I have found my favorite book of the year, my friends. I always find it in January and then spend the rest of the year moping that nothing measures up.
Emma Cline’s novel The Guest is a bloody masterpiece. I read it in one day, a pretty busy day with no time to read but I made time for this “hit you in the face and leave you hemorrhaging on the sidewalk” kind of book.
You, folks, know what type of stuff gets to me. Gritty realism, the cleanest possible writing. By that I obviously don’t mean lack of swear words. I mean the kind of writing that Strunk and White will read for eternity after they die and go to heaven.
“Arkady, I beg you, don’t speak beautifully,” says a character of Turgenyev’s Sons and Fathers to his verbally incontinent friend. That’s what I often want to say to writers. Stop trying to show how clever you are. Stop trying to be cute or teach me a lesson. Tell me a story, that’s all I want.
In The Guest, Cline tells a story that grips you and cracks you like a walnut. The main character is an unsuccessful, washed-out 22-year-old prostitute Alex. Reviewers complain that Alex is tawdry, unattractive and self-defeating. As if a 22-year-old prostitute could be anything else. Alex is one of those people who are so chaotic in their minds that they warp reality around them. I don’t mean “crazy” or “mentally ill.” Alex is a healthy young woman. But she tarnishes everything she touches because that’s who she is.
I wonder if everybody knows, at least at some level, what it feels to have a disordered mind that turns everything around you to chaos. Or do most people honestly not know what makes the dregs of society what they are?
Cline does know. Her understanding of the people who are inexorably drawn to the bottom is superb. She’s been criticized for not depicting Alex as a victim of “systemic injustices”. But Cline creates literature, not didactic woke tracts. Alex is neither a pure, unfairly persecuted victim nor a terrible villain. She evokes compassion but also a desire to pity her from very far away.
There’s not a trace of wokeness in this book even though Cline is a Californian Millennial with an MFA. She drives a stake through the heart of the rich elites and shows what the world with only the very wealthy and the absolute rejects looks like. Cline writes like it’s 1991 and nobody heard of woke precepts outside of a few campuses. This is yet another thing that makes the novel so narcotic. Reading The Guest is like taking a vacation to a planet where wokeness doesn’t exist. It’s so unusual to read a book where an author talks honestly about how things are that one feels kind of overwhelmed.
OK, if I haven’t persuaded you to give the novel a try, nothing will. But I’m telling you. It’s extraordinary.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is exactly the kind of book I’ve been wanting to read lately. I always try to add your books to some kind of “list” (unfortunately usually a mental one in the past), but this one will probably just be the next book I read.
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It’s so good. I’ll be happy to hear your impressions when you read it.
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“That’s what I often want to say to writers. Stop trying to show how clever you are. Stop trying to be cute or teach me a lesson. Tell me a story, that’s all I want.”
I am not sure I agree with you, but I like Rafael Chirbes’s theory of the novel: “hay novelas con las que te vistes y engalanas como para ir a la ópera; y otras que dejan carne a la vista como […] deja a la vista la carne de sus víctimas el verdugo que va a decapitarlas.” He then creates a metaphor of the novelist as a tailor or the novelist as an executioner: “El sastre viste con tejidos diferentes a pobres y a ricos, mientras que el verdugo descubre que es idéntica la carne de los nobles y la de los plebeyos.” [A ratos perdidos, (tomo I), 2021, p. 253]
I do not think that the story matters at all, it’s what the novelist does with it: is it to conceal reality or to uncover it? In writers like Kafka the story-line is almost non-existent and there is hardly any plot, but he lays reality bare for all to see. Musil is almost baroque in weaving an impossibly complex range of events that he narrates with sparkling verve and brio and yet the end result is the same as Kafka’s. So, it’s not the story really, but what the artist does with it, i.e. whether he uses it to reveal the world beneath the words or whether he uses words as purely decorative elements.
P.S. Thank you again for leading me to Chirbes. Best present ever.
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Right??? I mean. Chirbes is the absolute bomb. But this is highly postmodern (in a good sense) literature. It’s very much not for everybody. Cline, on the other hand, is very accessible to any intelligent reader. And there are many people who want to read for fun but are tired of endless woke lecturing. Cline will be a godsend for them.
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There’s a 20-week waitlist for my library’s copy. That’s OK, at this rate it’s gonna take me that long to finish reading *A Distant Mirror*. 590 pages in, though. Progress! I am a slow reader, but very determined 😉
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Same story at our public library. I ordered through the university library, and there are many copies available in the Illinois university library share system. Apparently, it’s not the kind of stuff that academics appreciate, which is a good recommendation for the book.
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For anyone who doesn’t know: you can often get interlibrary loans from universities to your local public library. In Ohio this is done through Ohiolink. I’m sure other states have their own methods. Obviously academics won’t need to do this, but us lowly civilians can also access academic library resources with this workaround.
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Ours is called IShare. It’s a godsend since our university library was eviscerated to make sleeping spaces.
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That’s interesting, my library has over 20 copies available
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Hush! We shall speak beautifully when we can, for this is a moveable feast, and we should not attempt to consume TV dinners every day.
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Loved it, thanks for recommending it. I didn’t care much for her first book and would not have tried this one, but it is so good! Amazing writing and leaves me with so many open questions. No explanations, no interpretation, just raw force.
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And that’s precisely the foremost sign of a mature, serious writer. She doesn’t try to explain or guide the readers’ perception. She has the confidence to let the story go free.
I’m so happy you liked it!!!
I’m very curious where this writer will go from here.
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