WHEN WE FIRST MEET HER, Alex is adrift—literally at sea, floating perilously farther away from shore. “What would they see if they looked at Alex?” she wonders, gazing on the rest of the beachgoers. “In the water, she was just like everyone else.”
At first glance, Alex appears like any other young woman enjoying a day at the beach, her “thin brown hair cut at her shoulders.” Alex had learned early on “that she was not beautiful enough to model,” but was “tall enough and skinny enough that people often assumed she was more beautiful than she was. A good trick.” At twenty-two, she is still young enough to pull off this particular optical illusion.
This is how Emma Cline introduces the protagonist of her new novel, The Guest. Though Alex, as we soon learn, isn’t like the other girls at the beach. She’s merely an interloper—the guest of Simon, a fifty-something art dealer who invites her to his Long Island summer home after they meet at a bar in New York City. A sex worker by trade (though Simon doesn’t know this), Alex is fluent in the art of playing someone’s girlfriend. Well accustomed to being on display, she approaches the maintenance of her physical appearance “with all her careful labor.” For Alex, the project of passing in Simon’s world is difficult to parse from the work of being beautiful.
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