The Horror of the Ordinary in Emma Cline’s The Guest
By William Hutton
Credit: DV DeVincentis
A third of the way through Emma Cline’s gripping new novel The Guest, a wayward teenager with metal glinting from his lower-teeth hands a book to our protagonist. It’s Siddhartha by the German novelist Herman Hesse, a short lyric tract about a young man who leaves his wealth, family, and religion, to discover for himself the truth about life. The young Siddhartha wanders the countryside of fifth century India, enduring a steady flow of ascetic deprivations before receiving his revelation: nonattachment is the only true wisdom. It’s a fitting analogue for Cline’s second novel and her third book since the story-collection Daddy was published two years ago.
The Guest is all about nonattachment. It follows a twenty-two-year-old woman named Alex as she is expunged from the home of Simon, the wealthy older man she has been staying with for the summer. The narrative action clings, as though in real time, to the five days she is left to wander the “wilderness” of Long Island’s East End, until a party on Labour Day, when Alex hopes to re-attach herself to Simon, and the trappings of his rarefied life. Such trappings affirm to Alex a sense of personhood which the ordinary world does not––or else cannot. Early in the novel, before she is cast from Simon’s palatial home and back into the world, Alex thinks of all the other young women who have come to stay before her: “Thin girls in camisoles who ate yogurt standing up. But Alex had outlasted them, had passed into another, more permanent realm. They were ghosts; she was real.”
Over the five days of the novel, as Alex drifts more ghost-like than she might have once liked, from one person to another until the day she can re-appear to Simon, we are presented with the tactics Alex has perfected in order that she ‘outlast’ these other girls. When waiting at the train station Alex is dropped at to return to her own life in the city, she observes a group of “house-share people” shaking hands, and knows exactly how to inveigle her way into their group: she greets one of the girls with a wave. “The girl smiled reflexively, girls were so polite, so ready to make others comfortable.” Alex knows with precision the ways to exploit the weaknesses of others. On Day Two, alone in an empty mansion with the personal assistant of one of Simon’s wealthy friends, she plots to stay the night feigning a coquettish innocence: “She made herself look down, counting out a few seconds before she looked back at him. She held his eye. ‘I’m really sorry to ask,’ she said, ‘I’m so embarrassed.’ There it was, the flicker of responsiveness, the barely perceptible glance at her breasts.”
Manipulation is Alex’s superpower, the means by which she can transcend her world for the one hidden behind Long Island’s gated drives and high-perimeter walls. We might suppose that an incident has made Alex this way: a founding childhood trauma that will justify her obviously villainous tactics of deceiving and manipulating others. Halfway through the novel, this very question is presented to Alex:
“Why are you like this?” he said. And he was really asking. Expecting some explanation, some logical equation––x had happened to her, some terrible thing, and so now y was her life, and of course that made sense. But how could Alex explain––there wasn’t any reason, there had never been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.
This passage reads prima facie like a successful curtailment of what the literary critic Parul Sehgal identified, notably, as ‘the trauma plot’: a founding moment in a narrative text that explains and justifies the personality of a fictional character and thus the audience’s expectant sympathy and interest. But sitting in the valence of that ‘ordinary’ we begin to wonder––recounting the innumerable gestures of violence toward women in the novel: Simon “gripping” the back of Alex’s neck at a dinner party, for example––if the ordinary, itself, were the traumatic conditions from which girls like Alex emerged. That seeking out of another ‘world,’ mentioned so frequently throughout the novel, were a necessary survival strategy to the horror of the ‘ordinary.’ Alex cleaves to power as a means to protect herself from the violence of others, others like Dom––a wealthy man in the city she has stolen from and the reason she can’t easily return to her life in the city––whose threat grows as the novel pulses, with the tension of a ticking clock, toward its climax on Day Five.
Through the lens of horror, The Guest becomes a novel about a young woman running for her life. Indeed, there is something monstrous about the men in this book, attending to their lives with “psychotic discipline.” Alex wakes in the middle of the night to find a man gripping her throat: “She didn’t look away until he pressed hard enough that her eyes closed and she felt them roll back in her head.” Women are the “fresh blood” necessary for their sustenance.
An exception to this rule appears to be Jack, the “insistently juvenile” boy who hands Alex his copy of Siddhartha. By Jack’s own admission his father, a prominent movie producer, is a “psycho.” Both Jack and Alex find different kinds of refuge in each other. They domesticate an empty summer house, and Alex even wonders if she can make it to Day Five with the boy. But at seventeen Jack’s monstruous characteristics are simply inchoate. Like Cline’s description of his bad breath: Jack’s negatives are “neutralized” by his youth. However, Alex discovers when a friend visits that the summer house belongs to Jack’s former girlfriend, about whom little is known except that there was an ‘incident’ and Jack has been asked to keep away from her.
Cline’s numerous allusions to Siddhartha appear to encourage our reading of Alex as the wandering ascetic. Then, on their last night in the summer house, Jack insists upon reading the opening of Hesse’s book as though “something in his urgent tone” knew that Alex was planning on leaving him in the morning. On the bed, Jack intones, “Siddhartha had started to nurse discontent in himself, he had started to feel that the love of his father and the love of his mother, and also the love of his friend, Govinda, would not bring him joy for ever and ever, would not nurse him, feed him, satisfy him.” It’s these last words––nurse, feed, satisfy––that allows us to re-cast the Siddhartha allusion. That instead of Alex, it has been Jack all along occupying the role of the wonderer: a man, despite the “babyish fat in his cheeks,” in search of something, and finding a conclusion that all men in this book find: women can alleviate their discontents.”
One day on the beach, Alex and Jack encounter a stray dog and bring it back to the summer house. If there is any hope in Cline’s assessment of the world it is in the “sudden fact” of such animals. Alone in the woods, Alex is suddenly panicked by a tremendous noise only to find a deer crashing through the trees. “The deer didn’t seem to notice Alex at all, didn’t care about a girl sitting alone on the ground.” The attentiveness to gender in that final clause carries the implication that were it another creature crashing through the trees––a man, say––he would certainly notice and take predatory interest in a girl sitting alone in the woods.
Once the fanged, taloned adversary of the horror genre, animals are recast in The Guest as nothing less than the “emissary from another, better world.” Jack tells Alex, “Siddhartha says that meditating gets you in an animal state. He said he was like a jackal. In the book. That’s kind of like a dog, right?” An animal state: this appears to be Cline’s ultimate exit route from the world as we know it. To live as though in an alternative universe ruled by immediacy. But in lieu of nonattachment to the ordinary, the characters of The Guest erroneously search for in each other the means of their survival, and thus encode each other’s destruction.
About the author
William Hutton
William Hutton received a BA from Cambridge University, and an MSt from Oxford. He is a Chair’s Fellow in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.