‘The Guest’ by Emma Cline

Fiction – paperback; Chatto & Windus; 293 pages; 2023.

Manipulators and con artists make great fodder for novels. Think Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley or Abel Magwitch in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Even Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby could be seen to engage in various forms of deception and manipulation in his pursuit of wealth and status.

Emma Cline offers up an unlikely grifter in her novel The Guest, which tells the story of a 22-year-old woman charming her way through a summer on Long Island while on the run from a man to whom she owes a lot of money.

Alex is an escort from “the city” (presumably New York) and she’s stolen an unspecified amount of money from a client because she’s behind on her rent.

The client, Dom, keeps sending her menacing text messages and angry voicemails, and Alex, knowing she’s not able to pay anything back, grabs the first lifeline that is thrown her way: she moves into a luxurious summerhouse in the Hamptons with Simon, a wealthy man 30 years her senior, after he invites her to spend August there with him.

Simon’s house out east was near enough to the ocean. The living room ceiling was twenty feet high, cut with beams. A polished concrete floor. Big paintings that, by pure dint of their square footage, implied high value. (page 17)

The party’s over

But things don’t go according to plan. When Alex embarrasses Simon at a party, she’s escorted to the train station with a one-way ticket back to the city. She never uses the pass. Instead, she hangs about the island for the next five days, passing the time before she can attend Simon’s Labor Day party. There, in a desperate eleventh-hour attempt, she plans to rescue their “relationship” and live a happily ever after existence.

The party was only a few days away. This was just a waiting period for Simon to cool off, a pause. Then everything would go back to the way it was. (page 99)

It’s during those five tremulous days that Alex inveigles her way into other people’s lives, using deception, trickery, manipulation and a pretty smile to get what she wants (usually food and accommodation).

She attends house parties, pool parties, goes to the beach, hooks up with a teenage boy, takes drugs, breaks into other people’s homes and all the while she desperately tries to ignore her malfunctioning mobile phone which buzzes with reminders that she has a debt to pay.

The art of grifting

It’s a high-wire act that works — up to a point. When she pushes people’s generosity too far, she risks exposing her true self: a desperate young woman who uses others to satisfy her own needs.

“And who did you say you knew? ‘Cause none of us” — the girl gestured around the room — “remember you.”
“Brian,” Alex said. “He invited me.”
“Brian?” The girl on the couch shook her head. “Fine, okay, Brian. What’s Brian’s last name?” (page 84)

Her impoverishment and desperation are in stark contrast to the upper-class wealth that surrounds her: the swimming pools and spas, the flashy houses, the grand gardens and the impressive seaside views.

Her vulnerability, coupled with her audacious, calculating, living-by-her-wits behaviour, makes her an engaging character, someone to cheer on even if her morals might be dubious. But as she builds her fragile house of cards, you keep turning the pages, waiting for the inevitable collapse.

Page-turning read

The plot, which is suspenseful and heart-hammering, moves along at a clip. Will Alex slip up? Will she do or say the wrong thing? Will Dom, whose menacing messages keep coming, finally track her down and violently extract the money he’s owed?

The story is written in almost old-fashioned third-person prose reminiscent of Richard Yates, who’s known for his precise and unsparing portrayals of suburban life, and Richard Ford, who focuses on the struggles and personal failures of ordinary Americans.

Cline’s writing, filled with the complexity and nuance of human behaviour, is cut from a similar cloth. She withholds judgement of her characters and their actions, allowing the reader to empathise and come to their own conclusions.

The Guest was featured on several bloggers’ end-of-year lists in 2023, so when I saw it on the shelves of my local library I borrowed it. I’m glad I did. I loved the way it contrasted the extravagant lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy with Alex’s seedier hand-to-mouth existence.

It’s a terrific fast-paced read but offers a lot to cogitate on — including the ending, which I’m still thinking about more than a week later.

Guy at His Futile Preoccupations has also reviewed it.