When I was a teen, I stumbled upon a pornographic video at the age of thirteen or fourteen. As a young boy in puberty, my primary reaction was one of lust, attributed to my hormones, but also wonder. I thought that it was something very pure, seeing this kind of expression on the screen in front of me. Quite naively, I figured that this type of act would be driven by love, that it was a pure act of love, because why would it be as pleasurable otherwise? Yet when I told my parents about me watching this video, they sat me down and had a long talk about sex, porn, and love. The main conclusion was that porn is fake. Not fake in the physical sense – I mean you can see the bodies moving in the videos – but fake in the sense of love. Porn is not a good representation of real love, my parents told me, and therefore I should not try to look at those kinds of videos in that way. It should be nothing more than an outlet for my hormonal needs, no matter how enticing it is to see it as anything else.

This idea of real or fake became less and less relevant as I became older. As I learned about the world, about life, love, and relationships, I took the lesson my parents taught me to heart: pornography was not genuine, just false intimacy and misleading love. There was one thing that I was curious about for a long time, however. I always wondered how porn stars themselves experienced performing porn, and if they agreed with my parents’ idea of porn being unrealistic. Despite my curiosity, though, I did not actually attempt to research that which I found curious. Pornography served my needs just fine as it was, without wondering about the emotional state of the people performing in those videos. Yet my questions on this subject are, at least partly, answered in The Guest, written by Emma Cline.

The novel made me wonder about the same question I had asked myself when I watched pornography: can you feel emotion for a character with a fabricated identity?

Cline takes my curiosity, and makes it the world of the main character to a certain extent. My questions about the authenticity of pornography are merely a small part of Cline’s narrative. They are more like a minor detail in the grand scheme of things. It did, however, make me interested enough in Cline’s story to read through her novel in the hopes of finding some answers, or maybe more questions that I have never even considered, and maybe answers to these questions, or maybe a mix of all of these things.

The Guest is a fictional work about Alex, a young woman who survives off of the backs of rich men that do not mind paying her expenses in exchange for sexual favours. She has survived living and working in New York City for a couple of years, but her time there is running out. She has not paid rent for a couple of months, her roommates hate her, and her previous sugar daddies have blocked or ignore her.

Alex has found a solution to these problems, however, when she encounters Simon. He whisks her away from the city to Long Island for a summer at his beach house. All she has to do to survive is to stay in Simon’s house and act like a piece of arm candy for him to show off when he goes to a dinner party. Besides that, she has his entire house and the clothes that he bought her at her disposal. Alex seems to have life figured out.

All of this comes crashing down when Alex falls out of Simon’s favour. While drunk at a party, Alex meets the husband of the organiser of the party, Victor. Alex recognises that Victor is similar to her. He used to be like her, before he “fully committed, made a life out of this, or at the least, decided to call what he had a life.” Victor is what Alex wants to be, a person who does not have to do anything except staying loyal to the person that provides for them. It is with this good company (while being drunk!) where Alex makes a fatal mistake. She shows genuine interest in a person other than Simon. She fails to do the one job that she has: not showing any kind of real interest in anyone besides Simon. And Simon, he finds out.

The morning after, Alex is forced to leave Simon’s beach house and go back to the city. However, Alex knows that she cannot do that. She has nothing left in the city, and more importantly, an ex of hers is looking for her because she stole his money. The ex, Dom, is constantly calling and texting Alex, threatening her and demanding that she pays him back the money.

Her salvation is Labour Day, which is in a week’s time. Simon throws a big party then, which Alex reckons is her only chance to beg for Simon’s forgiveness. With his forgiveness, her livelihood is safe; without it she is doomed. Thus Alex’s perfect life turns into a desperate race against time, as she has to survive on Long Island for a week without any help from Simon and his many acquaintances.

All alone, Alex must use all her manipulation skills to survive and leech off of the different rich people she encounters, such as charming a moody seventeen-year-old boy to do whatever she wants, or pretending to be a babysitter for a child and deceiving their housemaid. After a rollercoaster of thievery, destruction, and tons of painkillers, she reaches Simon’s party at the end of the week. Yet the author is cruel enough to end the book on a cliff-hanger, with Alex’s fate left undetermined.

What makes The Guest so interesting to read is the way the book handles time. Before Alex is kicked out by Simon, time can be either very long or very short: Alex’s years in the city are described in a span of a few chapters, whereas an afternoon on the beach is contained in only a few pages. Once it becomes clear that Alex has to survive a week, however, time seems to slow down ridiculously. The amount of pages once describing a few years now cover a couple of hours, or a day at most. This impacts Alex’s mental state heavily as well, as she needs to be at Simon’s party at the end of the week; otherwise her life is over. After all, if Simon does not notice and accept her at the party, she has nowhere else to go. New York is hostile, Long Island is foreign, and her ex Dom is on the hunt, unrelenting in his pursuit for his money. Without Simon, she is stranded between two worlds, where her constructed and fake identity denies her access to either one. The text thus constantly reminds the reader of how many days are left until the party, as a reflection of how Alex feels little remorse in light of the chaos that her presence causes.

Most reviews of The Guest mention how the novel is a so-called “beach-read”, referencing both the fact that the book was first published in the weeks before summer, but also that the novel starts at a beach, which, apparently, makes it perfect to read on the beach.

I do not agree with this description, as I find it shallow. In fact, I think that this book feels more like winter than summer: cold, dark and partly devoid of life, which are the same words that I would use to describe Alex. She is a person with little personality or identity – Alex does not mind changing her entire appearance, as long as it pleases her sugar daddy. This made me feel conflicted about Alex’s fate. On the one hand, she is a type of person most people have mixed feelings about: a woman entirely dependent on a man’s money, with no critical capacity or desire to be independent. On the other hand, however, there is a feeling of pity as you read how Alex is scrambling for any kind of support after she is kicked out from Simon’s mansion. After all, she has a psychotic ex-boyfriend looking for her, and no one in New York wants to be associated with her. Simon is her last chance at staying alive.

Cline is adept in transforming Alex’s lies and manipulations into a more balanced emotional experience, where Alex’s struggle to survive becomes more sad than anything else. I want to hate Alex, but I cannot seem to do it. Alex tries so hard to reunite with Simon, throwing all her connections and relationships away to reach her goal, even if Simon does not love her. “Simon.” Alex laments, “Simon had not loved her. […] But it was close enough. And close enough was fine.” Alex is so desperate and dependent on Simon that even him not loving her, but sort of loving her is enough. As long as Simon takes care of her, Alex does not care how he feels about her. That evokes a sense of pity in me so strongly that I can only feel bad for Alex.

Still, the ambiguous ending makes me wonder how seemingly effortless I have been dragged into Alex’s manipulations – as if I am one of the people she has lied to. Maybe the novel is a lie in its entirety, who knows? Even if Alex is not lying, maybe the narrator or the writer is. That said, Cline states in an interview in The Guardian in 2020 that she “[is] trying to replicate something of [her character’s] inner lives”, which does not help with this question. If The Guest represents Alex’s inner life, then it is still unclear whether Alex lies to herself or not. But can the reader even know? Or more importantly, does it matter?

What I have seen, however, is a glimpse of how people who fake their life or their job feel when they do it. Even if it is incredibly hard to deal with the current situation, they just keep on going, keep on surviving. Because that is what they know. Maybe I should keep on going too. Shows what I know. Maybe those porn stars are sort of similar to Alex: they both fake their identities, putting on masks in order to survive. Yet porn stars can take them off: can Alex do that too?