This week’s post is the second in a two-part series digging into the essential emotional vibe structure of Emma Cline’s buzzy 2023 novel The Guest and the 1964 John Cheever short story whose vibes inspired it, “The Swimmer.” You can read part one here.
The Guest’s Emotional Superstructure
A destitute, attractive young woman who thrills at violating boundaries must keep exploiting all the trust the Hamptons afford her until, she believes, she can move permanently into this world.
How to Turn Us Into a Living Ghost, Part 2
Alex, the protagonist of The Guest, is a 22-year-old who has been living in New York City for the past couple years. She’s getting kicked out of her apartment for owing her roommates months of back rent, stealing their pills, breaking things. In the drug-induced haze she’s forever swimming through, she hardly seems to know or care which of these things are true. The sex work she’s used to keep herself afloat seems to be drying up and, for reasons she can’t be bothered to recall, she’s unwelcome at many of the city’s restaurants and hotels.
One of the only people who wants to hang out with her is a pretty scary dude named Dom. Kind of knowing what might happen — and, as we see in the superstructure above, thrilling at violating boundaries — Alex steals drugs and a lot of money from him, and he spends the rest of the book blowing up her phone and trying to track her down. Which she’s also reasonably gifted at pushing aside in her consciousness when she doesn’t feel like thinking about it, though her gut level fear of him reads as real.
Enter Simon, a wealthy man in his fifties who takes up with her in a bar, and is ready to treat her as something like his legitimate girlfriend, at least for a few weeks of summer vacation. He helicopters her out to the Hamptons to spend much of August at his house there.
Alex can work with this. Simon has enough money to possibly pay down her debts, fix the Dom thing. There is faintly promising “talk of” — I don’t think the book specifies who does most of the talking — her moving in with him when he goes back to the city, and on this Alex pins all her hopes of escaping her old life into a new one with him.
Something she both needs to do and thrills at, because moving into the world of the Hamptons elite is one of the biggest boundaries someone like her might be able to cross.
The question hanging over the rest of the book is: can she do it? It’s thrilling as a reader to watch her try.
Because she’s still herself. No matter how hard she tries to edit her behavior, Alex never meets a boundary large or small that she doesn’t have some “reptile curiosity” to see if she can violate.
Her attempts to move permanently into Simon’s world and life are this writ large — the superstructure of the book — but self-similar instances of it, micro and mid-sized and macro, glitter throughout the book, the engine of the plot.
Jacket copy for The Guest describes what happens after Alex pushes the boundaries of Simon’s wealthy friend’s husband and gets herself pulled recklessly into a pool by him in an early chapter. Simon finds them, and is not amused. He coldly and firmly “dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.”
But Alex stays despite his wishes and “drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her.”
She convinces herself that, if she can only pass the week until Simon’s Labor Day party and crash it, he will welcome her back and moving into his life permanently will become an option again. It is still her best bet and at least a better plan than going back to the city while Dom is still very keen to find her.
And there are so many porous boundaries she can cross around the Hamptons in the meantime.
This is where Alex’s quest begins to have a lot of vibe-y similarity with Neddy’s from “The Swimmer.”
(No accident: “I don’t think that I am the first or will be the last person to get some Cheever ‘The Swimmer’ vibes from the novel,” Keziah Weir asks Cline in an interview for Vanity Fair. “Was that purposeful?”
“Yeah,” Cline responds. “For the longest time, the Word document was called ‘The Swimmer.’ Sometimes it’s nice to anchor it in a feeling.)
Neddy is a used-to-belong hanger on among the elite on Long Island while Alex is a never-belonged, but both travel from pool to pool (Alex ends up in a pool in every chapter), negotiating whatever social situations they need to along the way.
In Neddy’s journey, he goes from receiving warm receptions at the height of the day to receiving chillier and chillier ones as it gets colder and darker. As he progresses, he can hardly explain to himself why he feels so compelled to keep going. We learn from the chatter around the pools that (spoiler alert) he likely lost all his money overnight, had to sell his house, and his daughters might be in some kind of trouble. But, with the aid of a lot of gin, Neddy manages to mentally swim right past all of these potentially inconvenient thoughts and literally swim eight miles across his wealthy Long Island county. Until he finally reaches his house and it is (spoiler alert) empty.
What’s at stake for Neddy whether he reaches his home by a series of swimming pools or not? Inside his head, he has many thoughts of proving himself to be a daringly original explorer, making a contribution to modern geography. Outside his head, nothing. No other character, and nothing else within the world of his story, corroborates this for the reader.
Instead, we have a growing sense throughout the story that Neddy is avoiding some pretty big, unpleasant truths about his life and that whatever he thinks this quest will achieve is strictly in his head. But he remains devoted to it, and hence the eerie underwater vibes of someone so estranged from his own life, swimming through it, though no one can swim forever.
Similarly for Alex, nothing in the outside world corroborates her sense that Simon will be expecting her at his Labor Day party, “maybe even worried she might not show up. Worried she had somehow missed his signal, failed to understand his invitation.” In fact, all the other evidence we have points to quite the opposite being true, that she was a casual fling for Simon and would never be welcome to stick around in his life past the end of summer.
And if she ever was, she’s swimming against the rip current of her own personality. She’s continually exploiting all the trust an attractive young white woman is afforded around the Hamptons, but violating boundaries whenever she can’t help herself and passing the time with the increasingly needy and desperate people who might want something from her enough to keep her around for a good chunk of the time she needs to burn. Dom is still baring down on her. She’s increasingly at the mercy of all these brutal forces as the Labor Day party, her moment of truth, arrives.
The simple fact that, despite all her wiliness and skill at crossing boundaries, she keeps having to repeat the process, doesn’t bode well for Alex’s chances of finding a safe shore with Simon for long, even if he isn’t extremely resistant to her the moment he sees her at the party.
She’s swimming towards this vision of the Hamptons, and a life among the people who belong there. Everything is telling us the rip currents have probably pulled her too far out to sea.
But she keeps going, fervently believing in her quest until the very end. And in mirroring her emotions, we become living ghosts alongside her.
Key takeaway for story creators: To capture the eerie, ghostly emotional vibes of The Guest and “The Swimmer,” take a character so down-and-out that nothing within the world of their story can save them, and give them a quest that they fervently, delusionally believe will.
Question for You
Other than the pools and beachs of a rarified summer community, can you think of any other settings where it would be fun to watch a down-and-out character drift through a series of spaces, burning all the social capital they have remaining?
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