The Guest by Emma Cline

Emma Cline is back, proving that The Girls wasn’t a one off, one of those debuts that strike gold on the first go around. Oh no, Cline is genuinely and hugely talented.
The way she writes – it has that certain mesmeric quality. Particularly effective with this novel, which is essentially a prolonged trainwreck sequence.
You’d think a novel that hinges entirely upon a shoulders of a not-especially likeable protagonist wouldn’t be so compelling and yet…you just can’t look away.
Maybe not quite a trainwreck, but the momentum is similar. It’s also kind of like one of those scenes where a character loses their footing and they pinwheel their arms as fast as they can trying to regain it and never quite do. Gravity always wins out.
That’s what Alex is doing, pinwheeling for her life. Not much of a life, one made of scrounging, using people, stealing, lying, manipulating, kind of like a perpetual low grade grift to stay afloat. One might make an argument that at twenty-two, she just doesn’t know any different, but then again, she had seen plenty in her short years. Mostly from working as a sort of prostitute/escort in the city, through associating with all manner of characters from upper echelons of society to bottom dregs.
Fleeing one of the latter, a dreg that won’t let her go because she stole from him, Alex hitches a ride to high life with a man thirty years her senior and costs in luxury for a while until she screws that up too and gets booted out.
Determined to get back into the cushy life the man provided, she decides to stick around and win his affections back at the upcoming party. All she has to do is kill a few days.
Which turns out to be a surprisingly killer proposition for someone who’s short on funds, good graces, and ability to not f*ck up.
See, that’s sort of Alex’s specialty. Even if she means well, things just spin out when she’s around. And most of the time she’s either too drunk or too high to properly pilot herself.
So yeah, not an overwhelmingly sympathetic character and yet…
The way Cline writes her, you just can’t look away, as she leaps from frying pan into the fire, over and over, until the inevitable and stunningly rendered conclusion.
And underneath all that, there’s a simmering commentary on the wealth divide and class differential and people living in a dizzyingly stratified universe where people like Alex, essentially all service people of the world can easily and unnoticeable fall by the wayside as the elite continues to prosper in pampered unfathomable luxury.
What a terrific novel. As literary as you’d ever want, as well written as you can possibly wish for. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.