What Does Fiction Owe Reality?

Or: The easy answer is: Nothing. But…

I’m usually afraid to offer a critique of any novel I read. The reason for this is two-fold. The first is that I abandon any book that doesn’t hold my attention after the first five pages, so if I’ve finished reading a novel, it must have been a success on some level.

The second is much more tied to class. I didn’t get my undergrad or my MFA at fancy schools. The things we learned in both of those programs were much more tied to practical matters (how to make money after graduation, how to finish writing a novel draft). My parents were very concerned with me being able to get a job out of college, so most of the classes I took were not about capital T theory or capital C Criticism. 

So when I hear people who went to schools for things that aren’t tied to a paycheck (Philosophy, Film, etc.) use some obscure framework or philosophy to critique art, I just shut down. Those conversations are not for me, but whenever I hear them, my opinions get a little bit smaller. And over time, that’s reduced my ability to offer any criticism down to a speck of dust. I might offer a glossed-over take of a novel over a meal, but otherwise, I don’t feel equipped to say anything.

But I’ve been struggling a bit with a new novel, The Guest, by Emma Cline. 

Full transparency, I read the novel in a single plane ride. I couldn’t put it down. The pace clipped along, the prose was solid, it felt like the entire book was building to a crescendo. And I was along for the ride. 

The plot in a nutshell: Alex, a high-end 22-year old escort, flees New York City to the rich part of Long Island with a wealthy man who doesn’t know she is a sex worker. Their relationship is transactional on another level, wherein she’s playing the poised, perfect girlfriend that functions as a smooth mirrored surface for the desires of the man. She cannot make any mistakes or the illusion will be shattered. That’s the bargain.

But she makes a big mistake, and the illusion is so shattered that he dismisses her from his home. Without money, and with the delusional hope that he will change his mind after a few days, she drifts aimlessly through the ultra-wealthy landscape. She pretends to know people to enter parties and beach clubs, eventually taking advantage of a seventeen-year-old boy to survive. The novel ends with her standing before the wealthy man who dismissed her, still delusional, disheveled, waiting to see if he’s changed his mind against the landscape of his catered end-of-summer party.

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In my initial read of the novel, it seemed to be in conversation with The Bell Jar or Play It As It Lays, two other prime examples of disillusioned young women class-passing among the wealthy, enjoying the proximity until the proximity runs out. 

And throughout The Guest, there seems to be a bit of a barb of the wealthy. The New York Times called this a “... an entertaining series of misguided shenanigans interrupting the upper class’s summer vacation.” 

Alex does grasp that there’s an inequality at play, but her small moments of rebellion (stealing a small statue or pills from a rich person’s house) don’t really amount to much. I don’t think she really interrupts anything for anyone but herself.

If anything, she continues to blend in as much as possible, minus the occasional faux pas that might make a party pause for a moment before carrying on. Her commentary on the rich isn’t biting so much as it recounts somewhat dryly what she’s seeing around her as she keeps finding a man to cling to who will offer her a bed or food or drugs or all three. 

Underscoring all of this is Alex’s work as an escort. There’s a past client hunting her down for money she stole from him. Her drug issues lead her to steal from her roommates who kick her out. All of this is meant to make her either sympathetic or explain why she’s drifting through life so aimlessly. 

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In both The Bell Jar and Play It As It Lays, the characters face a major crisis: mental illness and abortion. But in both novels, we stay close to the source of suffering: We’re in the mental hospital, we’re witnessing the abortion. If we think of narrative as a camera that an author is in control of, the camera doesn’t look away from the hardest parts of the character’s lives, the parts that explain why they are who they are, the tragedies and traumas that form them, that shape their behaviors and their lives.

Initially, after reading The Guest, I thought that I liked it. But something was nagging at me. Was the narrative too clean? Was the prose too sparse and simple? Was I just jealous that the novel was crisply written and seemed above critique? After all, I couldn’t stop reading it. After all, I’d devoured it. And the critics seemed to love it. And Emma Cline seemed like a nice person! Obviously, I didn’t have a problem with Emma Cline, did I? No, I did not! She was a friend of a friend! I’d heard she was a lovely person! And she wore very nice outfits on her book tour. She is wildly more successful than I am! And who wants to pick a fight with Emma Cline? Or write a mean thing about Emma Cline? Certainly I do not! So The Guest was a fine book, wasn’t it? All of this was fine!

But maybe it wasn’t that simple.

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I’ve sometimes thought of certain writers as having been in the mud of life. By this, I mean they’ve faced down the real struggles: addiction, mental health issues, not having enough money for an abortion, abusive relationships, being desperate enough to live that selling drugs or sex work makes sense, the real fear that the government wants them dead or wants to force them to have children, going to work every day for a boss who sexually harasses you because you need the paycheck, the types of scenarios that keep you up at night, that consume you, that impact your very survival in this world.

For writers who have been in the mud, you can feel it in the text. It comes to life in the desperation of their characters. The stakes are high because the writer understands what the stakes are, because the writer understands how tenuous life is for the most vulnerable among us. It’s grim, it’s stressful, it’s all-consuming to be in these situations. If we’re going to bring these scenarios into our novels, I think our job is to show everyone the mud. 

Let’s play this out: If Alex isn’t a sex worker, the book becomes about a young woman who is bored in a wealthy society, floating from party to party to have her needs met, an opportunist looking for her next grift. The stakes feel exactly the same.

And if Alex is a sex worker, why do we never see her engaged in actual sex work? If this is a core part of her life, if it is a driving part of her motivations, if it has blown up her life to this extent, why do we look away from this part of her as a character? What do we lose by never seeing her as an escort? A lot, I think.

I’d even go so far as to argue you could remove sex work from this novel entirely and nothing would change. You’d only need to remove a few lines and adjust a scenario or two. Alex could just as easily have been an intern, an architect, a fashion blogger. As long as she had a pill problem, almost nothing else would change.

In that light, the sex work aspect feels like an add-on to make this more than what it is: A story about a detached woman floating through wealthy society for a few weeks. 

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Fundamentally, I don’t believe only sex workers can write novels about sex work. That’s not my argument here. But if you’re going to write about being an escort, you need to go all in. 

This is where The Guest fails for me. If a writer wants to write about a character who is in the mud of life, deep in the muck and mess of life, that writer also needs to be able to look directly at the hardest parts of the narrative.

Sex work is complicated, layered, loaded. To toss it into a narrative and then never walk the reader through it makes the occupation feel tacked on as an afterthought. It’s a way of telling the reader “Hey, there is mud here! I promise! But I’m not going to show you the mud. Just trust me, the mud is here!”

The result is artificial, surface-level. And sure, I guess we could argue that is how this character is operating in the book.

But I have to push back on that because the author chose to use a close third-person POV. If this were written in the first-person, I could maybe hold the floor for arguments about this being a function of a character repressing their memories, or hiding from their own life. But third person is meant to give us the flexibility to see more than the character, too zoom in, to flash back, to add wider context.

If one of the things that makes Alex different from everyone around her is sex work, but we never see that aspect of her life, is she that different from everyone around her? Ultimately, she isn’t. By avoiding this part of Alex’s life, the central conflict of the novel — The Outsider vs. The Rich — becomes toothless. She ends up just as vapid, opportunist, and aimless as the wealthy around her.

If every narrative choice an author makes is to avoid looking directly at the giant, all-consuming part of the character’s life, you might start asking yourself if the author is just afraid to go there.

Does fiction need to mirror reality to be successful? No. Instead, I think of this quote from Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth:

“The relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting, the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial; the true value of the work doesn’t lie in its relationship to a so-called reality, but in its effect on the observer.”

I don’t think there’s a lot of truth in The Guest. And if an author doesn’t deal in the truth, the unwieldy, gross, awful truth of the world they’ve built in the book, what are we, as readers, left with? A nice enough novel that really isn’t saying much of anything.