The Guest

“In the water, she was just like everyone else. Nothing strange about a young woman, swimming alone. No way to tell whether she belonged here or didn’t.”

Bodies of water are an important symbol of inclusion in the novel. Water is an equalizing space in which Alex can feel light, powerful, and in touch with her body. This quote introduces water’s symbolism and the connection Alex feels with bodies of water.

“A system that existed only because everyone believed they were among people like themselves.”

As an outsider in an exclusive, seemingly homogenous environment, Alex can see what insiders do not: They are not in fact surrounded only by people like themselves. Throughout the novel, Alex takes advantage of the wealthy class’s naive trust to infiltrate their closed-off world.

“A conversation performed as a smooth transaction—a silky back-and-forth without the interruption of reality. Most everyone preferred the story.”

As an outsider and a hustler, Alex is good at reading people and figuring out what they truly want from one another. Alex is dishonest in her dealings with others because she believes that people prefer dishonesty—a “story”—to reality. Conversations for Alex are “transactions,” not moments of connection. Alex’s transactional view of human relations may be influenced by her experience as a sex worker, but the wealthy characters in the novel, without exception, seem to share her view, if not her self-awareness.

“What would it be like to live here, to occupy this unfettered beauty every day? Could you become used to the shock of water? The envy acted like adrenaline in Alex’s body, a swift and enlivening rush to the head. It was better, sometimes, to never know certain things existed.”

As Alex enjoys the beauty of her environment, she is already mourning the inevitable loss of that environment. Alex works hard to try to stay with Simon so she can have access to this life, but she knows she will never truly belong there. Alex is living for a dream even she doesn’t believe in.

“Amazing how little you had to give, really. People just wanted to hear their own voices, your response a comma punctuating their monologue.”

Throughout the novel, Alex notes that other people want their social interactions to be superficial. Alex succeeds in manipulating others precisely because she knows how to stay quiet and give their voices priority. This quote expresses a bleak outlook on human interaction and connection, but it accurately reflects how other characters treat Alex as an object.

“There were many ways to keep knowledge from yourself, to not think too hard about things you didn’t want to confirm.”

Alex’s self-deception doesn’t serve her well, but it’s a survival tactic that she leans upon nevertheless. This quote reveals that Alex hides the truth not only from other people but also from herself. However, there’s only so much that a person can repress, and Alex’s repressed knowledge continues to haunt her.

“You could perform a constant filtering of whatever you were feeling, taking in the facts and shifting them to the side. There was a static that moved you from one moment to another, and then another after that, until the moments had passed, turned into something else.”

This quote reveals another one of Alex’s survival tactics: She has learned to live in the present, rather than dwelling on the past. In some cases, this is an admirable quality. But for Alex, this “filtering” and “shifting” of information is destructive because it prevents her from fully acknowledging her situation and dealing with it in a healthy way.

“Or maybe Alex had known, in some part of herself, that she was ruining everything, known how bad things could get, and maybe she had done it anyway.”

Alex’s error with Dom is unfathomable because it is truly self-sabotaging. In stealing his money and his drugs, Alex antagonizes a man she knows will come after her. In this quote, Cline suggests that Alex has a self-destructive streak. In the Hamptons, Alex makes a series of decisions that further implode her life, even as her resilience keeps her journeying forward at all costs.

“The houses looked strange, too, looming on the dunes with the blank eyes of their windows, the size too unbelievable, like this was a soundstage. The mist in the air, the unnatural warmth, the moonlight on the pale sand; it would make sense if none of this were real.”

In this quote, the fancy houses in the Hamptons take on a sinister quality. Their seeming unreality emphasizes Alex’s feeling of disassociation. Their characterization as vacant and performative also suggests that the people who live in them are similarly beautiful but soulless.

“What seemed so peaceful, the black stretch of ocean, was frightening when she got up close. It would be easy to lose yourself. One step into the water. Another. Simple, all the questions answered.”

Throughout the novel, bodies of water represent a safe place for Alex. But in this quote, Cline complicates the motif, characterizing the ocean as deceptive and dangerous, its “peaceful” guise lulling swimmers into a false sense of security before swallowing them. Alex feels both drawn to and frightened of the ocean in this moment, which reflects her warring instincts for self-destruction and survival.

“It was Nicholas’s job, of course, to be this agreeable. It was even part of his job to look like one of them and not like an employee, to dress like someone’s nice son-in-law who just happened to anticipate your every need and tend to it discreetly. Maybe the lack of uniform made people more comfortable with the idea of another person being so deeply embedded in their life, as if Nicholas hung around just because he liked it, just because he enjoyed their company.”

Many of the novel’s secondary characters are those employed by the wealthy to keep their lives frictionless. Nicholas’s role is to take care of George’s house and act as a host on George’s behalf. This role requires him to maintain a positive affect at all times and through all problems. Nicholas’s agreeability is necessary to his survival and success. This quote also highlights an irony of performing service work for the very wealthy: Nicholas travels with George and lives with him, but he is decidedly not part of George’s family. Wealthy people prefer to see their servants as people who just enjoy being with them; otherwise they become uncomfortable with the power dynamics at play.

“Occasionally a man in long sleeves and a baseball hat walked past the pool carrying a garbage can filled with weeds. When she nodded and waved, he just looked at the ground. So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.”

The landscaper at George’s house is another character whose labor helps make wealthy characters’ lives operate smoothly and seemingly effortlessly. Notably, he does not engage with Alex. He focuses on his job because he is even more of an outsider than she is. Also notable in this quote is the way Cline connects an “appearance of calm” with “violent intervention”: Pain and hard labor are required to make something look beautiful on the surface.

“Expecting some explanation, some logical equation—x had happened to her, some terrible thing, and so now y was her life, and of course that made sense. But how could Alex explain—there wasn’t any reason, there had never been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.”

This quote reveals an important piece of Alex’s backstory. Cline doesn’t provide much information about how Alex has landed herself in so much trouble or why she doesn’t have a support system. This quote suggests that Alex’s conflicts have an unsatisfactory genesis—there is no past trauma she is running from or external conflict that forced her into poverty and sex work. This makes her situation all the more mysterious.

“Alex had the sick sense that she was a ghost. Wandering the land of the living. But that was dumb, a dumb thought. It was just when the day was hot like this, hot and gray, anxiety moved closer to the surface.”

This quote highlights Alex’s burgeoning sense of disassociation. As she becomes more tired, hungry, and desperate, she has out-of-body experiences in which she doesn’t experience herself as truly living. Her dissociative episodes underscore her feeling of not belonging in the wealthy community.

“There was no reason to feel anxious—the fear had been transmuted, the way it often was, into excitement, the memory always dissolving until it was only the idea of fear, and when had the idea of fear ever been a convincing deterrent?”

Alex switches between disassociation and a kind of extreme mindfulness. She banishes fear from her mind as a survival tactic. In this quote, Cline suggests that memory can be so repressed that people’s experiences with fear don’t translate into wisdom that can help them avoid certain situations. Alex’s life is unstable, but instability breeds a toxic excitement. This further suggests that Alex partially enjoys her self-destructive behaviors.

“These were the type of people who assumed that there were rules, who believed that if they followed them they would one day be rewarded. And here was Alex, naked in their pool.”

Alex’s presence in this elite community is subversive and transgressive. She is not allowed to be there, but she is anyway. While the people Alex manipulates believe in the power of rules, Alex knows that rules can be broken. The luxurious bubble they live in is more permeable than they believe; it just requires one person to violate the implicit social contract.

“Their interest was forever reflected off someone else, forever mediated by another aim. She’d met people like Jack before, children of the rich or famous, their personalities distorted by a false reality. No one ever responded to them honestly, no one ever gave them meaningful social feedback, so they’d never cultivated a proper self.”

Even though Alex is less privileged than Jack, she can still recognize how his privilege harms him. Because his father is well known and wealthy, Jack isn’t accustomed to people treating him honestly. Jack doesn’t have a fully formed identity because he has been carefully kept sequestered by influence that doesn’t belong to him. This is an important characterization for Jack because he behaves in erratic ways that highlights his misery, a byproduct of his lack of identity.

“Alex was missing the mark so often, lately. Everything was jarred from its proper place, or maybe the problem was Alex. Maybe she should cool it with the pills. Even as she told herself she would try to be better, she was aware that she would not.”

Alex’s failure to read people and situations signals that she’s losing the thread of her own narrative. Alex’s survival depends on being able to see people for what they are so she can manipulate their vulnerabilities and profit from their strengths. In this quote, she makes a connection between “missing the mark” and her drug abuse but knows she won’t stop taking the pills. Alex is coasting on substance use that helps her feel better even though it causes her to make disastrous decisions.

“It was intolerable, in a way. Unbearable. But then, it had been tolerable, hadn’t it? Because here she was. A familiar feeling, a dim feeling she could conjure too easily. The times she knew, with certainty, that she did not exist.”

Alex’s resilience is ironically a detriment to her survival. Because she wills herself to keep going even when she’s at her breaking point, her life becomes a game of disassociation. This reveals the depths of her desperation and the dangerous tipping point she balances between consciousness and temporal invisibility.

“That’s what they all wanted, wasn’t it? To see, in the face of another, pure acceptance. Simple, really, but still rare enough that people didn’t get it from their families, didn’t get it from their partners, had to seek it out from someone like Alex.”

Alex’s gift is understanding what people want. This quote expresses Cline’s message that people simply want to be seen and appreciated. Because everyone is defined by the masks they wear and the codes they switch between, true acceptance is hard to come by. Alex knows how to give it to people, which gives her some power over those who are far more privileged.

“And anyway, most people didn’t feel the way they were supposed to feel. Love as a sort of catch-all term whose mere invocation was enough, a way to avoid having to acknowledge how you actually felt. It would be easier for Jack if he didn’t expect so much, if he understood these words were just gestures at meaning, not meaning itself.”

In this quote, Alex espouses a bitter view of reality, calling “love” an umbrella term that doesn’t have real meaning. It also reveals how we use language to obfuscate our real feelings. Gestures at meaning are not the same thing as meaning, but human beings nevertheless cling to such gestures. Otherwise, the world becomes too lonely to bear. Alex experiences this bleak loneliness on a constant basis, which is dangerous and destructive to her psyche.

“She forced herself to stay in the water a while longer, to keep bracing for the next wave. Conditioning herself to wait out the fear. To wear herself out. Even when she got knocked over again, it was thrilling this time, her head clear, the world winnowed to this immediate moment.”

This quote depicts the final time Alex turns to the water to re-center herself. The ocean becomes a cleansing space in which Alex can reinvent herself in preparation for the next chapter she’s planning with Simon. For years, Alex’s survival instincts have kept her moving from man to man, friend to friend, conflict to conflict. But in the ocean, her survival instinct focuses on one moment of escalated conflict. The pull and strength of the ocean requires her to fight with all her might, and she experiences a thrill in succumbing to its power.

“Bad, anxious dreams, a bubble of dread in her chest when Alex woke up. But she could barely remember any specifics of the dreams, only a submerged sense of urgency, the knowledge that there was a task that she was failing at, that she would always fail at. By the time she got out of bed, the feeling was gone. Not even a memory.”

The bad and anxious dreams mentioned in this quote foreshadow the disastrous day Alex is about to have. The “submerged sense of urgency” refers to Alex’s self-denial: Deep down, she knows that the Jack and Dom situation will not be so easily resolved. She pushes these feelings away, choosing instead to believe in a fantasy that everything will be fixed shortly.