Emma Cline's "The Guest": A psychological thriller about luxury and displacement

Alex is a pretty, needy twenty-something. Among the obvious things she's missing: a place to live, a refuge to hide behind for a few days, money to pay her debts, and a cell phone to charge and/or repair. What she doesn't fully understand is that she's actually deprived of a place of belonging. Social. Familial. Emotional. In the world. Her currency, the currency with which she buys something increasingly smaller and devalued, is her youth and beauty.

After the worldwide success of The Girls (2016), one of the best possible first novels written in the last decade, with The Guest (2024), just published in Spanish by Anagrama with a translation by Inga Pellisa, Emma Cline not only keeps the bar high, but raises it. And, as if that weren't enough, she adds a twist, expected (desirable), though by no means expected. The author surprises with this enormous little story that seemingly shifts its theme and focus.

For The Girls , Cline drew loose inspiration from Charles Manson and his clan. More specifically, from those young women—beautiful, hippie-looking—who carried out several of the murders in the late 1960s and who never lost their angelic smiles during the trial. From there, she begins to fictionalize a story that finds another aspect of the 20th-century noir chronicle that is still replicated in the present. In The Guest , she sets the ticking of a tragic bombshell in the present day , about a young woman on the run—from a drug dealer to whom she owes money, but mostly from herself—in an environment of luxury and appearances that doesn't completely expel her while scorning her. And it keeps her like that, on edge, watching everything through a metaphorical half-open door.

With a well-established body of work, which also includes the novel Harvey (2021), a dozen excellent short stories, and awards like the Shirley Jackson Prize, the 36-year-old American author is already, without a doubt, one of the most interesting writers not only of her generation, but of the current literary landscape in general. It's as if Brett Easton Ellis were a woman, a millennial, and heterosexual. In other words, they share everything else. Although it's not Cline's quest, their novels and styles engage in a distorted dialogue.

Cline was born in 1989 in Sonoma County, and Ellis in 1964 in the San Fernando Valley. Both in California. Both are strident, captivating authors who use genre and plot to seek something more , narrating from different places, through magnetic characters, the fringes of the great (North) American dream.

The Girls could be the author's American Psycho (1991) in its exploration of extremes and murder. In that line of conversation between one of the greatest literary exponents of Generation X and this young millennial, almost centennial, The Guest shares something with Less Than Zero (1985): stories about those shipwrecked in the ocean of elites ; each postmodern in its own time, both as uncomfortable as they are captivating.

Like Ellis, Cline portrays the fringes of the wealthiest society. In this case, with an excellent choice of title, "The Guest," she captures the heart of the matter: a person outside that seemingly ideal and desired world, who arrives with the aspiration to stay, to be part of it, to be included. The problem is that her stay is for a limited time, even though Alex tries to extend it, and the plot slowly reveals that she is unqualified to remain inside or, in fact, to re-enter.

In The Guest , there lies—whoever wants to hear, let them hear—a social critique that doesn't editorialize ; it only highlights the tremendous and damaging power systems—already caste-based, barely concealed—to which modern-day capitalism leads, which is now not only "cruel" and "ferocious" but also sensitive, with a tendency to take offense at its victims. The novel is, then, a psychological thriller with everything the genre demands in terms of plot, but permeated by a peculiar view of the world.

Long Island's pristine pools, the ocean, and private beaches all seem like perfect places for Alex, who navigates them in tense calm, on the edge between enjoyment and the need to fit in. She languishes, seduces, and, above all , shuts out the outside world, the hostile one where she's just a girl from the interior, a symbolic orphan of family and friends , trying to make a place for herself in a New York that has already expelled her. Where it's as dangerous as it is impossible to return. In this splinter vacation, the 22-year-old tries to get Simón—her wealthy lover, three decades her senior—to accept her as a permanent fixture. But this guest may never have been even that. And suddenly, she finds herself on the outside.

The novel unfolds, in a pulse of existential and genre suspense , on the edge of everything Alex does to return to what he believes would be his salvation: Simón's house, the world he and his family inhabit. The result is as uncomfortable as it is explosive. It's both unsettling and gripping.

It's a story filled with images, characters, and situations always on the verge of exploding. With an omniscient and acidic narrative voice, it observes things like this geography: "All the women on the show hated each other, hated each other so much, just so they wouldn't hate their husbands. Only their little dogs, winking from their laps, seemed real: they were the women's souls, Alex decided, tiny souls trotting behind them on a leash."

The Guest is a novel that, like its protagonist, deceives. Alex is driven by desperation and moves forward with a shifting sense of honesty or morality that adapts to her urgencies and weaknesses.

The setting is made of glass: everything is always on the verge of breaking, tugging between luxury and appearances, uncertainty and security, dominance and dependence. She might seem like a small-time con artist, but she lies to herself more than to those around her. And the plot, which initially leads one to believe it's a trashy adventure, soon draws the reader into a thriller made of archetypes, armed with power plays, that fulfills this seemingly contradictory premise: it both distresses and entertains.

The Guest , by Emma Cline (Anagrama).