Beautiful, disgruntled housewives or girlfriends of rich men are treasured in American literature, from Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening to Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In fact, the appetite for tales of these types of women is so avid that it’s hard to mess them up. But in The Guest, Emma Cline manages to offer a heroine (anti-heroine?) so unremarkable, so devoid of charm, it’s almost an achievement in and of itself.
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