In Emma Cline's newest novel, we follow an anxious, millennial grifter as she struggles to stay afloat in a barely concealed Hamptons location over the course of one summer. I had read The Girls, also by Cline, and remembered enjoying it (I read it a long time ago) so I got this out of the library. The basic premise is that the protagonist struggles to maintain an outward aura of coolness while inwardly, they move closer and closer to a psychological break. This is the cause in The Guest, which also uses wealth to make the wounds and progression towards break all that much more quick.
Alex, the protagonist, is a sex worker from NYC and when we meet her, has no money, no friends and no home. She is addicted to drugs and stealing. She's pissed off her roommates and her ex-boyfriend, who is an ominous presence during the entire novel. Things look up when she meets Simon, a wealthy man who defines Alex's job as only being beautiful. If she does that, he'll take care of everything else. She makes an embarrassing misstep at a dinner party, resulting in Simon getting her a one-way train ticket back to Manhattan, but Alex is nothing but dogged (or delusional) so she won't give up that easily, instead electing to remain and try to win Simon back at his Labor Day party a week after her expulsion. The book follows Alex during the week that she tries to survive until the Labor Day party.
I had a really hard time reading this novel. The novel itself moved very quickly and I appreciated the themes very much. It's an interesting and important premise. However, I did not like Alex at all and found her to be pithy. Maybe I'm not supposed to like her and that's the point, but I found her to be tiresome. I did appreciate the sense of dread and stress that I found myself unwittingly feeling as the result of Cline's writing. I still wouldn't re-read this or even recommending reading this book for the first time. There are too many other books out there that are way more interesting.
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