5-Page Book Club: The Guest by Emma Cline
Plus, what I'm reading and watching lately
What I’m Reading and Watching Lately
The God of The Woods by Liz Moore. I recently went to camp (yes, camp) and took this book with me because it’s about a teen who disappears from camp! I had such a great time reading this novel. I found every moment gripping.
Envious. I watch this show on Netflix whenever I’m having a hard day, and it never fails to make me laugh. It’s about a woman who desperately wants to get married and goes to strange lengths to find a romantic partner.
Kinda Pregnant. I laughed so hard all the way through this Netflix movie. Amy Schumer pretends to be pregnant for one harmless moment—and then gets stuck repeating her lie in increasingly bonkers situations, all while falling for a guy who doesn’t know the truth.
House of David. Initially, I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that the creators of this Amazon Prime show added fantasy elements to the Biblical narrative of David’s life. But now I’m totally invested in David’s rise to the throne in the midst of enemies who have recruited giants to destroy his people.
A Real Pain. After Kieran Culkin won an Oscar for his role in this character piece about mismatched cousins, I was really curious to watch the movie. Culkin’s character is fascinating, and I was moved by his experiences honoring his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. And yet, the movie is also quite funny! At one moment near the end, I gasped in shock and then couldn’t stop laughing—you know the moment if you’ve seen the movie.
Coming Soon To The Writer’s Attic
Later this month.
Two Things Every Great Mystery Novel Needs. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what makes me pick up any given mystery novel, and what makes certain mystery novels reach so many readers. I’ve honed in on the two elements that I’ve realized make a mystery novel’s premise irresistible. I’ll give examples, and we’ll talk about how you can start working on these two elements in your own writing.
5-Page Book Club: The Guest
Welcome to 5-Page Book Club, in which we read five pages of a novel to see what we can learn as writers. This feature is for paid subscribers; free subscribers get a short preview.
Today, let’s discuss five pages of Emma Cline’s The Guest, a short novel about a young woman who lies to everyone she meets as she searches for a place to stay among Long Island’s wealthy elite. The Guest was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications, even while its fever-dream tone and ambiguous ending make it notoriously polarizing. I absolutely love the novel, and I’m excited to study an excerpt with you!
You can read five pages of The Guest here for free. The excerpt starts several pages into the novel, when the main character, Alex, attends a party with her wealthy boyfriend, Simon.
Myth-Like Narrative
As Alex and Simon enter the house of Simon’s wealthy friends, Alex turns around “to make sure Simon [is] behind her,” like a figure from a Greek myth traveling through the underworld. The room she and Simon enter is “partially filled with mist,” as if the realm they’re in is not quite terrestrial. The whole novel reads this way, with Alex traveling from house to house, facing trial after trial, so that we’re never sure if she isn’t just moving through a series of vaguely unsettling dreams.
Even though Alex is savvy in how she deals with the wealthy people she meets, the world she inhabits seems to have no fixed state. During the party, she pockets a marble animal sculpture, but when she examines it she isn’t sure what to make of it.
Maybe it was valuable. Or maybe it was worthless.
Is the sculpture even worth stealing? Neither we nor Alex knows.
Characters, too, seem to have a slippery place in Alex’s version of reality. Staff members might be all the same person, or they might be different people in identical black polos. Helen’s husband might have an accent or he might be “forcing” one. Alex might have “almost drowned today” or else she did drown, and this entire novel is an account of her foggy afterlife.
Because the story never fully commits to reality, we’re left to view the plot and characters as ciphers or symbols.
Alex As Con Artist
Alex sometimes seems to be an expert on how to act, what to say, what to wear to keep herself within wealthy circles. She’s always amenable; with the party’s host, she presents “Girl Scout cheer.”
She thanks Helen for inviting her, but is careful not to indicate that she’s an outsider:
Better, always, not to compliment the house, not to indicate unfamiliarity with these places.
But occasionally, Alex slips up, as when Helen seems to realize Alex is lying about her dress. In these moments, Alex’s vulnerability is on display. She has nowhere to live, nothing to wear, if Simon decides to break up with her. She has led him to believe that she’s an independent, perhaps wealthy, grad student—that their relationship is situated within a shared class. A wrong step would leave her stranded.