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

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 […]

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