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Toeing the Line Between Welcome and Unwelcome in The Guest
Emma Cline’s new novel on self-realization and waking up
It’s Maria from Play It As It Lays on a tightrope: detached, distressed, destructive. There’re no snakes here though; Cline shies away from overturning the rotten underbelly of the elite. Like the fingernail scratch on one of her wealthy character’s paintings, there it is. A scratch, a scribble, “a thing that [cannot] be undone.”
In The Guest we watch Alex attempt to elude the traces of her past life and walk the precarious line between welcome and unwelcome. She floats spectrally between mansions with the blankness of a ghost carrying a checklist of how to be invisible: “Keep fingernails clean. Keep breath sweet. Don’t leave toothpaste in the sink basin.” Of course, this etiquette is abided with the hopes of extending her stay, but as Liska Jacobs writes in her review for The New York Times, the archetype of a blank, reflective young woman is where “self-realization is possible.”
Is this self-realization actualized? Yes, in the way that Alex, a sex worker, recognizes herself as not standing a chance against the well-heeled woman she characterizes as “future domestic totems”. But despite commodifying women in this manner she fails to generalize their dispensability to men, no matter how convincing or…