Alex is a 22-year-old woman who seems to make her living, such as it is, as an escort of some kind. When we first meet her, she has stumbled into a more lucrative role as the much-younger girlfriend of a middle-aged businessman named Simon. Alex has been summering at Simon’s place in the Hamptons, which is great because her roommates back in the city have finally gotten sick of her owing rent and forced her out of her apartment. There’s also the little matter of her ex Dom, who she owes a lot of money to and, well, isn’t the kind of guy you want to be owing money to. Hiding out on the island is a dream come true.
Until Alex screws it up. (This will be a recurring theme.) When Simon calls off their arrangement less than a week before his big end-of-summer party, Alex is too afraid, and too homeless, to go back to the city. Instead she comes up with the crazy plan that provides Cline’s novel with its shape. She will essentially hide out of the island, using what’s she learned about the island’s wealthy elite to charm and finagle her way through the time remaining until Simon’s party, where she will turn up and be taken back by Simon.
What Alex mainly does is take advantage of the naive belief in the Hamptons that if you’re there, you must belong there. Carrying her few possessions in a fairly small bag, without much money, and armed with a temperamental cell phone that only turns on periodically to display threatening texts from Dom, Alex bounces from one situation to another, buoyed by her maniacal desperation to make it to Simon’s party and get back in his good graces.
Alex is, to put it mildly, a trying person to spend a lot of time with. She’s selfish, amoral, and really bad at making decisions. She’s willing to do practically anything to keep her delusional plans alive. I’ve seen some suggestion that The Guest is meant to be a satire of the uber-wealthy, but if so, it is not very biting. Sure, the families Alex encounters are frequently screwed-up, with children estranged from their emotionally-distant parents and whole households that would fall apart if not for the thankless work of their domestic servants, but it’s not like Alex is in any position to criticize. She’s a walking, talking destructive force, leaving chaos in her wake. Her talent at becoming what other people want her to be has left her without much of an actual personality to hold onto. There are those who will reasonably point out the many male anti-heroes that have been embraced by audiences and wonder why many readers are unwilling to extend the same affection toward Alex. I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer to that question. I just know that watching her screw up and screw other people over held no enjoyment for me.
Between this novel and The Girls, I have come to the perhaps premature conclusion that I like the way Emma Cline writes, but not what she chooses to write about. Cline’s prose is crisp and eminently readable, but that ultimately feels empty when it’s used in service of Alex’s story. In a way, Cline’s ambiguous ending is a gift, since I had long since stopped caring what happened to Alex.