The guest: A grifter in a story that went nowhere

Emma Cline is an American novelist of contemporary fiction whose first bestselling book, The girls, was published in 2016. The adjectives on the cover of The guest describe a different book to the one I read. Perhaps it's time for me to stop reading novels about 20-something women as they just don't resonate with me. Contemporary literature, too, seems to be code for exploring part of the human experience that I don't want to read about. Am I just old? Anyway, here's my review of The guest, a book that I persevered to the end with but probably shouldn't have.

The guest | Published May 2023 | Read September 2024

The guest is an odd book. The whole 300-plus pages span a week or so in Alex's life as summer closes out. She's struggling to make ends meet in New York and ends up latching onto an older, wealthy man, Simon, who takes her with him to his luxury beach house on Long Island. She makes a silly mistake (and I can't even remember what that was now, but it was pretty minor) at a party that Simon holds and he quickly dispatches her back to New York. Alex doesn't go, though, and spends the next week (and the remainder of the book) drifting about the island, trying to figure out a way back into the man's good books.

There's no backstory or context to help the reader connect with Alex. We know that she's Done A Bad Thing to some guy named Dom, clearly involving a large sum of money. Inexplicably, Alex tells the reader she needs to hang on until Labour Day and then Simon will welcome her back. (Why? That is never explained.)

Alex is a trainwreck of a person but again, we don't know why, so it's hard to muster up any sympathy for her. She has a loose relationship with morality and the truth, and is pretty skilled at grifting. She consistently morphs into personas that are acceptable to the people around her. That idea might have made for an interesting book, but it's left unexplored. Instead, we get Alex leaving a trail of destruction across the island. She's a survivor, that's for sure, but at what cost to other people?

I kept reading, waiting patiently for something to happen, but it never did. The book just end without any resolution. The only thing that kept me going was to find out what happened to Alex so a non-ending was super frustrating. An open-ended story is fine if there's something interesting that has lead up to it, but nope, just Alex self-sabotaging for 300 pages. I could get on board with the grifting if there was a reason for it, but that reason is not revealed. Alex just comes off as a despicable person.

I've seen plenty of positive reviews of The guest but I don't get the hype. The book is flat and emotionless, there are multiple plot points left unresolved (what happened with Dom?), and the story goes nowhere. If I could give the author my one-sentence opinion on the book it would be this: If you're going to write a character-driven novel, then the character has to have sufficient depth to carry it off.

Rating: ⭐