Caught in a web of lies: The Guest, by Emma Cline, reviewed

This deeply unpleasant novel kept me reading all night. Alex, 22, preys on rich men as an upmarket prostitute, formerly in New York and now in resorts such as the Hamptons. She is a thief and addict, sneaking her boyfriend’s sleeping pills, his valuable watch, a former room-mate’s medication, random jewellery and any available alcohol, while lying to herself and others. Moving among the rich, she pretends to be one of them.

Writing about them in their holiday homes, Emma Cline is skilful and observant:

The women had a funny, girlish air: their tiny steps, their uncertain smiles, satin bows in their ponytails, though most of them were probably over 60, raised in a time when childishness was a lifetime female affect.

Alex, superficially deferential, is, however, losing her touch. Early on she prangs her boyfriend’s car, fibs about it, and is exposed by his housekeeper. As with any story about a protagonist on the run (Alex gets increasingly desperate), I was on tenterhooks to know whether she would get caught for her many other misdemeanours.    

Cline seems to relish characters who live on the margins. Her brilliant first novel The Girls was about Evie, a confused adolescent with problems at home, living on the periphery of Charles Manson’s murderous commune in 1969. Cline also showed us Evie in middle age, inspiring our sympathy. But in The Guest, Alex’s back-story is omitted: there’s just a hint of where she’s from – ‘land, green and golden’ – presumably the Midwest.  

I was puzzled by why Cline leaves Alex so unmoored. Does she want to show that sometimes there is no reason for a person to act badly? Or is she making a bigger point – about materialistic greed in contemporary life, where an envious outsider can have it all and get away with it if she knows how? Or is she instead suggesting that such predatory behaviour far from home will often end badly?

I thought of two other unscrupulous, go-getting women: Becky Sharp and Scarlett O’Hara.