In the previous post, we looked at the emotional superstructure of Emma Cline’s 2023 novel The Guest, a book with vibes so taut they buzz beneath every single sentence.
This made it especially challenging for me to find a superstructure sentence that did justice to the story, which is why you’re getting a second post this weekend in place of the one that should have gone out last Saturday.
Last weekend, I spent nearly three days going through countless drafts of the superstructure sentence, none of which truly did justice to The Guest. And for a tool meant to precisely capture the most important elements of any story’s emotional vibes, I feel like I have to get it almost perfect or there’s no point.
What helped me finally crack the problem, late Sunday afternoon, was remembering that Cline, in an interview with Marie-Claire Chappet for Harper’s Bazaar, said the book began for her with an image “of a woman being out in the ocean.”
“What that single snapshot became,” Chappet writes, “was an entire novel about a woman treading water, trying frantically not to drown.”
The point comes up because they’re discussing how Cline manages to infuse a nearly 400-page book with the heady atmosphere of a short story.
“I’m always trying to see how I can maintain that kind of emotional tone, that 'vibe', over longer prose,” says Cline.
Chappet speculates that “Cline pulls this off perhaps because she is so led by imagery.”
And the image that began The Guest becomes one of the first scenes in the book.
(It goes from the bottom of p. 5 to the end of p. 6 in the hardcover edition, and is available to read for free in the Amazon sample, if you would like to do that first. It would take about 4 minutes, though the full text is also reproduced in the line-by-line close read I’m providing below.)
I mined this scene for every bit of information it gives us about Alex, what she’s doing, and why it matters to her — here and throughout the book. I matched the vibes of the superstructure sentence to the vibes of this scene as best I could, because the whole point of this scene is that its vibes resonate so strongly throughout the rest of the book.
One could almost say that the whole point of the book is to keep the vibes of this scene going as long as possible. A perfect example for illustrating how emotional superstructure unites the vibes of any smaller part of a story with the vibes of the whole.
The Guest’s Emotional Superstructure
A destitute, attractive young woman who thrills at violating boundaries must keep exploiting all the trust the Hamptons afford her until, she believes, she can move permanently into this world.
The Riptide Scene
(The bolded block quotes are from The Guest. Everything else is my take, having read the whole book, on the vibes Cline is conveying.)
Still floating on her back,
Alex is relaxed, Alex is in a pleasant painkiller haze, Alex is having fun, Alex is killing all day at the beach. She might be evading some past mistakes, but if she can overcome her fear, this is doable, and there’s no reason she shouldn’t have fun while she’s at it as well.
Later in the book, Alex has an opportunity to stay with a girl close to her age who wants very much to be her friend. But she wouldn’t have fun doing what that girl does all day. She’s not the type of person who’s going to get bored or stay bored doing ordinary things, even if this means literally belonging in the Hamptons, just because she needs to hide or pass the time or because this is her ultimate goal.
Alex still likes to feel good. Her pleasure never really stops mattering, no matter what her other ostensible goals are, which is why the word “thrills” ended up in the superstructure.
… Alex opened her eyes, disoriented by the quick hit of sun.
Quick hit, reminiscent of the cocaine she does later with a house manager who befriends her.
Physical realities can disorient her, momentarily. How does she handle it?
She righted herself with a glance at the shore: she was farther out than she’d imagined. Much farther. How had that happened?
A glance, a merest glance. She rights herself easily.
But she is much farther out than she’d imagined.
She made little to no effort to prevent this from happening. Alex is not someone who would swim close to the shore just to stay safe. This is an important part of her characterization. She’s not bothered by preventative measures, she always assumes she can fix it.
Maybe, she measures her powers by going a little too far, then fixing it. But even this involves just a little too much premeditation for Alex.
She doesn’t know how she got this far out.
This is a huge theme of the book, the end contained in the beginning. She gets to the end: Simon’s Labor Day party, Dom closing in, a teenage boy she’s taken up with for a couple nights maybe about to do something bad because she left him. She’s estranged from her own life, doesn’t know how everyone she loves is gone, can’t account for how she floated this far out. “There’s something just so devastating about it,” Cline explained, about knowing this is how she wanted the book to end, the Swimmer-esque vibes she was trying to nail.
She tried to head back in, toward the beach, but she wasn’t seeming to get anywhere, her strokes eaten up by the water.
She took a breath, tried again. Her legs kicked hard. Her arms churned.
She’s trying! She’s embodied. She’s moving her body. Exploring what she can and cannot achieve in her reasonably attractive, young, female, yet often vulnerable body is a major theme of the book.
It was impossible to gauge whether the shore was getting any closer. Another attempt to head straight back in, more useless swimming.
Like she knows heading straight back to Simon’s will be useless. The phrase “useless swimming” is so good. Also the impossibility of gauging whether the shore is getting any closer. Some things are out of Alex’s control, legitimately.
The sun kept beating down, the horizon line wavered: it was all utterly indifferent.
The elements are indifferent to us all, we have this in common with Alex. Can’t fault her for that.
The end—here it was.
Alex knows she’s vulnerable, mortal. She’s also ready to make bold declarations, if only to herself.
This was punishment, she was certain of it.
We’ll know soon enough that even Alex’s certainty is mutable, a wavelike condition. She knows she’s done things she’s probably supposed to be punished for.
But how much is expecting to be punished bound up in the simple being a young woman? It feels feminized, at least in this moment.
Strange, though, how this terror didn’t last.
This line has so much frisson for me. There’s so much going on here. Let’s really slow down and savor it.
The invocation of a word like “terror” in a genuine life-and-death situation. And, yet, the temporariness of it. This sense of all human feelings being fleeting.
Simon’s anger won’t last.
And the word “strange,” the distancing of Alex’s mind to the point of curious observation, even in this moment. It’s creepy. She’s a little creepy.
It only passed through her, appearing and disappearing almost instantly.
Like a wave.
Something else took its place, a kind of reptile curiosity.
This is Alex throughout the book.
When she scratches a painting that could have been in a museum, upsetting a situation in which she could have enjoyable passed a lot of the time she needed to kill. Her reptile curiosity wins out, she can’t be within touching distance of a paining like that and not violate the boundary, not leave her mark.
When she decides to cross into a private, guarded club instead of the adjacent public beach that she could just walk onto, even if this means kidnapping a small child.
Her reptile curiosity, her compulsion to see how far she can take things, is one of her defining features.
She considered the distance, considered her heart rate, made a calm assessment of the elements in play. Hadn’t she always been good at seeing things clearly?
This calmer assessment isn’t any worse than her first instincts, any less likely to succeed. It’s more likely to succeed, in fact.
And we want that for her, don’t we? We don’t want her to drown, do we?
How she’s navigating the physical world here is how she’ll navigate the social world throughout the book. And we don’t want her to drown there either, do we?
Time to change course. She swam parallel to the shore. Her body took over, remembering the strokes. She didn’t allow for any hesitation.
With Simon, she’ll be much farther out than she realizes. But she’ll change course, swim parallel to the shore that he represents in her mind.
She’s going to end up much farther out from her own life, estranged from her own life, not knowing how she got there. Pulled out by the rip current of her own impulses and defining personality features. Always thinking it’s still in her power to correct the situation. Never hesitating or dwelling on inconvenient thoughts too much.
It works here, right? She just has to keep going.
At some point, the water started resisting her with less force,
Now, the water. Soon, the people.
Simon. The little boy, his nanny. Many others. She expects to, at first, encounter resistance in social interactions. But she doesn’t shrink away like a good girl when she does. She doesn’t mind violating other people’s boundaries. She gets curious. She wonders what happens if she’s undeterred by that resistance, if she keeps going.
And why should she put too much value on other people’s feelings? We already know her own feelings — even in a life-and-death situation — are fleeting, transient, like waves. It actually makes more sense to let something like terror in a genuine crisis pass through her — strangely, it does — and then see what she can accomplish.
Why would she value other people’s feelings in a lower stakes social situation more than she values her own feelings when her life is on the line? Why shouldn’t she just keep doing what she wants and see if people begin to resist her with less force?
… and then she was moving along, getting closer to shore, and then close enough that her feet touched sand.
Moving along. Why does the thought of Alex “moving along” make my skin prickle? Don’t I want her to move along? She just reminds me of a snake in the water, given how reptilian she already is in this scene. It’s not like I want her to drown, though, even if she is creeping me out. Right? Now, and no matter what else she does in the book?
Her feet touching sand, literally here. Metaphorically, in the book, Simon is the shore she’s swimming towards. Moving in permanently with him, and into his world, would be like emerging from the water and standing on solid land. And also crossing one giant boundary — thrilling.
She was out of breath, yes. Her arms were sore, her heartbeat juddered out of sync. She was farther down the beach.
Physical realities. Not to mention disturbing estrangement within her own body, like with the drugs she doing throughout. That juddering heartbeat.
But being farther from where she started is never necessarily a problem. Not an insurmountable one.
But fine—she was fine.
The fear was already forgotten.
She’s gotten through this. Why would she fear any moment less life threatening than this one? Especially the kind of social fear that might keep other people in line. She can forget her fears very quickly.
No one on the shore noticed her, or looked twice. A couple walked past, heads bent, studying the sand for shells. A man in waders assembled a fishing pole. Laughter floated over from a group under a sun tent. Surely, if Alex had been in any real danger, someone would have reacted, one of these people would have stepped in to help.
Once again, the outside world seems not to corroborate Alex’s belief. As will happen with her delusional Simon quest.
It’s ominous to be so ignored, and an opportunity.
She’s alone. No one is likely to notice if she drowns. And no one is about to step up and save her from any other trouble she gets herself in throughout the rest of the book. The world is indifferent to Alex. She’s left to her own devices.
In return, she owes these people nothing.
If they wouldn’t even notice her dying, why not exploit them completely?
Key takeaway for story creators: If you want to teach us how to read your character’s interactions with other people, try showing us how they interact with the natural world first. Is there a vibe you can hit that can repeat in various ways throughout the rest of the story?
Question for You
Based on this scene — whether my close reading of it, or your own! — how does Alex make you feel? Do you want to spend more time in her head?
My answer and the comments below are available to paying subscribers of Lit in One Sentence. If you use Substack’s social network Notes, feel free to restack with your answer and tag me!