Con-artists have always made fascinating characters for stories. In 1986, David Mamet’s play “House of Games” set the standard for depiction of con-artistry from the point-of-view of the victim. Last year, Emma Cline’s “The Guest” supplied a standard for the 2020s depiction from the point of view of the con-artist.
Alex, the story’s female antihero, a 22-year-old escort, “was not beautiful enough to model…. But she was tall enough and skinny enough that people often assumed she was more beautiful than she was,” wrote Cline. Alex called that “A good trick,” which set the tone about Alex’s trickster personality.
The story seemed simple. Low demand for Alex’s escort services made her fall behind on rent. Her roommates kicked her out and she moved in with Dom, a client. She stole cash from Dom, spent it, and left. Dom wanted very much to have his stolen cash back and pursued Alex.
Then Alex met Simon: a rich, divorced art dealer who used “summer” as a verb and needed a companion for the season at his beach house. Con-artist Alex told him she just graduated from college and needed to decide whether to go for a master’s degree. Simon “asked her why she wasn’t close to her family—she said her parents were angry with her for not going to church anymore.” Simon bought the con and invited her to summer with him.
Simon cared more about selling paintings than about Alex and turned her into an “inert piece of social furniture” that required “only her presence … the general size and shape of a young woman. Anything beyond her sitting in her chair and nodding along was a distraction.” Occasionally, Simon patted her shoulder.
Alex did not mind such shoddy treatment. She had experienced worse in life and Simon had saved her from the wrath of Dom. The book never mentioned any specific geography, but appeared set in New York City and in the Hamptons, a collection of towns in eastern Long Island.
If indeed set in the Hamptons, then Cline captured the area extraordinarily well. She described the beaches, the townies, and the summer crowd with a clipped precision. Her prose sounded highly effective.
The novel soon took a turn. At one of many never-ending cocktail parties Simon obligated her to attend, Alex embarrassed Simon. The next morning, his assistant bought Alex a train ticket that would take her right back to Dom. What now? Should she board the train?
Cline opted for a plot in which Alex commingled fantasy with reality: Alex would stay “just until Simon’s Labor Day party. Then Alex would walk in. She’d apologize, she’d appease him. Then Simon would take her back.” Without a place to stay and with only a few dollars in her pocket, she wondered “how to burn the next six days.”
Even if the Hamptons had hotels, Alex could not have afforded one. Con-artists, though, could easily find solutions to momentary homelessness. She had to adapt, blend in, and use every skill she knew to assimilate into a very tightly knit subculture in which everyone knew everyone else and no one knew her.
Few novels have ever featured subcultural adaptation in such second-by-second detail. Alex functioned like a metamorph who gathered data and quickly fine-tuned her behavior, trying to act exactly as expected. For many con-artists, the energy required by this game devoured their real selves.
Some of Cline’s points probably suffered in editing. She developed a subplot about Lyme disease and deer ticks but then dropped it. She invested in another subplot in which Alex scratched an important but unnamed painting, but bungled the facts: Alex’s fingernails could scarcely have done any damage.
Though set in 2023, Cline’s novel entirely disregarded the pandemic. She could have used that hard-to-ignore period to plot Alex’s setbacks. The ending of “The Guest” disappointed me, but the rest of the book was top-notch. Many reviewers undervalued it as a “beach-read,” but for me it read like a precision-survey of human nature.
Author’s note: Readers should not confuse Emma Cline’s “The Guest” (Random House, 2023) with “The Guest” by B.A. Paris (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), a thriller set in the UK. Cline has written other works of note. Readers who want to follow Cline should turn to The New Yorker and The Paris Review.
