Published in the run-up to summer, Emma Cline’s second novel is probably what people mean when they talk about a “beach read”. Whereas her 2016 debut, The Girls, arrived on a tsunami of hype and hazy lyricism, The Guest is the more controlled work of a fine talent maturing on its own terms. Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, it’s a gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality.
The story even begins on a beach. The ocean is amniotically warm, the sheen of sunscreen and the colour of bikinis filling the mise-en-scène as we meet our amorphous protagonist. An escort and a sugar baby, at 22 Alex is already in steep decline. Locked into a lifestyle of reciprocal benefit and exploitation, she’s in a relationship with a rich, “professionally healthy” man in his 50s named Simon. Like some AI dating-bot of the imminent future, Alex hoovers up data and adapts herself to her lover’s idea of who he’d like her to be: “All Alex’s unsavoury history excised until it started to seem, even to her, like none of it had ever happened.” As Simon grows suspicious, we infer that Alex has left in her wake a string of angry and disabused men. One of them, the ominously named Dom, has been texting and calling relentlessly since she ripped him off and disappeared.
In its early chapters The Guest looks like it’s shaping up to be another forensic look at the power dynamics between an attractive young woman and a wealthy, older man – the kind of thing so enjoyably done in Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times. But one of this novel’s pleasures is how it keeps setting up such expectations only to confound them, so that even halfway through you’re not entirely sure what kind of story this is, save a good one.
Alex’s audacity in compulsively deceiving everyone she meets is underwritten by her total lack of foresight. She has no plan – and little in the way of backstory either. There is (pointedly) no foundational trauma beneath her chaotically improvised life, which remains inexplicable even to her: “There wasn’t any reason, there never had been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.” In lieu of a stable identity or a horizon that extends beyond a string of randomly filled instants, she hopscotches from one disastrous decision to the next, keeping ahead of trouble through ceaseless forward momentum.
In the novel’s latter half, hoping to worm her way back into Simon’s life, she attaches herself to a morose teenager named Jack, even though she usually avoids younger men, who “had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality”.
The faintly frustrating lack of place names – we seem to be in California, but everyone is either in “the city” or “out east” – encourages allegorical readings. Without smothering her narrative in subtext, Cline gets at something universal – or at least late-capitalist – about the prostitution of experience and the commodification of sex and personality. Everyone is performing a role in exchange for protection and privileges: a boring woman’s much younger husband; a personal assistant named Nicholas whom Alex prods to say something mean about his employer; Alex’s fellow sugar-baby Dana.
The Guest echoes in its implications that tiny, haunting David Foster Wallace story from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men whose title is its own summarisation: A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life. In other words, Cline’s is the sort of elevated beach read that reflects a social order in which authentic response has vanished into a matrix of abstract, commercial relations. No one in the novel explicitly uses Instagram – Alex’s phone keeps dying – but reading it feels like Instagram; like wandering through a gleaming, depthless funhouse of thirst and desperation. You don’t have to read The Guest as a slant treatise on neoliberal precariousness and alienation, or as an even broader one on metaphysical estrangement – but it’s all there should you want it. Or just take it to the beach and savour every page.
• Rob Doyle’s most recent book is Threshold
• The Guest by Emma Cline is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
