A young ****** searches for security among the leisured wealthy in Cline’s clever study of precarity and excess
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 ******, 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.
Be First to Comment