Liminality in Emma Cline’s The Guest
Content note: brief mention of drugs and alcohol and exploitative sexual relationships. Light spoilers for Emma Cline’s The Guest.
Emma Cline’s novel The Guest is a thriller where nothing much happens. The tension and dread are evoked from the seemingly impossible drama of trying to live from moment to moment.
It is a story of emotional labour as a 24/7 performance and what happens in the cracks where that breaks down. The somewhat privileged but precarious main character feels a little more like a Millennial than the Gen Z young woman she is written as. She evoked for me the protagonists of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The Answers, Luster, and The New Me. Those women eking out their lives through the performance of emotional labour and the numbing effects of drugs or alcohol.
The heroes of these books are a certain type of Millennial (mostly white, mostly female, mostly middle-to-upper-middle-class) but even with these privileges, there is little to prevent a slide into absolute disaster should the mask slip for a moment. The tension comes from how to maintain the performance.
The Guest is about how to get from one minute to the next, and the increasingly high cost of doing so. The main character ends up semi-homeless and exploiting and abusing people like her who are working for a living, trying to keep their jobs as house managers, butlers, and live-in partners to the wealthy — which is her job as the novel opens.
In one of the first moments of quiet horror, her reflection slips out of the forgiving glow of a phone filter into a momentarily candid shot. The one commodity she feels sure of is her 22-year-old skin, and in that moment she can glimpse her beauty fading to valuelessness.
Not long afterwards, she invites herself to the sumptuous holiday home of an acquaintance of her ex-partner under false pretences and stays with the house manager taking cheap coke and drinking expensive alcohol. She wanders the house, where priceless paintings are stored at specific temperatures, and, in an ambiguous moment, she scratches one of the artworks.
To me, that was the true climax of the novel, though a lot more does happen. It was there in the quiet moment of friction. A fingernail against paint, the shadow of imperfection, millions of dollars lost in a single fuck you.
She does it with such obnoxious carelessness that made me feel something in my body. A laugh. A yawn. A spaciousness in my chest.
In a book that is about a person who creates the illusion of frictionless pleasure for her clients and partners, she makes herself known and real at this moment. I am here. I exist.