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.” Ismae's most important assignment takes her straight into the high court of Brittany-where she finds herself woefully under prepared-not only for the deadly games of intrigue and treason, but for the impossible choices she must make.“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. To claim her new life, she must destroy the lives of others. If she chooses to stay at the convent, she will be trained as an assassin and serve as a handmaiden to Death. Here she learns that the god of Death Himself has blessed her with dangerous gifts-and a violent destiny. Mortain, where the sisters still serve the gods of old. Seventeen-year-old Ismae escapes from the brutality of an arranged marriage into the sanctuary of the convent of St. Why be the sheep, when you can be the wolf?
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