Review of “The Guest” by Emma Cline
Avoiding the Riptide of Responsibilities Amongst East Coast Elites
“It didn’t feel impossible that she could swim forever, that she would never get tired…she had continued on, persevered, because, in some part of herself, she knew this could all go back to the way it had been before, and that she had only to outlast it”
-“The Guest”, p. 250-251
I had been itching to read “The Guest” for months. It had become an “it girl” read, evidenced by a constant onslaught of Tiktok recommendations and Kate saying she frequently spotted it on the New York subway. After several months, I picked it up with high expectations. It was certainly a good read but I’m not sure if it actually met my expectations. The bar was high between its popularity and its accolades printed on its front cover; “Intoxicating”(Time), “Spellbinding” (Vogue) and with sentences “as sharp as a scalpel” (New York Times). Its vague description was intriguing and left me curious as to what the secret meat of the story would be. Upon reading, the vague description is, in fact, the only way to describe the book and perhaps the point of the novel. The result is a book that is difficult to look away from as you and the main character constantly await the “big moment” while on a continuous trudge through strange, unsettling, and uncomfortable experiences.
The book follows the protagonist, Alex, as she miraculously drifts from house to house for a week while waiting to triumphantly appear at a Labor Day party at the house of the older man she’d been seeing who had kicked her out for her social faux pas.The story takes place “out east” from New York, in the land of exorbitant wealth of Long Island/Hamptons. Witnessing Alex navigate finding a place to stay is consistently captivating and unsettling. Alex’s depth of understanding for human nature is disconcerting when paired with her murky morality. Despite being able to so effortlessly manipulate someone into taking her in with simple changes in tone and intentional physical contact, Alex seems lost in the sea of social grace. How quickly the tide of social manners shifts on her, despite this seeming awareness. Moreover, the application of this understanding is rarely directed at self-reflection. Alex is blinded by delusion and deeply avoidant and it destroys her life, time and time again. It seems that when genuine human connection really matters, when the ability to read a person and know just what to say is crucial, Alex falls short despite her “talent”. It spurs out of her misguided morals and a kind of lack of genuineness. She’s not from the wealthy world and she’s in a state of survival and pretend constantly. At what point of pretending, or avoiding does she completely lose touch with the person beneath the personas? With each person she manipulates, how far does she get washed away from her self and humanity?
*ENTERING SPOILERS*
Within the very first pages, Cline captures the nature of Alex’s life “out East” and foreshadows the experiences Alex will have throughout the book in her trip to the beach. Setting the scene, a beach east of the city is an epitome of escape. Out there, there is none of the chaos of New York City, which Alex very clearly is avoiding—her eviction by her roommates, and most notably, the looming threat of Dom. It’s clear in the opening lines that this is Alex’s experience too; “ A bout of strong swimming and she was out, beyond the break. The surface was calm.”(3). After the work of “landing” Simon and becoming his lover, she was offered a ticket out to somewhere calm and picturesque, with the kind of wealth where people constantly believe they are safe. It is the kind of place where doors to million dollar mansions and expensive cars are left unlocked simply because “everyone believed they were among people like themselves”(4).
Moreover, the idea of the surface being calm captures the facade that accompanies Alex’s escape from the city and entrance into this society. As she makes her first dip into the ocean and looks back at the shore, Alex comments that the beachgoers wouldn’t be able to see past her facade here. Specifically, she reflects, “What would they see if they looked at Alex? In the water, she was just like everyone else. Nothing strange about a young woman, swimming alone. No way to tell whether she belonged here or didn’t.”(4) Paired with this overt comfort and lack of fear, the people in the community have no reason to suspect an outsider amongst them or to think twice about Alex. It’s like a deer in a forest devoid of predators. Why would they ever suspect there would be a threat? She becomes implicitly trusted and no one needs to think any further or question deeper. In fact, it is perhaps such an innate trust that Alex’s facade as a community member is not completely an active performance. There is an aspect of her spending time there that has Alex believing that it is changing her person, that she deserves to be there, rather than she has been invited there as an outsider to be a guest.
Being in the water, Alex wonders “ Why does being in the ocean make you feel like such a good human?”( 4). As noted previously, being in the water feels akin to entering this community and being submerged and engulfed in this world out east. In posing this question, it becomes clear that Alex equates the ocean, or more broadly, the community, as the agent of change to becoming a “good human”. Simply being there not only makes her part of the community but also a good human which dissolves the active performance of Alex’s facade of belonging and pushes it into this kind of subconscious wishing or more bluntly, delusion of belonging in the Hamptons.
There’s a few crucial word choices and circumstances that capture Alex’s actual dissonance from being a true, trusting community member. First, Alex is actively high on stolen painkillers in this moment. Despite being physically “in the ocean”, or the community, she has already broken the unspoken trust by stealing medications from her lover and her host. Second, “a good human” is a particularly interesting phrasing. If it were solely about a question of morals, one might suspect that Alex would have framed it as a good person. The word human goes deeper than person and points towards the larger idea of humanity. Being a “good human” implies that connecting with nature, leaning into the nature of living without the buzz of urbanity, is the good, ideal behavior. Applying the understanding of trust in this beach community out east, the idea of a “good human” goes even further. Here “out east”, there is a deep trust in other people on a human level. It is a community based on trust and mutual respect. Barring a larger conversation on the role of capitalism and manipulation for profit required to form this community and the deeply exclusionary nature of the wealthy elite, it is wonderfully idyllic of what human life could look like especially when compared to dark corners of New York City which Alex escaped. There is no survival instinct here. No locks. No heads on the swivel. Just beach days and pools and parties catered to the nines and where the drama and faux pas are swept away with the right amount of money. Though the wealthy members of this town have their own performances and facades, to Alex, this is the ideal. Surrounding herself with the people here is the mechanism by which she can evolve from her dark past and questionable morals into a “good human”. Yet, she does not make the changes herself, as evidenced by her active use of stolen medications, poor and selfish behavior, and klepto-maniacal tendencies.
Perhaps the most stark image of Alex and her relationship to the community in the opening pages is once she finds herself caught in the riptide. Specifically, Alex closes her eyes and floats in the ocean while awash in this thought of being a good human. However, as her thoughts wander back to the looming threat of Dom, she finds she has been pulled away from shore. Alex, in fact, describes Dom as “in another sphere” (5) and in letting her thoughts drift, finds herself drifting away from the current sphere she is hiding in. Upon realizing it, Alex is shocked: “she is further out than she’d imagined. Much farther. How had that happened?” (5) In a way, it represents Alex’s larger pattern in the book and her dissonance from being truly a member of the community. Repetitively throughout the story, Alex will be masterfully engaged with another character (primarily as a means to an end) only for it to promptly and unceremoniously end when Alex either goes too far or loses the human element. Despite being a master of understanding human nature for the means of manipulation, Alex consistently appears shocked when people become upset at being manipulated or when she is confronted with the consequences of her actions. In this way, as she drifts back into the dark habits of her life before Simon (the untrusting, manipulative, and survival based tactics), she finds herself opening her eyes to see she’s been pulled from shore.
Her struggle in the riptide is also poignant as the strange thing riptides is that no matter how hard you swim, you seemingly move nowhere. As Alex describes, “…she wasn’t seeming to get anywhere, her strokes eaten up by the water…”(5). However, in order to survive a riptide, it’s crucial to stay calm and swim parallel to the shore as Alex demonstrates. She states that as the terror passed, it was replaced with a “kind of reptilian curiosity. She considered the distance, considered her heart rate and made a calm assessment of the elements in play.” Despite this potentially life-threatening experience, we see Alex approach this threat with a specifically “reptilian” curiosity. In that moment, Alex’s survival tactics are on full, vulnerable display and they are specifically lacking in humanity. The tactics are overtly calm, cunning, and cold as the reptilian moniker suggests. This becomes apparent through the books as she, in a state of survival, manipulates characters with a similarly reptilian mindset despite wanting to be in this ocean, this community, of good humans.
Moreover, the physical imagery of swimming parallel to shore is palpable. Here Alex is, fighting tooth and nail to return to shore, but from a distance appears to be any other swimmer. The object of her desire to close within reach visibly but physically might as well be miles away. The stillness and intangibility plays a role here too. Specifically, this line of ““…she wasn’t seeming to get anywhere, her strokes eaten up by the water…”(5). Despite all of her effort in the book, Alex doesn’t seem to get any further into the world of the Hamptons. She just expends energy and her goal of reaching that shoreline never come closer but are seemingly no further away either. Her strokes are swallowed by the water, her hands gliding through it. This dream and goal of hers of returning to Simon and becoming part of the community, is just as fluid as water. Yes, the water may make her feel like a good human but it will never make her a good human. Alex is in this world but she will never truly grasp it or be in it, just as she may be in the ocean but never truly grasp it. The ocean is a domineering and unyielding force. She is not of the ocean, she is simply a guest that it is ultimately indifferent towards.
In addition, not only is her goal of joining the community intangible, but the community is ultimately indifferent to her: “No one on the shore noticed her, or looked twice…”(6). Certainly, there are characters that Alex interacts with but the object of her desire, Simon, is ultimately indifferent to her once he sent her away. The wealthy community broadly appear to be distant from Alex, even when she is in close proximity to them. Yet, Alex never holds this against them. In fact, as soon as she is on shore where she is safe, “the fear [is] already forgotten”(6). With each character, as soon as Alex gets her goal and moves one step closer to Simon, they seem to be immediately forgotten to her. Even when Jack is sending concerning texts, begging for her to return, Alex seems to forget about him still because her goal of Simon is within reach.
The further Alex is ripped from shore, the deeper into survival mode she goes. In this mindset, she becomes reptilian and is distant from this humanity and trust that she want to be apart of so deeply. But, in this reptilian and dark state, she uses people and is shocked when she creates distance between herself and them and herself and her goals for poor behavior. It seems like the more she manipulates, the further she actually gets from shore and consistently loses the human part of herself while in pursuit of this humanity.
Towards the end of the book, Alex returns to the beach to go for a swim while Jack was sleeping in the house they were squatting in. It parallels the days when Alex would go the beach while Simon worked at the start of the book. She and Jack even have a dog and a strange but quaint life in formation, despite it being only quaint on the surface. The reality of their situation is anything but—squatting in a house, hiding from parents and vindictive drug dealers, with a dog that genuinely belonged to someone else if they bothered to call the owner. Unlike when Alex went to the beach at the start when the ocean was calm and serene, “the ocean was rough”(249) now. Despite the “waves…high enough to scare Alex”, she decides to swim anyway under the logic of “she’d come all this way.” (249) . She tackles the wave head on and despite her best effort, the waves crash down on her. When she comes to the surface, there is a stranger who actually cares: “[a] man in a wetsuit…bobbing nearby with his wetsuit hood pulled back, his nostrils pinched shut with a piece of plastic”(250). He offers her kindness, asking if she was okay and noticed how “the last one really knocked [her] over” (250). In comparison to the riptide scene at the start of the book, the fact that someone noticed and came to check on her is novel. With her life with Simon, there was a distance between the people of the Hamptons and Alex. They assume her one of them and left her alone. However, throughout the novel, Alex sees more of the life in the town as she uses them to move through. There is opportunity there to build connection but she consistently pushes them away, as she does here. The man in the wetsuit represents someone who has the ability to navigate the ocean. He is streamlined, hydrodynamic in his suit and is prepared against the sting of salt water in his nose with the plastic pinching it closed. It’s possible the man is a local or he could have been like Alex. An outsider. Only he has learned how to navigate the ocean, even when the surf is rough. Yet, Alex will never know as she brushes him off with a tight smile and a nod. This is emphasized as she sees him pause, “as if he might say something more. Offer some further warning. Then he pulled his hood back over his head, disappearing under the water.”(250).
Instead of leaning into connections or people who could genuinely advise her, Alex depends on brute force and “forced herself to stay in the water a while long, to keep bracing for the next wave.”(250). Even when a flash of concern crosses her mind,“what did it mean that the waves had a milky cast? She tried to remember if that was a sign of something, some indication of favorable or unfavorable condition”, she forces herself to brush it away and keep swimming and staying alive. Specifically, she states that “she kicked to stay in place. She needed to get rid of the kid.” This juxtaposition captures the survival method at play. In order to stay in her place, it takes force and that requires cutting the “kid”, a person who showed her kindness, out of her life.
Just like at the start of the book when Alex’s thoughts start to wander to her wrong-doings with Dom and she drifts from shore, as Alex’s thoughts drift through this meticulous scheming to return to Simon, resolve her issues with all the people she had encountered (George, Jack, etc), she is once again moving further out from shore without trying and caught in a current. Just as she knew she had to stay calm and keep swimming, Alex employs the same tactic but with a strange delusion of thinking that “it didn’t feel impossible that she could swim forever, that she would never get tired.” (251). Moreover, she states that “she had continued on, persevered, because, in some part of herself, she knew this could all go back to the way it had been before, and that she had only to outlast it” (250). Once again, in Alex’s mind, if she forces through it and just keeps kicking, she will not be ripped away from shore and pulled back to the dark life she had before. But, it’s a delusion. She will eventually become too tired to keep swimming and her goal will stay out of reach, especially if she refuses help. With no one to care for her, her stamina alone will likely fail her. Without believing it is a credible threat, Alex will not seek change and will continue to swim in the sea in hazardous conditions. And it will cost her, as is evidenced by both the entire novel and the blood pooling from the cut on her knee from the wipe out. Despite her trying to sum up these currents and giant waves as “a brief dream [or] rip in the ordinary fabric” (251), she is physically harmed due to her delusional pursuit of swims in the ocean at all costs.
Consistently throughout the book, this survival tactic and delusional pursuit results in her losing human connection. Her survival tactics are reptilian and people becomes means to reach her goal of returning to Simon, returning to a carefree life without responsibilities and access to more money that anyone can fathom. This culminates in a brief scene at the house with Jack where she finally looks at her reflection after this journey from house to house over the course of the book. With one night left until she sees Simon, thinking “this would wrap itself up”, she looks at her face in a mirror: “She didn’t like seeing her eyes—there was almost no color, just pure black. As if there was on human-ness in her…”(256). After 6 days of using people and kicking to stay in the water and fight the current, she has lost her human-ness. Despite working so hard to stay “in the ocean” or in the community where she feels like a “good human”, she sees she has completely lost that color in her eyes. She begins to become aware of the cost of staying and fighting to return to Simon, but she continues to trudge toward him regardless of this cost. Even when Jack is reading her Siddhartha, practically begging Alex to reflect and see that her pursuit was destroying her spirit and that she would never be satisfied, Alex can only think of how she needed to distance herself from Jack. Despite his love, his affection, and the alternative he offers in comparison to Simon, who she knows “had not loved her” (259), she still deems Simon as “close enough” and the object of her desire and will not stop until she gets there.
Ultimately, Alex never makes it to shore again. She has completely lost herself in this pursuit to return to Simon. Over the course of the week of manipulating people into inviting her into their homes, she has burned bridges and isolated herself even further. She has been pulled so far from her humanity in her survival methods that she can’t ever return to the shore she so desperately wants to be in. Despite fighting and kicking to stay “in her place” in this ocean of “good humans”, she became reptilian and lost herself and any chance of genuine happiness by using people who offer her kindness and not allowing herself to connect to anyone else. Ultimately, Alex will end up isolated, alone and facing the consequences of her actions and the looming threat of Dom that she so desperately tried to avoid.
She stands across from Simon, her shore, and suddenly, her limbs won’t move. “Now, she told herself, willing her limbs to work. She didn’t move. Now.” (291). Alex had, after all of that struggle and swimming to stay parallel to shore while caught in this riptide, had finally run out of strength. She had done what she couldn’t fathom: she had gone too far out. The current had swept her so far from shore that she didn’t have the strength to finally come in again. Now, she was awash not in an ocean of being human but of the dark. With no strength, she would sink and be swallowed by what she had sought to avoid.
The ending, at first read, was disappointing. What do you mean after 291 pages of Alex being so singularly focused on doing whatever it takes to arrive at this party and soiree her way back into the life of the rich and free, we don’t know what happens? At first, it was enraging. But then, upon consideration, it became clear that perhaps that is the point. Just like Alex saw each house and person as a means to the end goal, I found myself ripping through the pages and just as eagerly leaping to the next character and plot point to get closer to this grand ending I had also dreamed of. Would Dom appear at the party? Would Simon take her back? When in reality, every single character that Alex stepped on and over held such meaning and potential. As a reader, her interactions highlighted her faults, her complexities, and the strange dynamics of the ultra-wealthy. Each character also offered Alex a potential to rebuild a different life, if she tried to actually relate to the people and not just used them. The girls at the party could have actually become friends. She could have found herself work as a nanny to be able to stay in the Hamptons. If she had let herself truly be friends with Margaret, she would have been able to stay. Certainly, these had some questionable morality if she had leaned further into them but maybe that would have been better than doing nothing but using them because she would have tried to build something more human. Even with Jack, before she took their relationship too far, he even offered her an alternative to Simon. However, Alex seems to burn every bridge and like a riptide, is sucked further and further away from humanity and herself. No ending would change the damage she had done to people and to herself. She had burned every bridge and taken advantage of every person she can and that damage was done. It was as if we saw Alex on that verdant, green hill of the party; as close to perfect as she can be but with a wake of destruction silhouetting her. We, in fact, do not need to see what happens next.
