Grifter’s journey of deception with the rich is a thrilling ride
EMMA Cline’s first novel, The Girls, was the biggest-selling hardback debut novel of 2016 and attracted fans as diverse as Lena Dunham and Richard Ford. A collection of short stories entitled Daddy came next but there hasn’t been another novel until now.
The Guest is tighter in focus than The Girls — the latter had a double narrative and beautifully delineated the experience of girls at the fringes of a Manson-like cult. The Guest is about one woman, 22-year-old Alex, who is staying with an older man, Simon, on the US East Coast.
We don’t know how Alex ended up at Simon’s house or why she wants to be there. We do know that her roommates kicked her out of her apartment for stealing and not paying rent. There are various hotels and restaurants she is not welcome at and she owes money to a man named Dom, whose incensed messages flicker on her phone.
Alex pilfers from strangers (a silver barrette, an ornament, handfuls of chocolate-covered almonds) but she also seems to believe that by stealing from the rich people she targets she is engaging in an “efficient allocation of resources”. At a dinner party Simon takes her to, wearing a dress he has paid for, she ends up in the pool flirting fully clothed with the hostess’s husband. Simon suggests she returns to her apartment the next day — something we know is impossible. Alex had forgotten the golden rule, that she is replaceable — she is “a sort of inert piece of social furniture — only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman.”
Although her heroine exploits everyone she meets, Cline, pictured below, stops her appearing as a monster. There is no traumatising experience from her past to explain her grifting — when another character questions her actions, she reflects that “there wasn’t any reason, there had never been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.” Sex is not the problem: “And really, it was nice, having a strange hand on her. She had never minded that part.” We realise how predatory she is when she seduces a teenager and “felt some thrill, the boy prone beneath her.”
Alex is nonetheless precariously reliant on pleasing the men who bankroll her, like a younger version of a Jean Rhys heroine or Blanche DuBois from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
She knows how to recognise other escorts, whom she views as “Girls in drag as girls”, but she has taught herself not to be too obvious, never to take too much at the start, nor to say thanks for presents or otherwise draw attention to the fact that she is not at home in the monied environment of the Hamptons.
We know she is beautiful from the way other people react to her but she has a powerlessness that when you are very young can feel like power. Even at 22, she is worried about wrinkles. At one point — in desperation for someone to pay her way — she effectively kidnaps a child for the afternoon, humouring him while she expenses snacks and beers to the family credit card. The Guest lacks the intense narrative of The Girls but could be crucial reading for any young woman who may treat life, as Cline wrote in The Girls, as “a waiting room until someone noticed you.”