The Dead Aren’t Hungry
(Sentences of) Opaque Wanting in Emma Cline’s The Guest
When I picked up Emma Cline’s The Guest, I had just read Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, in which Seymour summarizes Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s comparison of “social media to a fridge which has something new in it every time we look.” Seymour goes on to say that the something new might not be appetizing,
“and we might not really be hungry. But at least we understand hunger, in a way that we don’t necessarily understand the obscure feelings of dissatisfaction that sent us to the fridge in the first place. We have the option of treating this opaque wanting as if it were hunger, to be satisfied with a feed.”[1]
It’s possible that “obscure feelings of dissatisfaction” could describe how Alex came to be the character we encounter in the book (Cline is careful to not chalk it up to classic trauma), a twenty-two-year-old sex worker attempting a grift-to-graft for a safer, steadier life in the Hamptons with Simon, a fifty-something rich guy who has cycled through a few of Alex’s kind. But: “They were ghosts; she was real.”
They—Simon’s former young women—“drifted into the kitchen at ten in the morning…, tugging their cotton underpants out of their ass…. Thin girls in camisoles who ate yogurt standing up” (24). Even in the moment Simon is ejecting Alex from his life, she refuses similarity to these girls: “Her swimsuit had ridden up her ass but she forced herself not to pull it out” (60).
Alex’s force of will, her hunger to remain in a “more permanent realm”—to not become a ghost—defines the novel as not so much character-driven as driven-character. We don’t get a very deep impression of who Alex was (typically, in a novel with so much through-story action, we’d enrich our sense of Alex’s character during flashbacks). What we do get is scene after scene of Alex wanting, wanting to survive the week between her expulsion and her planned return to Simon’s end-of-season party. Her wanting’s clear; opacity attaches to some readers’ desire to know why she is the way she is (I skimmed a few reviews), for some standard narrative to knock off the sprues.
Hunger is a plausible eventuality, if not a certainty, in a survival narrative. Even in the story’s main expository flashback—to the inciting incident at Dom’s—Alex is already marked by hunger and dissatisfaction. Before Alex leaves with what she takes from Dom, Cline writes the sentence that made me want to write about the novel:
Nothing in the fridge but a murky jar of gherkins, a stony cheese embalmed in many layers of plastic wrap. (86)
I read this sentence several times, kept opening the fridge, enjoying the like sounds in “murky gherkins” and “plastic wrap,” the beat of it: the first phrase’s three trochees and three iambs (the final syllable in gherkins stranded); the second phrase in the two-image fragment is fully iambic (we can argue about layers). It takes me about six seconds to read it, easy to imagine that’s the pace of Alex’s gaze as she observes these dead specimens.
Before the flashback in which she ghosts Dom, we get these references to food: flavorless pink steak “thick as a hardcover book”; room-temp ginger ale, “whipped cream containers…, and empty seltzer cans in a CVS bag” and Dom’s 4 A.M. omelet “that neither of them touched”; Simon’s freezer crowded with halibut, and his vice: sedulously eating an entire peanut butter jar on the couch; the ghost-girls’ coffee and yogurt; the “rocky oysters” at the raw bar at every party, and “the blended green soup in a shallow porcelain bowl” Alex can’t bring herself to eat; “the grains and the juices” of some host’s famous breakfasts; “cheese plates and dry-looking cookies”; “ravaged pizza boxes, a gallon of milk sweating.”
Sweating, dry, ravaged, rocky, frozen, empty, thick, untouched; Cline builds a barrier of inaccessibility around the sustenance. She names what’s edible, but describes it as inedible or unappetizing. Or at least as not belonging to Alex, as objects that are out of reach despite their proximity.
To notice the hunger pattern is to register Alex’s emptiness as fundamentally physical, her motivations as instinct. Watching Alex move through the scenes is like watching one of those reality shows where people get dropped in the middle of some wild environment and have to wit and muscle through, sucking sap and steaming grubs on a mesh of soaked withe. But in those shows, the contestants’ ultimate safety is as assured as their desperation is evident; Alex has no such assurance, and she must cover her desperation in a veneer of satiety and hope.
There is no moment in the novel when Alex is in not in secret survival mode, and for most of the action she is in limbo (like a ghost) between the life she had with Simon and the city life she fled. We know what she wants all along, and we know she (probably) won’t get it because her delusion is so basic—Cline tells us Alex is aware that desperation doesn’t play in this setting, and then she shows us Alex being desperate to the point that she forges her own reality. There are a bunch of meta moments in which the agreement between Alex and another character is like that between writer and reader; they collaborate to create a truth they have to trust each other to sustain—even when it seems to lack something essential. I think that’s why I like the fridge imagery so much. It would be easy to doubt the absolute statement of “Nothing in the fridge but” but the prose compels me not to. To see the jar of mustard in the door, the cans of energy drink (not Ghost; Dom seems more like a Monster guy), I’d have to break the agreement.
Alex’s weeklong survival is marked by opportunities to eat. She has a beer, a few tortilla chips, and a hot dog that “tasted like charcoal, the center still cold” on the beach the night she meets teenage Jack, who is trying out vegetarianism on the basis of reading Siddhartha[2]. Jack admits Siddhartha “‘wasn’t a vegetarian, ’cause you were supposed to just take whatever food you were offered. ’Cause they were begging?’” But, he explains, the book made him think about “‘how to cause less harm’” (94). Alex spends that night on the beach, a night she fears will be sleepless—for lots of reasons, we assume, but Cline makes sure to tell us: “Part of it was hunger” (98). A hunger that has Alex imagining Jack at home before “some dinner of pesto salad and salmon and corn” and thinking of ignoring—in a memory fragment from her city life—the “gruesome leftovers…on the room service tray” (96).
The one scene in which Alex gets real nourishment is when Nicholas, a house manager for one of Simon’s friends, cooks her lunch. Nicholas, in his professional capacity, is “like Alex, [in that] he had made himself into a vapor, the better to allow things to pass through him” (101)[3]. But he is unlike Alex in the scene in which he feeds her, and she is aware of their difference; she draws a parallel between her wish to hang out and chat while he cooks and “the men who asked her endless questions about herself…[and] who insisted on her coming first, as if this was proof of their fundamental goodness” (106). Being chummy with the help is like feigning interest in the woman you’re paying to fuck? Either her version of this is quite a bit worse or Alex is so hungry that she has collapsed all appetite into a single drive in her mind. What Nicholas serves, salmon and salad, is the only truly appetizing food in the novel, and it brings Alex briefly back to herself, to a self we don’t really know—to some fundament of her being she’s kept suppressed. In the hours after she eats, she even feels turned on—albeit “vaguely”—for the only time in the book: “her skin sliding around under her hands, newly aware of her swimsuit pressing her crotch” (112). You can almost feel her cortisol levels drop.
It doesn’t last, of course. This is Alex. She fucks it up. The next morning she’s back hunger-questing toward Labor Day with unripe nectarines and chicken tenders whose aftertaste makes her want to “perform a swift and nasty maneuver in the nearest trash can”; rose candies that taste like perfume, wine “so cold that it tasted like nothing”; more “red wine from the fridge” and “unopened clamshells of humid-looking salads, feta pressed against the plastic.”
Nasty, tasteless, cold.
An image from one of Cline’s (at the time of this writing) eleven Instagram posts, from May 2023—caption: THE GUEST is out tomorrow (blue heart, green heart, open hand palm up emoji, green heart, blue heart)—features, in the foreground, a still life of (I assume) her desk: an open notebook, pen in the spine crease, Lays bag, the left edge of a plugged-in MacBook with a single-spaced doc on the screen, two cans of seltzer, a paper to-go coffee cup, a copy of Siddhartha stacked on a book about de Kooning. Swipe left to a Marcel Duchamp formula printed on a square of wrinkled gold foil, all-caps: A GUEST + A HOST = A GHOST.
Is Alex a ghost?[4] That’s not the question. The question is why are we compelled to ask? How are we compelled back into the text? By the ending.
Cline said in an interview that she knew “the emotional temperature” of the ending “from the beginning.” In that case, we can read her choice to write in the past tense, in a close, Alex-focalized third, as a choice to keep her character alive forever between the covers of the book. Without structural evidence (a shift in tense or POV) to suggest otherwise, we’re compelled to read the accident and its aftermath (the novel’s final pages) as only being different because it’s the end; there’s nothing more; we can’t open the book again and get another helping of the meager sustenance we’ve been getting all along—this is not a knock; I craved those murky gherkins, those stony, inedible cheeses. Still, people want more. And by people, I mean people on the internet who want books to be satisfying in a specific way. To want to be satisfied by this book is to want it to turn into salmon and salad.
In the end, Alex is what’s been consumed—consumed with the idea of showing up at the party, and consumed by the various characters who play host to her (though as they take her in they are in turn taken in by her; this is the bargain for readers, too). To host her is to let her feed. And she proves too intense for the Labor Day partygoers (and for some readers, the ones who want her to be dead).
In the end, Alex can’t move. But we can. We can go back into the text, open it at random and read until we see some food. Close it. Open it again to a different page. Stay hungry. Walk away. Come back for more. A book is a technology for preservation, and a great book does more than preserve; it shows you something new every time you look.
[1] I think the analogy needs tweaking; in my experience, social media is more like a fridge that rearranges the same junk food and expired condiments every time we shut the door. Someone else’s leftovers severed from the context of the original meal.
[2] Late in novel, on Molly, Jack will read the opening to Alex; it, too, is about satiety.
[3] Italic page numbers are from the e-book version, slightly different pagination.
[4] A Vanity Fair article discussing the ending says “the word maybe appears in [the novel] 100 times.”