'The Guest' review: A hanger-on in the Hamptons

Much like her 22-year-old protagonist, Alex, Emma Cline approaches her Hamptons-based psychodrama like an anthropologist studying coastal elites. When we meet Alex, she is in dire straits, but plays it as cool as a sociopath. A Didion heroine.

Alex had been recently evicted from her New York apartment for not paying rent. Accustomed to using sex as leverage, Alex finds herself on Long Island’s East End as a guest at an oceanfront mansion of a man named Simon. She ignores increasingly threatening texts from another man named Dom to whom she owes money. After an indiscretion at a swank party with the host’s husband, Alex is sent back to the city by Simon.

Except she doesn’t really leave. Instead, she begins scoping replacement benefactors, hoping to remain on the East End for five more days until the big Labor Day bash where she plans on reuniting with Simon, if only in her head.

Some critics have compared Alex’s local journey to that of Odysseus in Homer’s “The Odyssey,” but her small town trajectory feels more like Leopold Bloom’s in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” itself an homage to Homer’s epic poem. Like Bloom, Alex endures countless humiliations and degradations. She encounters myriad people, all potential targets — or obstacles: a teenage surfer who reads “Siddhartha”; drunken frat boys whose party she crashes; a personal assistant of another well-heeled resident; a young boy, his sister and their nanny; and an aging bartender. She drifts into and out of these strangers’ lives, seducing and befriending, misleading and pilfering, biding her time before she can worm her way back into Simon’s life.

“The Guest” is a character study, a novel of microscopically examined behavior. Alex is furtive, animal-like. Predator and prey. Through her efforts we get a sense of alienation amid the humid haze of late summer and class isolation. Despite being adrift and unmoored, Alex never registers loneliness. Perhaps she is too deeply in crisis to be lonely. Her predation is determined by her desperation. The novel, like the character, is complex. Readers may find Alex an opportunistic narcissist or a victim of society’s expectations and exploitations. She is both perpetrator and victim. She takes advantage even as she is taken advantage of.

By necessity, for the sake of survival, Alex is a fabulist. She invents truths and embellishes reality. “Keep up a few untruths. And wasn’t it better to give people what they wanted? A conversation performed as a smooth transaction — a silky back-and-forth without the interruption of reality. Most everyone preferred the story.” Her fixation on fantasy borders on the delusional and Alex continually presents herself as someone she is not.

Knowing her milieu all too well, Cline offers plenty of clever social insights. When discussing the death of one of her hosts' first husband, Alex ruminates, “One of those freak accidents the rich suffer — too many people kept them in too good of shape for them to die from natural causes. Life has ceased to be dangerous, the oxygen tanks and hormone tests and syringes full of B vitamins warding off the old killers.”

When angling for entry into another rarefied enclave of young mothers, Alex meditates on unspoken social appearances. “Their skin was always good, even when they weren’t attractive. They were dressed to invoke the wives they either were or would one day become, future domestic totems.” Alex is a kind of female Tom Ripley minus the murders. She observes, calculates, approximates and imitates.

Cline writes with precision and intelligence and best of all her compassion is not performative. Alex makes one disastrous misstep after another — using, offending and hurting people in her path. She steals, lies, manipulates and encroaches. As Nabokov did with “Lolita” or “Laughter in the Dark,” Cline puts her unlikable protagonist through the wringer and makes her suffer, but she also clearly cares about her, and through the portrait she paints so do we.