A Leak In The Safe

No great loss, but I seldom write book reviews anymore. HOWEVER, I enjoyed this book The Guest by Emma Cline so much that I can’t resist the need to bloviate.

Lead character Alex is a modern day Moll Flanders, an amoral streetwise woman surviving off the excess wealth of an out of balance society. Unlike Moll, The Guest is told in the third person, but so vividly from the pinball perspective of Alex’s pretty but audaciously cynical head that the reader can’t help but sympathize with her transgressive, uncomfortably numb point of view. When you get off that train is up to you, but every other character she encounters wishes they had done so a lot sooner. In this sharp, masterful fiction, however, you’ll want to stay to the last shuddering stop.

Reminded me of Hunger, Under The Volcano, The Gambler, Talented Mr. Ripley, Pop: 1280, Tampa.

Many great quotes – here’s my short-list:

The perfect sheets, the chilly rooms: they were a convincing substitute for a life.

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

Misfortune hadn’t touched Alex: it had only come close enough that she felt the cold air of a different outcome hurtling past.

Could you live like this forever, in some alternative universe pulled by immediacy?

Sometimes it was best to just say yes, to see how far something would go. It would either be a good choice or a bad choice, no way to know yet.

Men who insisted on her coming first, as if this was proof of their fundamental goodness. It wasn’t bad, it was just annoying. Because actually it required more energy from her, requires more fake emotion scrounged up to match theirs.

Certain hours of the night where doom made a terrible sense, where it seemed like the only possible outcome.

Or the kids at the party the night before. Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in their babies in the woods. Instead the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.