When did you first encounter going “out east”? That slice of it seemed to exaggerate a lot of class stratification and power dynamics that were in the city but more visible in this concentrated way. The setting came out of, What would be a fun foil for this kind of character, and what kind of world makes sense? Long Island, that specific slice of it, struck me-to my California eye-as very specific and very different than anything I had been dropped into before. There’s something fun about following that kind of chaos. Ripley, where there are characters who you follow through the narrative that are operating outside the bounds of our moral code. Was that also the case for this book?Įmma Cline: It was the character first. Vanity Fair: You’ve said that setting often comes first. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

But narrative storm clouds gather when Alex engages in a mild flirtation with Simon’s friend’s much younger husband it lands Alex in a pool, and puts both her phone and relationship on the fritz.

Simon is her way forward, her beam of light. She has left behind angry roommates to whom she owes months of back rent, hotel bars in which she is no longer welcome, and a violent, shadowy contact named Dom who is trying very hard to get in touch. By the time she’s met Simon, New York has tarnished for Alex. “The light-the famous light-made it all look honeyed and mild,” Cline writes, “the dark European green of the scrub trees, the dune grasses that moved in whispery unison.” A man on the beach is “tanned to the color of expensive luggage.” Simon’s place is “near enough to the ocean.” High ceilings, polished concrete floors, a freezer stocked with halibut that he’d grill “with so much lemon that Alex felt her mouth vibrate.” It’s a book with the dog days languor of a Sofia Coppola film and the chilling tension of a Patricia Highsmith novel.īack in New York City, Alex did sex work, placing ads for services in exchange for “six hundred roses” or “six hundred kisses.” Her relationship with Simon is also transactional-as perhaps most relationships are-but less blatantly he buys her a buttery leather bag and designer silk dresses, and is apparently unaware of her history. He’s in his 50s, and during the day while he works Alex takes his painkillers and floats in the pool or the ocean.

When we first meet that character, 22-year-old Alex, she is spending August at her boyfriend Simon’s Hamptons house. “I didn’t know what the specifics were, but I knew where I wanted the book to leave this character.” “I knew from the beginning the emotional temperature of the ending, how I wanted it to feel,” said Emma Cline of writing her new novel, The Guest.

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