaining series of misguided shenanigans interrupting the upper class’s summer vacation, but 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. And not just for her hosts, but for the novel itself.

You’d be forgiven for finding “The Guest” somehow familiar. Cline’s old-fashioned prose style at times had me in a shimmering state of déjà vu, bringing to mind the nimbleness and nuance of John Cheever, who also captured the rot beneath wealthy suburbia. And Alex — a pretty, pill-popping 22-year-old who uses sex as a means to an end — also ticks all the boxes of the apathetic, willfully destructive heroines in Joan Didion’s “ Play It as It Lays ” and Jean Rhys’s “ Good Morning, Midnight .” Where those authors ultimately come to a kind of clarity regarding their protagonists’ back stories and motivations, however, Cline keeps hers a mystery, a woman on the edge, unknown.

What we do know is that Alex’s roommates in New York City kicked her out a month ago after she’d stolen their pills and jewelry and failed to pay her share of the rent; that she’s no longer welcome at certain hotels or restaurants; that she owes money to someone named Dom, whose menacing messages light up her malfunctioning cellphone throughout the novel. She is a call girl on the run pretending to be something else — as Cline puts it, one of many “girls in drag as girls.” Before Alex’s banishment “out east,” she kept a “running list” of reminders: “Keep fingernails clean. Keep breath sweet. Don’t leave toothpaste in the sink basin.” Be appealing, but also be invisible. Alex knows she is replaceable, “a sort of inert piece of social furniture — only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman.”

To survive the five days until Labor Day, Alex drifts from house parties to beach clubs, gaining entry by posing as a party girl or a family friend or a sex kitten, a study in determined complacency as she figures out what people want and how to give it to them. “Even a glancing touch at their elbow, the barest squeeze of an arm, could short-circuit any wariness,” Cline writes. “Suddenly they were newly suggestible, eager to find steady footing in whatever story you offered.” We’ve seen this kind of calculated womanhood before, and know where it might lead; but in Cline’s fluid prose, it becomes tantalizing.

It also, of course, leads to trouble, for Alex and those around her. “You could perform a constant filtering of whatever you were feeling, taking in the facts and shifting them to the side,” she thinks. “There was a static that moved you from one moment to another, and then another after that, until the moments had passed, turned into something else.” The more performative the task, the louder the static in her head, and the more effaced and enshrouded Alex becomes. For this archetypical young woman — a blank, reflective surface — Didion and Rhys’s model of self-realization is impossible.

Instead, like Cheever’s short story “ The Swimmer, ” Alex’s beachside journey is a kind of modern-day Homeric odyssey, doomed by the hero’s own self-erasure, but also by an essential imbalance of power. Moving through this rarefied world, Alex is a cipher holding up a mirror, revealing the mechanics of a society that sees women as interchangeable commodities. “The women she passed on the sidewalks looked like mothers and daughters,” Alex observes as she prowls around town. “They were dressed to invoke the wives they either already were or would one day become, future domestic totems.” Women like Alex don’t stand a chance.

Unlike with Odysseus’ final homecoming, there is no anchoring in the realm of reality at the end of Alex’s journey. Every stop on her trajectory drifts further into illusion, into sleight of hand. Listening to a 17-year-old boy she’s hooking up with read to her from “Siddhartha,” both of them high on molly, Alex “couldn’t hold on to any details,” she thinks, “just a sense of forward motion, a journey. A man in search of something.” Cline leaves her own reader in a similar haze, our protagonist’s apathy obscuring any meaningful conclusions.

But Alex is not just a listener; she is, like Cline, a storyteller. “Most everyone preferred the story,” Cline writes. “Alex had learned how to provide it, how to draw people in with a vision of themselves, recognizable but turned up 10 degrees, amplified into something better.” Like the author herself, presumably, Alex knows the cost of selling a narrative, how every transaction in an environment that treats people and ideas as interchangeable can erase a piece of you. “Maybe she was the ghost she had always imagined herself to be,” Alex muses on the final day of her exile. “Maybe it was a relief.” More novels should probe the stakes of female performance.

Liska Jacobs is the author, most recently, of “The Pink Hotel.”

THE GUEST | By Emma Cline | 291 pp. | Random House | $28

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The Guest by Emma Cline review – strange depths and an arresting originality

The Girls author’s smart, menacing tale of a young female serial deceiver succeeds as a treatise on sex and alienation and an engrossing beach read

P ublished in the run-up to summer, Emma Cline ’s second novel is probably what people mean when they talk about a “beach read”. Whereas her 2016 debut, The Girls , arrived on a tsunami of hype and hazy lyricism, The Guest is the more controlled work of a fine talent maturing on its own terms. Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, it’s a gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality.

The story even begins on a beach. The ocean is amniotically warm, the sheen of sunscreen and the colour of bikinis filling the mise-en-scène as we meet our amorphous protagonist. An escort and a sugar baby, at 22 Alex is already in steep decline. Locked into a lifestyle of reciprocal benefit and exploitation, she’s in a relationship with a rich, “professionally healthy” man in his 50s named Simon. Like some AI dating-bot of the imminent future, Alex hoovers up data and adapts herself to her lover’s idea of who he’d like her to be: “All Alex’s unsavoury history excised until it started to seem, even to her, like none of it had ever happened.” As Simon grows suspicious, we infer that Alex has left in her wake a string of angry and disabused men. One of them, the ominously named Dom, has been texting and calling relentlessly since she ripped him off and disappeared.

In its early chapters The Guest looks like it’s shaping up to be another forensic look at the power dynamics between an attractive young woman and a wealthy, older man – the kind of thing so enjoyably done in Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times . But one of this novel’s pleasures is how it keeps setting up such expectations only to confound them, so that even halfway through you’re not entirely sure what kind of story this is, save a good one.

Alex’s audacity in compulsively deceiving everyone she meets is underwritten by her total lack of foresight. She has no plan – and little in the way of backstory either. There is (pointedly) no foundational trauma beneath her chaotically improvised life, which remains inexplicable even to her: “There wasn’t any reason, there never had been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.” In lieu of a stable identity or a horizon that extends beyond a string of randomly filled instants, she hopscotches from one disastrous decision to the next, keeping ahead of trouble through ceaseless forward momentum.

In the novel’s latter half, hoping to worm her way back into Simon’s life, she attaches herself to a morose teenager named Jack, even though she usually avoids younger men, who “had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality”.

The faintly frustrating lack of place names – we seem to be in California, but everyone is either in “the city” or “out east” – encourages allegorical readings. Without smothering her narrative in subtext, Cline gets at something universal – or at least late-capitalist – about the prostitution of experience and the commodification of sex and personality. Everyone is performing a role in exchange for protection and privileges: a boring woman’s much younger husband; a personal assistant named Nicholas whom Alex prods to say something mean about his employer; Alex’s fellow sugar-baby Dana.

The Guest echoes in its implications that tiny, haunting David Foster Wallace story from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men whose title is its own summarisation: A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life. In other words, Cline’s is the sort of elevated beach read that reflects a social order in which authentic response has vanished into a matrix of abstract, commercial relations. No one in the novel explicitly uses Instagram – Alex’s phone keeps dying – but reading it feels like Instagram; like wandering through a gleaming, depthless funhouse of thirst and desperation. You don’t have to read The Guest as a slant treatise on neoliberal precariousness and alienation, or as an even broader one on metaphysical estrangement – but it’s all there should you want it. Or just take it to the beach and savour every page.

Rob Doyle’s most recent book is Threshold

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‘The Girls’ novelist Emma Cline takes on the millennial grifter tale

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By Emma Clline Random House: 304 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

They say not to use high beams in fog. The water vapor refracts the intense glare of headlights back toward the driver in a way that actually decreases visibility. Best, then, to use low light. This is the vibe of a story by Emma Cline , who writes so luminously about the haziness of female desire that even the most revelatory moments unfold in a sort of soft focus. She writes so sharply about the uncertain contours of women’s wanting that the effect is one of compelling, almost pleasurable edgelessness.

Cline’s acclaimed first novel, “ The Girls ,” is a loose retelling of the Manson murders centered on the young women who get swept up in the treacherous orbit of a charismatic lecher. She followed that up with “ Daddy ,” a collection of stories; in one of them, an American Apparel employee starts a side hustle selling her worn underwear to men she meets online; in another, two women at a rehab center become infatuated with a male celebrity who checks in.

Her new novel, “ The Guest ,” proves Cline has become adept at portraying the eager heat of lust — not necessarily for sex, but for power and comfort — with cool insouciance. The narrative follows Alex, a 20-something sex worker who is staying for the summer with Simon, a wealthy art dealer in his 50s, at his vacation house on Long Island. Simon does not know about Alex’s profession. He also does not know that Alex is totally broke: Her roommates have evicted her from their Manhattan apartment due to nonpayment of rent, and most of her recurring johns have moved on. With no other prospects, she travels with Simon “out east.” “She had disappeared herself,” Cline writes, “it had been easy.”

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The word “easy” is repeated often in the first chapters of what becomes a quixotic new entry in the millennial grifter canon. “It had been easy to slot herself into Simon’s life here,” Alex thinks, “its textures and habits were so finely woven that Alex had only to submit.” When Alex dings Simon’s expensive car, she worries he’ll notice — if not the ding, then at least Alex’s guilt over it. Her simple solution is to become intimate with Simon: “How easily these things went.”

Alex attends a party thrown by one of Simon’s rich friends, a woman named Helen. The most interesting thing about Helen is that she has a much younger second husband, Victor, and it is Victor whom Alex sets her sights on. It’s not so much romantic as it is a recognition of some shared impostor syndrome . Victor shows Alex Helen’s pool before throwing her into it and following her in. Simon finds them, and soon he sends Alex packing back to the vacancy of her life in Manhattan.

At the train station, however, Alex hatches a plan. She decides to bide her time, drifting among the summer houses through some combination of hitchhiking, squatting, party-crashing and seduction until Simon’s end-of-summer bash, when they’ll both laugh it all off and Alex can be subsumed back into his life of ease. This is the inciting incident that gives the novel its plot, its clock, its stakes. For the rest of the run time, Alex schemes her way into the cars and pools and homes — and lives — of a series of unsuspecting vacationers. It’s a whole lot of fun, even if the people in the book barely have any.

If it all sounds a bit Cheever-y, that’s seemingly by design. The fact that swimming appears to be the only thing that gives Alex joy may well be a callback to John Cheever ’s landmark 1964 short story, “ The Swimmer ,” in which a middle-aged man traverses an upscale suburb by paddling across its denizens’ pools. “Being embraced and sustained by the light-green water,” Cheever writes, “seemed not as much a pleasure as the resumption of a natural condition.”

That could serve as an apt description of how “The Guest’s” protagonist moves and feels about the world. As with many of Cline’s heroines, Alex’s desires are at once basic and vaporous.

Emma Cline’s ‘The Girls’ is a gorgeous, disquieting spin on Manson family dynamics

“I was a daisy-fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me.” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita “The Girls” is gorgeous, disquieting, and really, really good.

June 10, 2016

Is it possible for a novel to be heavily erotic without being at all sexy? A lot of seduction occurs throughout the book, but hardly any of it pulses with real pleasure. At one point, Alex gets herself invited to a party thrown by young people sharing a house; she flirts with a guy and they eventually hook up, and Cline describes it so: “Her body was involved, her brain forced to recognize what was happening. A flush radiated through her — then what? Then nothing.”

Then what? Then more mostly empty houses and mostly empty kisses. The closest Alex comes to directly expressing sensuality is when she looks at a famous painting hanging on someone’s wall; it’s not a print or a facsimile but the original: “It’s like I’m getting a high off this,” she says. “Like, just purely off the estimated value.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she comes most alive when confronted by others’ wealth, and it’s in these moments that the novel comes most alive as well. Early in the book, Cline describes a rich man as being “tanned to the color of expensive luggage.” Alex watches someone else’s groundskeeper mow the lawn and thinks, “So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.”

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Alex is so attuned to the “textures and habits” of the elite, so sure she can pull one over on them that she of course hoodwinks herself. In “The Girls” Cline writes, with a mix of resignation and defiance, that the trick young women can perform is to “smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.” Her follow-up novel expands on this; is it possible, Cline asks, to be both the joker and the butt of the joke, the driver and the passenger, the owner and the guest, all at once?

Atmospheric and at times incandescent, “The Guest” is a story about the ways people turn themselves into ghosts in order to become more seen. As a narrative and a reading experience, it’s about how low lights are often the only way through the fog.

Hart’s first novel, “We Do What We Do in the Dark,” was released in 2022.

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by Emma Cline ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2023

A propulsive read starring an irresistible antihero.

A week in the life of a 22-year-old grifter in the Hamptons.

Cline does pretty-but-creepy like no one else and now takes her brand of alluring ickiness to the wealthy enclaves of Long Island (the location is unnamed but clearly recognizable) in the last week of summer. We meet Alex swimming in the ocean, high on painkillers she's stolen from her man of the moment, a "civilian" named Simon who doesn't know Alex is a working girl and who has invited her to spend the month of August at his place "out east." She floats along thinking about the pile of shoes left at the entrance to the beach, "how easy it would be to take things, out here. All sorts of things. The bikes leaning against the fence. The bags unattended on towels. The cars left unlocked, no one wanting to carry their keys on the beach. A system that existed only because ev­eryone believed they were among people like themselves." Unfortunately, Alex makes a judgment error at a party that evening and ends up getting delivered by Simon's personal assistant to the train station. But she can't go back to the city—her roommates have kicked her out, she's no longer welcome in certain restaurants, and there's a dangerous man who is very, very angry with her. Instead of boarding a train, she attaches herself to a group arriving for a shared rental, successfully pretending to be one of the invitees. When that stops working, she finds another mark. Alex is very good at fooling others, but the trouble is that she's also fooling herself, thinking if she can just make it until Simon's Labor Day party at the end of the week, he'll welcome her return. The riveted reader watches helplessly as her mistakes pile up and the sense of imminent disaster steadily soars, humming in every sentence. "Alex passed the white skeleton of a lifeguard tower." "So many people with open, gnashing mouths and glasses in their hands, their private moons of alcohol." Cline's writing is an addictive treat, and if her cliffhanger ending cuts us off like a mean drug dealer, maybe cold turkey is the only way.

Pub Date: May 16, 2023

ISBN: 9780812998627

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023

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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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The Guest by Emma Cline review – a stylish follow-up to The Girls

A young escort searches for security among the leisured wealthy in Cline’s clever study of precarity and excess

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Like Emma Cline’s celebrated 2016 debut The Girls , The Guest has a deceptively simple premise, and its achievement is to wring much nuance, tension and contradiction from it. It is a novel of precarity and excess, moving chaotically from beach to beach and pool to pool over the course of a late-summer week on what seems to be Long Island. This watery setting is navigated by a curiously liquid protagonist, Alex, a 22-year-old escort, as she improvises and adapts to survive.

Alex is introduced as a guest of Simon, a rich man 30 years her senior, whom she has recently begun dating in “the city”. She was losing clients, had got terminally behind on rent and had just stolen a large amount of money from a regular, when she met Simon and saw an opportunity. When Simon asks her to spend August at his summer house, she abandons her room and her debt and sets about making herself a permanent part of his luxurious life.

However, two weeks in, Simon buys her a one-way ticket back to the city after a faux pas at a party in which she falls in the pool with the host’s husband. From this point the narrative explores the contemporary logic of an old maxim: sink or swim. Alex decides not to return to the city, and instead to grift her way through a week, attaching herself to various groups and individuals, hoping ultimately to return to a forgiving Simon at his long-planned Labor Day party.

Cline uses the metaphorical possibilities of water, pools and beaches deftly. These are conspicuous leitmotifs that, because of their symbolic richness, never feel overdetermined. The novel opens with Alex swimming at the beach near Simon’s house, where the water is a kind of camouflage in which there is “no way to tell whether she belonged here or didn’t”. But soon she is caught in a rip tide and only makes it to shore by swimming sideways with the current. This foreshadows the intuitive moves she makes to merge into the lives of various island-dwellers. Though Alex is repeatedly found out or seen through, she keeps “swimming” – and surviving. At times she seems to slip successfully into the wealthy world she sees as an escape from a life of hustling, but mostly she is rejected. In one scene late in the narrative, Alex again heads into the ocean and the waves violently knock her over. She braces for wave after wave, wondering how long she can stay afloat while simultaneously feeling “she could swim for ever”. This current of cruel optimism proves alarmingly strong despite the brutal divisions of social class that grow starker as the narrative progresses.

Attempted social mobility is a foundational and recurring theme in American writing, and yet The Guest feels fresh. Early sections depicting the absurdities of the grotesquely rich do echo recent satirical narratives such as The White Lotus or Glass Onion , but give way to powerful scenes of rough sleeping and survival sex. Cline’s vision of wealth also gains complexity through the way Alex both desires and is disgusted by it. Her party faux pas occurs, tellingly, when she feels a “desire for the night to sharpen into action”; this scene is echoed later when she impulsively marks a valuable painting.

These contradictory impulses enrich a character who is both insightful and naive but also strangely spectral and blank. We learn she comes from a place where “the arc of your life was already determined”, but no details emerge. She has feelings of being ghostly or “inhuman”, at one point noting “with certainty, that she did not exist”. This is partly about class-based humiliation, but it also constitutes an openness that makes her relatable. She is a sex worker, and this has a critical bearing on some of her relationships, but Cline’s approach to this is never lurid or crude. Ultimately, Alex is a poor young person struggling in a world where material wealth is highly visible and where the pernicious ethos of meritocracy is ubiquitous.

The Guest does not share the violent historical context of The Girls – the mystique and crimes of the Manson family – and may not receive the same plaudits and coverage. It is a better novel, though, and cements Cline’s place as one of America’s great contemporary stylists.

• The Guest by Emma Cline is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Emma Cline’s ‘The Guest’: Let’s discuss that ending

‘the guest’ concludes without a conclusion. here are some thoughts on that cliffhanger..

The following article contains spoilers for the novel “The Guest.”

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story,” Orson Welles said. Imagine, for instance, if “Anna Karenina” or “The Great Gatsby” had concluded a few chapters earlier. The endings might not have been happy, but Anna wouldn’t be under the wheels of a train or Gatsby floating face down in a swimming pool.

Perhaps no recent novel has generated more buzz about an ending than Emma Cline’s terrific sophomore novel, “ The Guest .” (In 2016, she gave us a stunning debut, “ The Girls .”) There’s a lot to love in “The Guest,” a tale of a 22-year-old sometimes sex worker in the Hamptons named Alex who has wound up homeless after getting kicked out of her sugar daddy’s summer place a week before Labor Day with no place to go. Her plan? Simply stay at the tip of the island until her rich ex has his annual end-of-summer blowout and show up uninvited; then, Alex convinces herself, all will be forgiven and he’ll take her back.

Emma Cline sets a smoldering thriller in the Hamptons

And after a hero’s journey involving drinking, drugs, riptides, car accidents (one minor, one not), sleeping with a teen, “borrowing” a child from his nanny at an exclusive swim club, finding (and losing) a dog and avoiding a threatening fellow named Dom from whom she stole a lot of money (all gone now), she does get to that Labor Day party, where …

I won’t spoil it for you.

But I will tell you I was drawn to the book in part because I read the reviews and saw so many social media posts where people said they had to talk about the ending . They had to . Novelist Keziah Weir (“The Mythmakers”) wrote a terrific article about it (with, as she warns us, “spoilers galore”) in Vanity Fair, including lots of folks weighing in on what the ending means. Conjectures include Alex being dead — She’s a ghost! — and the idea she’s not dead … yet … but will be any second thanks to the aforementioned Dom or that increasingly agitated teen boy with whom she slept.

I would say the ending is a glorious fever dream, but, in some ways, the whole novel is a fever dream. In fact, it’s kind of a nightmare, as this young woman who knows that her survival depends on her youth and beauty and clean breath is living out of a small overnight bag and discovering that, alas, she’s starting to stink and her breath just might not be great. Her phone, which she accidentally brought with her into a swimming pool while cavorting inappropriately at a Hamptons soiree — one of the reasons her older, pseudo-boyfriend sends her packing — is a classic midnight phantasm. Just like those nightmare airplanes that never quite get off the ground or those nightmare business meetings you never quite get to on time, her phone never quite works. It switches on just long enough for her to see a threatening message or call from Dom, and then it shuts down. And still Alex clutches it like a life preserver.

‘The Girls,’ by Emma Cline: Charles Manson, reimagined

She was always a hot mess, but by the end of the novel, she may be just a mess. Which meant I devoured the book. “Dad,” my daughter said to me once after reading a rough draft of one of my own novels, her tone kind and a little bemused, “take this as a compliment, because I mean it that way. But I think one of your sweet spots as a writer is seriously messed-up young women.”

I wasn’t offended. I knew she was right. The truth is, I’m drawn to novels where people make very bad decisions — often the sorts of books that compel readers to flood Goodreads with comments like, “I couldn’t relate to the main character because every choice she made was moronic.” Write me a character like Camille Preaker, the self-loathing, alcoholic cutter at the center of Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects,” and I’m hooked. To paraphrase Emma Lazarus, give me your damaged, your flawed, your huddled masses yearning not to screw up yet again.

So, that ending. Aristotle suggested that the perfect ending is both surprising and inevitable. We don’t see it coming, but we can’t imagine the story ending any other way. There are exceptions, of course, including any book, movie or musical about the Titanic. The same goes for rom-coms.

Emma Cline has done something that I think is courageous. She ignores Aristotle and our conventional notions of happy endings and tragic denouements. With few exceptions, books usually begin in media res — in the middle of things. But they don’t end there. Authors tell us how their characters’ journeys have ended. They lived happily ever after, for instance, or you’re reading Cormac McCarthy.

But Cline ends her novel in media res. Alex seems to have gotten to the party, but the fever dream continues. Would she be dead if Cline had written one more page or even one more sentence? How about arrested? Hospitalized? Or merely escorted from the soiree? Might she be reconciled with the party’s host and her former sugar daddy? (Nope. Not in this universe.) That’s the thing about nightmares and dreams. They have their own logic and their own rules. And that, I think, is why anyone who has read “The Guest” wants to find someone to talk to.

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 24 books, including “The Flight Attendant,” “Hour of the Witch” and the forthcoming “The Princess of Las Vegas.”

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The Ending of The Guest Is Anyone’s Guess

By Keziah Weir

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In an era of frantic IP grabs and rampant adaptation, it’s nigh impossible to avoid dreamcasting popular books. I personally prefer a more musical exercise: I slot in an outro song, what might play as the final image dissolves in my mind. Nico and the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” closes Rebecca, say. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” ushers out Crime and Punishment. And for the enigmatic ending of Emma Cline ’s The Guest , this summer’s deeply unsettling Hamptons beach bag must-have, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”

Imagine it, if you’ve read it. Alex, our wayward antihero, kicked out of her boyfriend Simon’s house and tailed by Dom, a shady acquaintance, has spent the majority of the book clawing her way from pool to pool, air-conditioned room to air-conditioned room, leaving only destruction in her wake as she waits out the days before Simon’s Labor Day party. There, she believes, she’ll enact a triumphant return. But when she arrives at the party, “this was all wrong—why was Simon making that face? Why did his eyes seem to look at something beyond her?” The book’s final lines:

Okay. Simon had been waiting for her. She would go to him. He was waiting for Alex, and all she had to do was walk over.

Now, she told herself, willing her limbs to work. She didn’t move.

A long pause, broken by the pure tremolo of an electric guitar and the smooth, smooth voice of Stephen Stills: “There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear…”

What exactly is happening at the end of The Guest ? Those last lines yawn open like a gaping wound. It’s The Awakening ’s Edna Pontellier walking into the ocean. (“Her arms and legs were growing tired,” Kate Chopin writes. “She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.”) It’s the onion-rings-and-parallel-parking cut-to-black of the Sopranos finale . (“Don’t Stop Believin’” would, incidentally, be another great closing song for The Guest. ) The entire book is something of a Rorschach test for its reader: Does Alex lean victim or villain? Which ominous threads point to which inevitable conclusion? Is death on the brain, or something more carceral?

My own Rorschach reaction as I read those final sentences was that Dom, her maybe-pimp, is Chekhov’s gun. Dom’s the reason Alex is so keen to hightail it out of the city for the summer, as he’s displeased with her for making off with his cash and drugs. Dom, who “agreed to meet her at the train station,” who “sent a screenshot of Simon’s company website,” who once woke Alex with his hands around her throat, of whom Alex is “genuinely afraid.” When Alex sees Simon looking not at but past her, I figured it’s because he’s watching Dom, who has arrived to—what? Place her in a second, more successful chokehold? Shoot her, rendering her motionless for a split second before her brain shuts off for good?

Is the evidence there, though, on the page, for such an ending? Dom does loom increasingly large in the narrative, and there’s precedent for his stalking. Back in the city, “leaving her place one morning, she’d spotted Dom across the street. Dom lingering on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets.” But Alex has a slippery brain; she’s as pilled-up and unreliable as a close-third-person narrator gets. The word maybe appears in The Guest 100 times.

And Dom is far from being Alex’s only ticking time bomb. There are her two car accidents, including one that is the penultimate scene, leaving her injured to some degree. There’s her near-drowning six pages in. There’s Simon’s assistant, who seems to know her game. (Maybe it’s not Buffalo Springfield that plays Alex off the stage. Maybe it’s Laura Branigan —Alex as a stand-in for the mythic Gloria.) There’s Simon’s friend George, whose painting she defaces. The clouds may part for Simon’s party, but they sure gather for Alex.

Why are her limbs unable to move despite her willing them to? That could certainly suggest her shuffling off this mortal coil—except that Alex is often trying and failing to do things: to smile, to appear calm. During that first dangerous swim, “she tried to head back in, toward the beach, but she wasn’t seeming to get anywhere, her strokes eaten up by the water.” Just before she bangs up Simon’s car, “[s]he tried to back into a driveway to turn around.” Constantly, throughout: “She tried to turn on her phone.”

Do clues lie elsewhere? Perhaps in John Cheever’s 1964 story “ The Swimmer ,” the title of which, Cline told Vanity Fair , topped the book’s manuscript for much of the writing process? In it, a married father of four named Neddy leaves a gathering to swim from pool to pool, all the way home. “Had you gone for a Sunday-afternoon ride that day, you might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulder of Route 424, waiting for a chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, or had his car broken down, or was he merely a fool?” When Neddy arrives at his house, expecting to find his wife and daughters waiting for him, the door handles are rusty, the gutters loose. The place is empty.

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By Charlotte Klein

“I remembered the story as this surreal journey that starts off so light, and this sense for the character that they can live this way forever,” Cline told me in that VF interview. “And by the end, ending up in this place that’s so far from what you thought, and being so estranged from your own life. There’s something really haunting about it to me.”

Of The Guest ’s end, she said, “I knew from the beginning the emotional temperature of the ending, how I wanted it to feel. I didn’t know what the specifics were, but I knew where I wanted the book to leave this character.”

That’s the thing about a book like this—the ending, maybe, isn’t so much a what-then as it is a state of mind. I’m content in the lingering unease, the creepy dissonance of an upbeat song playing on repeat.

But just ask Alex: Where did anyone get, in life, being content? Other people who read it have provocative ideas. So, herein, a host of theories.

All of Alex’s maneuverings would be impossible if she didn’t look the way she does: pretty, young, white, with nice clothes. (I didn’t feel any dread for Alex, reading the book. I was feeling dread for the people whom she was impacting, the people without power. Not the Simons or the Helens, but the caretaker at the house where she scratches the painting, and the nanny at the swim club whose charge she co-opts.) But that changes, in the end. She’s in the car accident with Jack, and I’m assuming that the airbags have gone off, and she’s dirty, and even though she’s changed in the bathroom, I think her hair is messy, and that stye in her eye is back. She’s probably got a bloody lip or something—because the way it’s set up, she so wants to be clean. She looks in the mirror, but it’s brushed metal, so she can’t really see what’s going on. When she finally sees Simon, she’s probably got a weird look on her face, because she’s Alex. I don’t think Simon is at all pleased that she’s standing on his lawn, but I don’t think he’s calling the cops, because I don’t think he wants to make a scene. Simon cares too much about appearances, but he’ll just get someone to get her out of there, and then she has nowhere else to go. I think that Alex is not long for the world and that, ultimately, no good comes of Dom. He’s probably hunting her down. — Miwa Messer, creator and host of Poured Over: The B&N Podcast ; friend of VF

I think she has to be dead. And that’s a sociocultural read. People like her aren’t arrested. The only thing that stops them is death, right?— Tressie McMillan Cottom, VF contributor and author of Thick: And Other Essays

I read The Guest like I might take lines of cocaine: in small doses inhaled at frequent intervals. I found the protagonist so stressful that I could only assume her consciousness for five pages before taking a break to anxiously pace my room, only to mainline her antics again. So when the novel ended with Alex—after she’s maneuvered herself, over five days, into weekend party rentals, art-filled mansions, members-only beach clubs, and a hookup’s ex-girlfriend’s empty beach house—being stunned into immobility after finally making it to her now ex’s Labor Day party, I was less perplexed by the plot and more subsumed by the book’s overall mood, which felt orchestrated to mimic a drug rush (or even a shopping spree or the fulfillment of any desire) where the high of attainment meets the inevitable comedown, landing with a horrific thud—like someone cannonballing unknowingly into a water-drained pool. —Alexis Cheung, VF contributor and editorial director for Four One Nine and EADEM

Alex dies in the car crash with Jack and goes to Simon’s Labor Day party as a ghostly figure, desperate to resolve her unfinished business with him. Her unwavering belief that supersedes everything, even the finality of death, is that all will be resolved if she can just get to the party, back to Simon and the life she had before. Obsession has kept her alive during the novel’s desperate week, and it now tethers her to earth forever. She will now haunt the place where she last had some modicum of happiness and safety, as an eternal, unwanted guest. — Maggie Robe, marketing & events manager at Flyleaf Books , Chapel Hill, NC; friend of VF

Perhaps because I spent my own weekend mostly abed, nursing an old dance injury in the soft glow of my own (doctor-prescribed and much more chill) painkiller haze, The Guest read like the most important thing I could possibly be doing with myself. I didn’t root for Alex; I didn’t root for anyone, truly, except maybe the beach dog. I did want to see how this ascetic, wandering beggar on her quest for spiritual illumination—a reunion with her wealthy boyfriend elevated to the divine plane—would meet her end. It didn’t matter what the end was exactly. I was entranced with the how, the getting there. So this bleary conclusion ruefully throws my own intentions in my face, because what exactly has happened? In my reading, I imagine it is Jack behind Alex, looking even worse off than she does post-car-accident and about to do the “bad thing” he warned about repeatedly—not to himself, but to her. Truly innocence lost. Sure, Dom had been the long-looming phantom, but Jack was right there, ready to tip over the edge. Then you take into consideration the murky, maybe-violent business with his ex-girlfriend, and well… Like its cinematic spiritual kin, Uncut Gems, this ride only ends as all things end: in death. —Arimeta Diop, editorial assistant

The odd thing about Alex is that she is hyperconfident about her ability to get away with things, but she almost always gets caught. The taillight, the painting, Dom’s money, et cetera, et cetera. The story of the book is in some ways the story of all her bad behavior catching up with her, in cumulative fashion. The schadenfreude of seeing her torture all these privileged people is matched only by the schadenfreude of seeing her get her due. So by that logic, my theory is not that she dies or gets killed, but rather that she is finally busted once and for all, whether by a hand on the shoulder from Dom or a pair of cuffs around her wrists. The gig is up, and the Hamptons are once again safe for people who can’t imagine why anyone would steal a shoe. —Michael Hogan, executive digital director

At first I felt a sense of shame come over me, like I just wasn’t getting it. What the fuck is happening here ? So I reread the ending, starting from the (second, final) car accident, like a good English major. Then, like a bad English major, I put aside all the drowning/ghost (the Guest = the Ghost?) imagery and arrived at my own little not fully formed take: Alex is critically wounded with a neck injury, on a consciousness-losing number of pills, and looks completely messed up (grimy duffel, funky eye, sweat-stained dress, probably not smelling delish)—but not necessarily like she needs urgent medical attention. Like, no need to call an ambulance—just the cops, very discreetly, which Lori does, while everyone else less discreetly shuns her. (Is this capitalism responding to the mental health crises of the vulnerable or what?!) As the cops show up, with Simon spotting them behind her, she either succumbs to her injuries and self-medication or “goes crazy,” despite her assurances throughout the book that she never would. — Claire Howorth, executive editor

The book begins with Alex nearly drowning, and ends with her actually drowning. When those little girls bump into her, she definitely doesn’t fall. But she did—into the pool. Now, the aquatic references are numerous and echo earlier underwater scenes. Everything she experiences makes more sense now: muffled voices, languid movements, a “sun like a sodium flash.” Why didn’t her limbs work at the end? Her body had gone limp. She used her last bit of power to slightly widen her smile at Simon—not too much, don’t want to look desperate while literally dying—hoping to lure him. — Mike Nizza, publisher of Bloomberg Opinion ; friend of VF (and Claire’s husband)

I assumed that some type of security had come to collect Alex, since Simon was looking beyond her in the final scene. Also, she maybe collapsed from injuries sustained in the car accident. The last lines say she couldn’t move, and it seems like the end of the road for her could have been very literal and physical. Whatever happened, though, she loses and the Simons at the party win, in spite of their having to endure the mild discomfort of a strange character at their party. — Kenzie Bryant, staff writer

I think it’s safe to say that Alex has suffered head trauma significant enough that it’s physically apparent. There’s a moment after the accident where she can’t remember Jack’s name and refers to him as the boy. She never gives herself a clear look before going to the party, and the lack of acknowledgment from the people there makes it almost seem like she has walked into a random house and is imagining Simon, his guests, and the staff. — Fred Sahai, associate web producer

This entire book was my personal nightmare, and it’s my theory that it was quite literally all a dream. Have you ever had that nightmare where you try to call 911, only your phone won’t work? That’s all I could think of every time Alex tried to use her phone. The never-ending grift-and-drift from person to person, house to house, felt endless and horrifying, the way some bad dreams continue on and on. The ending, after her getting into the car crash, and arriving at the party, only to find everyone staring at her and that her legs won’t move? Don’t tell me that’s not a nightmare. — Kelly Butler, director of editorial operations

One of the best things about The Guest —and there are a lot of best things; this is the best book—is the heightened sense of wonder that accompanies Alex’s journey, even as her experience mostly consists of the most mundane Hamptons activities. This wide-eyed remove gives the whole text its nimble comedic rhythm that occasionally snowballs to become brutally hilarious. Make no mistake, this is a deliciously funny book, even more so on rereads. To put myself at risk of overanalyzing a great thing that really doesn’t need a cottage industry of hot-take-ery (if you haven’t read The Guest, stop reading this, and go read The Guest ), here’s my piece about the end. It’s pretty simple. When Alex completes her odyssey, our hero’s Ithaca is just another dumb Hamptons party with bad canapés and art-adjacent hangers-on she thinks she recognizes. Instead of a melodramatic flourish, the book ends with Simon seeing Alex at his party, and she freezes up, having spent so much time imagining this very moment. But she doesn’t cause a scene. There’s something way more scandalous to talk about that happened at another Hamptons party, at another house; no need to let such a small thing like an unwanted party crasher distract away. It’s a wonderfully droll way to end a wickedly fun and flat-out brilliant book, and I could not have been more pleased.— Nate Freeman, staff writer

The car crash reads as darkly humorous to me, as a wink and nod to the “disaster you can’t look away from” trope. The final scene finds Alex once again arriving at a party at which she doesn’t belong. However, this time, everything’s different. Simon doesn’t seem to recognize her and even seems to look beyond her (or through her, as if she no longer exists). To me, rather than imparting a ghost story ending, this scene places the reader in the shoes of a narrator at a crossroads, one at which she must finally take accountability and act as a realized person—“Now.” The cliff-hanger cleverly leaves the reader unmoored, as they have been throughout the entire novel, despite the book’s ending on a breaking point. The discourse around the ending reflects the feeling of liminality Cline creates. We are mere guests in Alex’s reality; we don’t belong there. — Jaylen Lopez, host of the Reading the Room podcast; friend of VF

The ending of The Guest forces the reader to use their imagination, which many people seem to dislike. The book is full of tension, and the countdown to the Labor Day party is perfectly crafted and drenched in a steamy summer pill haze, slow and simmering, which I find pretty romantic. Did the staff spot her and call the police? Did Simon merely have her dismissed from the party? Is she dead? Did Dom shoot her? Is this all a dream? WHO CARES? I read this book in two days because it was captivating. I respect a cliff-hanger and can make up my mind, and I don’t even have a particularly active imagination. I advise the angry mob of lit nerds to do the same. —Chris Black, cohost of the How Long Gone podcast, friend of VF

They all beached off. — Ken, probably

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Emma Cline’s Vacay-Bummer Novel

By Sarah Chihaya

In the early pages of Emma Cline’s “ The Guest ,” Alex, the titular guest, wanders away from a dinner party at a palatial home on Long Island. She drifts into an empty, impersonal room, which houses an armchair, a flower in a vase, a fake log in an unused fireplace, and a few ugly but probably expensive knickknacks. She palms the one item that catches her eye, a small, pleasingly carved stone—perhaps an animal, perhaps just an abstract shape. It seems to be the only item of interest in this space, which is otherwise “a non-room, dead and unused.”

The room is a bit like Alex herself: studiously un-particular, with an undefined quality that intrigues the viewer just enough to inspect some contours. Alex is not dead, but she does sometimes imagine herself as a ghost, “wandering the land of the living,” or as an “inert piece of social furniture—only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman.” If this is a non-room, we might think of Alex as a non-heroine. She is neither a warm, strong character who engages hearts nor a prickly, charismatic one who provokes minds; she is simply a woman trying to glide safely through the world of the book. “That was the point of Alex,” Cline writes, “to offer up no friction whatsoever.”

We learn very few of the facts of Alex’s life, either directly or indirectly. She is a sex worker in “the city” (New York, never named), and has been since she arrived from some undisclosed, possibly rural place—she’s twenty-two now, and already worried about looking too old. She has shoulder-length brown hair and dirty fingernails, and is skinny, tall, and pretty, though “not beautiful enough to be a model.” It’s never stated, but Alex is white, or at least white-passing. Given what unfolds, she couldn’t be anything else.

As the book opens, Alex is spending the summer on what is apparently the ritzy east end of Long Island—hints of “ The Great Gatsby ,” again unnamed—with the affluent Simon, “a kind person, mostly,” though it’s immediately clear to the reader that the relationship is transactional in his eyes, whether or not he knows that she’s an escort. The escape is just what Alex needed. There’s nothing for her in the city, where she’s been kicked out by her roommates for thieving and failing to pay rent, and she’s passively on the run from Dom, a vaguely menacing man from whom she stole some large amount of drugs and money. When we meet her, she feels safe, cushioned by painkillers and the easy richesse of Simon’s life style—driving his expensive car to the beach, wearing the expensive new dresses he’s bought her.

But after a couple of missteps Simon tells her to leave. Alex is faced with a decision: she can return to the city, with a possibly dangerous criminal on her tracks, or she can wait out Simon’s anger. She decides on the latter, convincing herself that he’ll welcome her back at his annual Labor Day party in a week. All she has to do is get through six days on her own, armed only with her designer clothes, her sedated wits, and a mostly dead phone.

In another novel, Alex could easily fit into the heroine or anti-heroine category. Her situation is desperate, her self-deception profound, and her moral compass unpredictable: a good setup for sympathy, fascination, or both. Cline, however, is assiduously uninterested in molding Alex into one thing or another. This mutability is partly Alex’s job; she prides herself on her ability to case a client’s needs and smoothly be shaped by them. During her week adrift, this trait becomes a survival skill, allowing her to insinuate herself into social situations where she might find a bed or a meal. Because she is young, pretty, well-dressed, and white, the privileged people she meets believe that she is who they assume she is: a young city dweller reliving college debauchery at a squalid house share; someone’s trusted “friend of the family”; a perky graduate from upstate. These people let her unquestioningly into their house parties, their country club, their cars, and their homes, never seeing through the mist of appropriateness that surrounds her. The only characters who penetrate this narcotic, wealth-induced haze are the others in service positions, to whom her gambit is embarrassingly clear.

“The Guest,” like its non-heroine, is something of a shape-shifter. The book restlessly flits between familiar forms; during Alex’s sojourn, it seems equally plausible that nothing will happen and that a whole lot of violent something will. Will the novel turn out to be a take on the white-woman-in-peril thriller? A cool, provocative sketch of an unlikable protagonist? Leaning into its Long Island locale, perhaps a Gatsbyesque romantic drama?

There are stagy whispers of all of the above, but “The Guest” actually engages more closely with two other types of narrative. The first is the contemporary class satire: the post-“ Parasite ” turn, especially in film and television, toward punishing sendups of the one percent. Cline’s novel falls into a genre that could more precisely be called “the vacay bummer,” in which ludicrously rich people are reproved for their life styles while on ludicrously decadent vacations. Examples range in subtlety from the delicious, meticulous discomfort of Mike White’s “ The White Lotus ” to the heavy-handed comic butchery of Mark Mylod’s “The Menu”; in the middle of the spectrum, we might throw in Ruben Östlund’s “ Triangle of Sadness ” and Rian Johnson’s “ Glass Onion .” As Sam Adler-Bell wrote of this uneven crop of class-warfare entertainment, “hostility to the ultrarich has become a marker of modish cultural literacy.”

“The Guest” initially seems like an exemplar of the form, given its damning descriptions of the well-to-do. Alex, like Cline, is a consummate collector of details, deeply attuned to her moneyed environs. She learns the dutiful banter—“Everyone said it was beautiful out here. How many times could this sentiment be repeated? It was the polite consensus to return to, the bookend to every conversation”—and how to pass among the blandly interchangeable rich, the women in “white cropped pants, expensive sandals, pearl earrings.” Both the absurdity and the incredible dullness of this world are apparent to her. Some of the people she encounters are flatly loathsome, like the dinner-party hostess who, after hearing about a woman who murdered her children and kept them in a freezer, simply says, “The freezer must have been very big.” (She also asks for its brand.) Others, like the children, are pitiable, but not too pitiable: “Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.”

Yet Cline’s novel is also aware that the fantasy of eat-the-rich stories is just that: a fantasy. In a show like “The White Lotus,” this point is made through cutting, extravagant farce, but here it comes on like a bruise: slow, dull, and inevitable. Alex’s ambitions are limited to survival, and she has neither the cunning nor the bandwidth to blow up the system, or even to get a score from her marks. She doesn’t want to destroy the rich; in fact, she constantly tries not to ruffle their uniformly groomed feathers. She merely passes the time, day by day, pill by mind-dulling pill.

These qualities place her in direct opposition to one of the genre’s tropes: the female outsider who, much like the “final girl” in horror films, emerges triumphant from the ruins of her surroundings. Consider Lucia (Simona Tabasco) in “The White Lotus” or Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) in “The Menu”—keen, streetwise young women, on the make, whose class difference allows them to see the rotting core of a gilded world. Like Alex, Lucia and Margot are sex workers tangled in the lives of their clients. This figure often seems key to the form, a sharp edge that makes the unctuous smoothness of the rich look unnatural, unsustainable. Alex is more of a bumpy protrusion than a sharp edge, and her passivity, her lack of drive or guile, grinds down the edge of the genre itself. “The Guest” is not a caustic takedown of the rich, but a queasily unfunny reminder of their invulnerability.

In the 1984 study “ Reading for the Plot ,” Peter Brooks argued that desire was the engine of storytelling. Narratives were about desire, but they also relied on it as a dynamic—it was what kept us turning the page, immersed in the text. For Brooks, a model was the 1554 Spanish novella “Lazarillo de Tormes .” The book is one of the earliest examples of the other genre that Cline interrogates: the picaresque novel. “Lazarillo” tracks the adventures of the pícaro, or rascal, a character who willfully rejects social convention, and who navigates a loosely plotted string of dramatic episodes, making daring escapes using his wits and luck. The form lends itself to satire: the protagonist, who rarely changes through the course of the book, skips from one milieu to the next, exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of the people he encounters. This is precisely Alex’s function in “The Guest.”

But, for a character constantly gauging the desires of others, Alex can seem curiously devoid of desires herself, at least beyond the will to survive. As Brooks notes, later versions of the pícaro often feature a more relentless, specific motivation: the fuel of ambition. Alex has no plan or dreams, no deeper purpose. Rather than leaning into a ravenous hunger for more—more money, more sex, more adventure—she is perpetually turning inward, turtling in the shell of her anxiety. More an uncertain person than a defined type, she sometimes seems like she might be in the wrong kind of book. She is a bad pícara, Don Quixote without chivalrous fantasy, Becky Sharp without social aspiration. As with the vacay bummer, “The Guest” doesn’t simply reject the expectations of the genre; it picks them up, toys with them, and then sets them back down again.

But can a book run on the energy of what doesn’t happen, rather than what does? If both Alex and the structures of her story are emptied of desire, what keeps us following her through the sun, sand, and late-summer ennui? Throughout the book, it’s clear that no easy resolution will present itself when Simon’s party finally arrives, and Alex’s refusal to see what’s glaringly obvious renders her both more and less sympathetic, the novel’s early suspense fading into exhausted resignation. In the end, Cline relies on a perverse desire of the reader’s own, to see if a novel that promises so much can sustain itself on the negative space of character and event, on refusing straightforward satisfaction. Alex believes in surfaces, in the idea that wealth, like narrative convention, can tie up all loose ends, smooth any rough edges. Underneath what’s visible, though, the people who do the tying and the smoothing are always laboring, living lives that will never be as smugly conclusive as we’d like them to be. ♦

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The Guest : Book summary and reviews of The Guest by Emma Cline

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by Emma Cline

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Published May 2023 304 pages Genre: Thrillers Publication Information

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A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls .

"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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"Cline does pretty-but-creepy like no one else and now takes her brand of alluring ickiness to the wealthy enclaves of Long Island...A propulsive read starring an irresistible antihero." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "A 22-year-old woman loses her apartment and her grip on reality in the provocative latest from Cline ( The Girls )...Cline has a keen eye for class differences and makes Alex into an intriguing protagonist who has learned to be observant, but must also recognize she's losing her judgment if she wants to survive. Like watching a car crash, this is hard to look away from." — Publishers Weekly "A grifter tale for the post-Anna Delvey era, a spellbinding literary rendering told from the perspective of the deceiver herself ... Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb." — Vogue "Cline quietly continues to be one of the best and most discomfiting young writers working today." — Entertainment Weekly "Eerily captivating." — Elle "Emma Cline's second novel is tense and restrained, as careful and controlled as the woman at its center—before she begins to unravel at the seams. This is a slow-motion car crash of a book: it's extremely hard to look away." — Lit Hub "Her odyssey of desperation and misadventures feels like Barry Lyndon for Gen Z." — Buzzfeed

Author Information

Emma Cline is the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls and the story collection Daddy . The Girls was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors' Choice and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Cline's stories have been published in The New Yorker , Granta , The Paris Review , and The Best American Short Stories . She received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and an O. Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

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‘The Guest’ Is a Fever Dream About a Young Escort Grifting Her Way Through the Hamptons

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Emma Cline has a penchant for writing about troubled young women who just can’t seem to elude disaster and destruction. First there was 2016’s smash-hit, The Girls , a stunning debut about a 14-year-old in suburban San Francisco who gets lured by a group of women into joining a dangerous, Manson-esque cult. And now there’s Cline’s latest, The Guest , which centers on yet another woman barreling toward rock bottom.

Alex is a 22-year-old escort in Manhattan. Her client list is all but dried up, she’s banned from various hotels and bars around the city for conducting business where she shouldn’t and her roommates have kicked her out of their apartment for stealing their things and neglecting to pay her share of the rent. She’s also dodging calls and texts from a man whom she owes money and is eager to pop any pill she can get her hands on.

A calculating opportunist who’s all too comfortable lying and stealing, she’s been spending the summer living with Simon, a 50-something-year-old, at his house in the Hamptons. She’s content at first, but Cline makes it clear that this is someone who eventually messes up every situation she’s in, so it’s not terribly surprising when a pair of missteps inspire Simon to put Alex on the first train back to the city with the vague suggestion that he’ll check back in in a week.

But Alex never gets on the train; instead, she decides to stay on Long Island for five more days, at which point she’ll show up to Simon’s Labor Day party and all will be forgiven. The week goes by in a haze as Alex spends her nights in a house-share with a group of friends she latches onto, a family she meets at the beach and a sheltered and emotionally fragile teenage boy who doesn't react well when Alex moves onto her next mark.

Alex is compelling if not exactly likable, and interestingly, Cline doesn’t assign her a stereotypical sob story childhood that would explain away her problems. (“There wasn’t any reason, there never had been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary,” the author maintains.) Even so, fans of The Girls might find The Guest a bit less narratively exciting, since—unsurprisingly, given the Manson parallels of the former—there's a lot less at stake on Alex's journey.

At turns languid and tense, Alex’s week-long odyssey—much like her life—is a trainwreck: hard to watch but impossible to look away from.  

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The Guest: A Novel Hardcover – May 16, 2023

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House
• Publication date May 16, 2023
• Dimensions 5.69 x 1.06 x 8.53 inches
• ISBN-10 0812998626
• ISBN-13 978-0812998627
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (May 16, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812998626
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812998627
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.69 x 1.06 x 8.53 inches
• #389 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• #829 in Contemporary Women Fiction
• #1,507 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Emma Cline is from California. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, and The Paris Review, and she was the winner of the 2014 Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. Her novel The Girls was a finalist for the First Novel Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize, and was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. In 2017, Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her story collection Daddy will be published September 2020.

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6 Books to add to your summer reading list

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay

Mitra & Ghosh Pvt Ltd, 1976

Aranyak follows the story of Satyacharan, who, on account of his new job, moves from his urban life to one revolving around a jungle. Him and his partner, Jugalprasad, find a mutual fondness for the nature they are surrounded by. Problems arise when Satyacharan's job requires him to destroy the creation of the forest-Goddess against his own will in order for him to distribute amongst the people. As he grapples with the consequences, readers can find solace in the setting, which acts almost as an escape for all of us from the heat of this summer.

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As summer rolls around and our lifestyle changes to adjust to the heat, so do a lot of our books! So here are a few books that might make a good addition to this year's summer reading list.

Emma Cline's The Guest revolves around Alex, a con artist who is down on her luck. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she ends up stranded in Long Island where she goes on to spend the final days of summer. Here, moving from summer home to summer home, Alex finds herself causing all kinds of shenanigans for upper-class people on their summer vacations.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being

For a lot of us, summer is when we like to ponder, reflect and educate. The Creative Act tries to help encapsulate what it is to be an artist and to dabble in creativity. The book tries to navigate the mysteries of the art of creation while explaining how we can access and utilise this creativity through commitment and practice. The book dares its readers to surpass any and all limitations that the world presents and ride the wave of creativity to an otherworldly experience.

Marlowe Grandos

This novel is written in the format of a diary written by Isa. The entries revolve around her and her friend Gala, detailing their travels and their adventures through New York City over the summer. With little to no money, readers get to see this pair's friendship and life evolve with their time spent in the city. As we watch them go progressively broke, we also get to see how that is not something that's going to stop either one of them.

Humayun Ahmed

In this heat, when everything feels hazy from humidity and the glaring sun, Kobi offers us a tiny pathway into a world that is wistful and mystical instead. Through the protagonist Atahar's struggle to find himself, his poetic voice, and his place in this uncompromising city, the author invites the reader along for a poignant, painful ride. As a perennially cash strapped Atahar walks endlessly across the city in characteristic Ahmed fashion (walking is a preoccupation another one of Ahmed's famous characters, Himu, shares), the month of Chaitra, its obdurate heat, the smell of burnt road and sweat—all gather together to weave a tale that accurately captures the relentlessness of summer.

Little Women

Louisa may alcott.

Personally, this classic has always felt like the perfect read for a warm summer day. Perhaps it's nostalgia or personal preference but something about flipping through the warm, wholesome life of the March family feels like the perfect escape as we try to beat the heat. So sit back, and turn on your fans as you get to laugh, smile and cry through the evolution of the characters and their relationships.

Syeda Erum Noor is devoted to learning about the craft of writing and is an avid reader who can talk endlessly about the magic of books. Reach her on Instagram at @syedaerumnoorwrites.

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শূন্য থেকে স্বয়ংসম্পূর্ণ

আশির দশকের গোড়ার দিকে দেশে ১৬৬ ওষুধ প্রস্তুতকারী প্রতিষ্ঠান ছিল। এর মধ্যে আটটি ছিল বিদেশি। এরা ৭০ শতাংশ বাজার নিয়ন্ত্রণ করত। বর্তমানে দেশীয় প্রতিষ্ঠানগুলো ওষুধের চাহিদার ৯৮ শতাংশ পূরণ করছে। বাকি...

২৮ এপ্রিল থেকে প্রাথমিকের শ্রেণি কার্যক্রম চালু, অ্যাসেম্বলি বন্ধ