Summer Book Club: Week 2

Emma Cline's The Guest + What's Next

I’ve managed to get a ton of reading done this week, even with summer in full swing. First, I need to say that I went to an adorable anniversary party at an indie bookstore this past weekend on eastern Long Island. I was able to meet the incredibly kind booksellers and enjoy the well-curated bookstore. I also signed books. Such a fabulous day!

Now off to our book club discussion! I’m not sure how quickly you all read Emma Cline’s The Guest, but I finished it in two days. The novel is infinitely readable. It’s about a 22-year-old woman whose rich boyfriend breaks up with her after she embarrasses him at a party in the Hamptons. Rather than return to NYC, she chooses to couch surf for a week in the homes of the nation’s one percenters because she believes, rather bizarrely, that she and her rich boyfriend will get back together the following weekend at his summer party. Delusion number one.

Emma Cline’s The Girls, which was loosely inspired by the Manson Family and the murder of actress Sharon Tate, was one of my favorites when I read it in 2016, so I knew I would love this one, too. Cline is a writer’s writer and a reader’s writer, meaning her sentences are so perfectly crafted that they are both evocative, complicated and incredibly precise all at once. She is the kind of writer one reads and thinks: Now that is a writing gift!

Still, the book was imperfect, maybe even a disappointment.

First, the good.

When Alex, the main character, is asked to leave her boyfriend’s house by his assistant—ouch!— she packs up some of the expensive clothes and items the sugar daddy had bought her. The same assistant drives her to the East Hampton train station when, on impulse, Alex decides to stay in town. The reader is then invited deeper into this unreal summer vacation, a place that thrives on who is given entree and who isn’t.

Cline grew up in northern California and she says she was smitten by how beautiful the oceans were in the Hamptons but she also saw complication when she visited. “This world felt surreal and magical. But then also, it was such an interesting overt expression of class and belonging, and I thought, What would a character look like out here who didn’t belong? It’s not a place for people to pass through.”

I grew up passing through the Hamptons myself. Growing up on the water in eastern Long Island was beautiful but hardly fancy. My corner of town had craggy cottages that had been winterized, yards with simple garden beds. Our town had a general store that carried items like off-brand ketchup and hot dog buns for campers at nearby Wildwood State Park; there were no hand-painted platters, cornichons or sardines or fancy clothing stores with $750 price tags. I can completely relate to driving through the Hamptons through my teen years and looking at all of the picture-perfect lawns and gleaming shopfronts and thinking that East Hampton was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. You can’t help but wonder: Who are these people?

Alex, the main character in The Guest, is similarly taken with the dreamscape of the Hamptons. To survive out there without much money in her pocket, she uses her beauty and sexuality to get by, often waltzing into places she’d normally only gain admission on the arm of her boyfriend. One of the most striking scenes is when Alex befriends a young child on a beach at an exclusive beach club, encouraging him to the pool so she can follow him—a woman with child is only so threatening, she intuits—and no one says a word. (It’s here she steals money from a lost handbag in the bathroom.) We meet other characters later, too; kids whose entitlement and money have sent them into depression and drug addiction. Parents who try to make up for lack of attention with flashy dinners. And by the end, Cline shows us how much complexity lies behind all of those pretty mansions with house staffs.

The story is incredibly powerful.

I honestly couldn’t put the novel down. But here’s what we need to talk about. Alex, the main character. I despised her. I didn’t understand her. There was so little to her. Cline uses this vapid, empty young woman to show us how far someone will go to try to belong in these exclusive beach towns—and yet the result is a fascinating social commentary without anyone at all to root for. I nearly stopped reading the novel several times because I didn’t want to keep going on this journey with her. Maybe it’s because Alex had such a limited character arc. We don’t watch Alex realize that what she’s doing is wrong. We don’t even see her question her own morals. She just takes and takes from people. She doesn’t feel bad about deceiving people. She steals and has little disregard for anyone but herself.

What did you all think of her?

Such a terrible person also raises a writing question: Can you love a book without liking any of the characters in the book? As I write my own novels, I’m always thinking so hard about the likability of my heroine. You never want to draw a character that is perfect or always happy. They need complications. They need to feel balanced. Human.

Did Alex feel human to you? Because I couldn’t relate to her at all. I was willing to learn from her but it was disappointing that in the end she was merely a vehicle for Cline to share her sharp social observations about the cultural mores of the Hamptons. I wish she’d gone back through her pages and developed the way Alex flitted through these worlds, like maybe she could do something to show that she had a heart somewhere in her.

The one bright spot for Alex’s character was the end. The very last chapter had me laughing out loud. Was that Cline’s intention?

Up next for Summer Book Club is Beatriz Williams’s The Beach at Summerly. We’ll discuss next Tuesday.

Now tell me what you thought about The Guest?