Spoilers!
A system exists only when it is imagined, or believed, by those within the system that everyone else is operating like them. That’s a paraphrase of a great quote (on page two, no less) of Emma Cline’s 2023 novel, The Guest. But what if there is a guest, an unbeknownst guest at that, within the system? Maneuvering through the social dynamics, taking what won’t be missed until it’s too late, and leaving havoc in her wake? Alex, the main character in The Guest, is a transient by nature and takes a drug-fueled, sex-manipulating sojourn through the beach dunes of Long Island. Guest or ghost, Alex is not of this system, but is in many ways, a product of it all the same.
Alex, 22, is with a much older, richer man, named Simon. She basically exists to, uh, service him, and otherwise lazily spend her days at the beach while he pays for all her clothes and housing, of course. When they go to a friend of Simon’s dinner party, Alex makes the “mistake” of getting too cozy to the host’s (also younger and transient) husband. Simon kicks her out and sends her back to the city. Instead, Alex decides she’ll spend a week surviving on the beaches and doing whatever it is she does until coming back to Simon at his Labor Day party. It should also be said that looming over Alex is a man named Dom, who presumably she thieved and/or frauded out of a lot of money and he wants it back.
Throughout the week then, Alex talks her way into a beach house party until she sleeps with the on-again-off-again boyfriend of one of the girls there and is kicked out. Eventually, she finds Jack, a seeming 19 year old with braces, on the beach and cajoles her way into his good graces. Jack’s father is a Hollywood producer and apparently, to Jack at least, overbearing. Jack it’s hinted at, is off his meds (although we don’t know what he is taking medication for), and there was a previous “incident” with his ex-girlfriend. As Alex still needs a few more nights before Labor Day and reuniting with Simon, she convinces Jack to find a new place to stay since he doesn’t want to stay with his father. Jack breaks into the ex-girlfriend’s summer house. They have sex and do molly. Jack confesses his undying love for her and tells her he can solve the Dom problem by breaking into his dad’s safe.
But that dream, a way of tidying up all of Alex’s loose ends, is deferred when it’s revealed by Jack that his dad doesn’t have a safe. It was a molly-induced lie. Also, Jack’s friend reveals to Alex that he’s actually only 17 (this doesn’t ultimately deter her). Threatening to harm himself if she leaves him, Jack nearly drives his dad’s car into a deer, but skirts it and hits the guardrail instead. That’s Alex’s cue to abandon him. She makes her way to Simon’s Labor Day party where neither his assistant nor him seem to recognize Alex. Guest or ghost. Upon reflection, in the lead up to Labor Day, Alex kept referring to it as a “new life,” but wouldn’t it be returning to her “old life,” as it were? That’s what makes me think Alex was always a “street kid,” thieving, cajoling, and conniving her way through situations to survive and was only imagining what it would be like to live with, and be taken care of by, Simon.
Cline’s book, by way of comparison, felt like a loose mashup of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Funny Games, but perhaps more understated, less violent, and more hallucinogenic. It was hard to get a bead on this one, like Alex herself, it’s transient. What I mean by that is, The Guest may be one of those books that left me rather befuddled in the course of reading it, especially at the end when Alex isn’t recognized, but will, nevertheless, linger with me long after finishing it. That’s precisely because of the transience of it, the “being a guest through life” theme. Being outside the system while within and a product of the system. Of being broken and yet unseen. Cline created something simmering and profound here within the sand dunes of Long Island.
Milam's Musings 