Ange Mlinko: Four Pints of Gelato

Ange Mlinko

Emma Cline is an entertainer. Her first book, The Girls (2016), was a sensational reimagining of the Manson Family from the point of view of Evie, a 14-year-old who becomes entangled with the group. She’s not mesmerised by the guru figure, Russell, so much as by his harem – the long-haired, slightly scuzzy, dumpster-diving, shoplifting, insouciant ‘girls’. It is 1969. Evie, neglected by her divorced mother, is preoccupied with how to become a woman: ‘I waited to be told what was good about me.’ She contends with an onslaught of advice about making the most of her appearance: facials with avocado and honey; cold water rinses to shrink the pores. Eat seaweed salad: ‘You’ll never have another zit.’ Don’t wear your hair in a fringe if you have a round face. The unwashed cultists she falls in with appear liberated by contrast: they greet all normie directives with derisive laughter. And compared to the furtiveness with which she’s pursued sexual experiences, the blunt push of her head towards Russell’s lap, while not romantic, seems instructional. Her first thought, when she realises what’s happening, is: ‘Where had I left my bike?’

With all of this on offer – a teenager’s awakening (and exploitation), a lesbian obsession, a commune, a bloodbath – The Girls was bound to sell. The aura around Cline helped: she was 27 when it was published, with a supermodel’s bloom, and had grown up in an affluent family of seven children on a vineyard in Sonoma County. A well-adjusted California girl, she nevertheless called to mind the mythos of all the women who met their doom there.

Cline’s second novel, The Guest (2023), seemed no less calculated to turn heads. Alex, a 22-year-old woman who we gradually come to understand is a sex worker with a taste for pills and larceny, finds herself adrift in the Hamptons when her sugar daddy, Simon, casts her out. The consequences of her actions pile up like a pyroclastic cloud. One john from the city seems intent on tracking her down and inflicting vengeance. How will Alex find shelter for five days until she can ambush Simon at the Labor Day party he’s hosting? By grifting her way through a series of encounters with service workers and kids, insinuating herself, looking for marks, exercising her wiles and breaking things, until a final reckoning presents itself.

The Guest is more original than The Girls – more mocking towards the trappings of femininity and affluence – and more fun to read. Cline started writing The Girls while she was doing an MFA at Columbia, and sometimes it shows. (On entering a young man’s room: ‘It reeked of what I’d later identify as masturbation, a damp rupture in the air.’) The Guest is succinct and specific: ‘Among other duties, Lori was in charge of Chivas, Simon’s dog. Lori was always trying to train Chivas to wear a tiny hiking backpack so he could carry a water bottle when she took him for walks’; ‘He was trying to drink more water and had started dumping sachets of mushroom powder into his metal water bottle’; ‘Alex opened the freezer door – there was a bottle of vodka, four pints of pale green gelato and ten boxes of unopened perfume.’ (The ice cream is basil-flavoured.)

Unlike the insecure, middle-class Evie sifting through magazine advice, these are people who got the memo: about drinking enough water, exercising, applying sunblock, wearing rash guards. ‘How old was she? Alex couldn’t quite tell – her skin had been professionally blasted into the face of a bland thirty-year-old.’ Yet all of this is just a varnish on their meaningful, curated pursuits: dinner parties, art collecting. ‘“Our art needs more technology and our technology needs more art,” Helen bleated, looking into the middle distance.’

We’re invited to scoff at the Simons and Helens, to raise our hackles at the injustice they represent: ‘More than ever, this place seemed like a collection of houses, everywhere she looked, or more like a collection of gates. A good trick, when you thought about it. How everything was private, everything was hidden … It was unthinkable, enraging, how many of these houses were empty.’ We’re invited, that is, to identify with Alex, a hustler who moves through life in a daze of stolen painkillers and uses people for her own ends. We may be rooting for her as she evades the thug Dom, who wants his money back, but it’s another thing altogether when she sinks her hooks into a teenage boy who spots her on the beach. He’s psychologically vulnerable, but beautiful and rich. She violates him in the shower, turned on by his discomfort. ‘Why are you like this?’ someone asks her. ‘And he was really asking. Expecting some explanation, some logical equation … But how could Alex explain – there wasn’t any reason, there had never been any terrible thing.’

The Guest was very loosely inspired by ‘The Swimmer’, Cline told an interviewer in 2023, the John Cheever story that ‘ends in such a bizarre, desperate, haunting way … a story where you’re estranged from your own life, everyone you love is gone, you can’t account for how you got so far into the woods’. Cheever’s story, often read as an allegory about drinking, is centred on a man who decides to swim home from a party, traversing the backyard pools of suburban Westchester County, only to find that he arrives too late. His house is locked and empty. His life has passed him by. Tom Ripley must also count as a precursor to Alex; The Talented Mr Ripley provides a case study of the gullibility of the safely rich, as well as the morally warping effect of bodies of water.

If The Guest feels like a leap forward from The Girls, it’s not only because of the complexity of the story or the new suavity and propulsion of the prose; it’s also because of the sophistication of the cliffhanger ending. I won’t spoil it here, but suffice it to say it doesn’t cater to middlebrow expectations and not everyone admired it.

Since the kerfuffle over The Guest, Cline has been thinking about endings. The protagonist of Switzy, David Hastings, is a man suffering from dementia who flies to Zurich to euthanise himself. The title is a flippant nickname for Switzerland, a place like old age: snow-topped, dim and cold. Until recently, David was a corporate executive, a CFO who masked his increasing incompetence until an accounting calamity exposed him. A former associate has lent him a private plane so that he and his personal assistant, Cody, can complete this final task in style. First, they will make a stop in London to visit David’s only daughter, Rebecca (innocent of his intentions), and her nine-year-old son, Rainer. The novel hums with luxury: the private plane, the voguish hotels and restaurants, the limousine. And yet those pristine spaces end up merging seamlessly with the institutional nihility of the euthanasia clinic.

Cline takes a close third-person approach to the story. We’re in David’s head – which, you might assume, is not a promising place to be. His thoughts are hard to shepherd; facts are hard to recall. Advertising slogans and old songs intrude, not without significance: Johnson & Johnson’s ‘No More Tears’ shampoo; the lyrics to ‘Edelweiss’; ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh’. He plays endless games of solitaire on his phone, registering the haptic clicks with dumb complaisance. ‘Sometimes he stared into space and it seemed he was holding a piece of string and he could not explain what the string in his hand was or where it had come from or what was waiting on the other end.’ But he’s still good at noticing sense data – weather, decor, odours, whatever is immediately present – and still attentive to other people’s body language: ‘They were mad at him and he didn’t know why. He had missed a certain meeting – important. An important meeting! People avoided his eyes.’ Occasionally he is droll: the clinical liaison is named Anna Gould, whom he privately calls Ghoul. Told that his condition is caused by amyloid plaque, he starts addressing it as ‘Amy Lloyd plaque’. ‘I hate you, Amy Lloyd, he thought idly.’

A hint of misogyny is only realistic. David went to a boys’ boarding school and spent most of his adult life in conference rooms with other men. He seems peeved and bewildered about his divorce, which his wife initiated after many affairs. His daughter is a cipher. Cline limns the hazy borderline between homosociality and homosexuality. David is much more attentive to members of his own gender (he is apt to call his thirty-something assistant, as well as his grandson, ‘the boy’, a tic that becomes a clue) and has not refused the occasional intimate encounter. Weighing most heavily on his conscience is his involvement in a hair-raising prank that went wrong in his final year of school. His roommate, Tom, who stood apart from the other boys for his conspicuous academic and artistic interests (not to mention his good looks), now lives near Zurich. David plans to confront him and perhaps ask for Tom’s forgiveness.

Switzy may seem like a departure for a writer known for depictions of young women. Then again, the collection of short stories Cline published in 2020 was titled Daddy. Her Chekhovian neutrality is unerring in ‘What Can You Do with a General’, in which a man called John gives his children DNA kits for Christmas: ‘Who could ever say he didn’t think of his family?’ ‘You know, this is basically just giving your DNA to the police,’ one of his daughters remarks. The scene is likely to make you sympathise with the father. Is it a truism that children dwell mostly on the negative in their upbringing, while parents remember only the good? But then:

And how had it happened, the eventual neutering of his anger? He was too tired to knock things over. What had Sasha said, the last time they’d got in a fight? She’d been crying, on a trip about how he used to throw food at her when she didn’t eat it. These things seemed so far away, and then eventually they got further away, and then nobody talked about them anymore.

Forgetting serves a crucial function in the life cycle of any family, and that’s one level on which to consider Switzy’s ramifications.

There are other layers to the novel that seem to implicate us all. How does David’s dementia resemble our internet-addled, paranoid hive mind?

They had all pretty much lived inside the same day. The shape was agreed on – the hours familiar and measured. Which had turned out to be an important point of reference for the human project, after all.

Now there were a million mental jaunts available to you in every moment, consciousness in a constant state of fracture, and even before he’d actually lost his mind, he’d lost his mind; everyone had.

How much do we (secretly or not so secretly) long for forgetting, if not oblivion? It’s striking how closely David’s thought patterns resemble Alex’s in The Guest. Did she take all those benzos to achieve the detachment that amyloid plaque bestows on David? Is that why anyone uses drugs? Inevitably, the mobile phone plays a large supporting role in both books. It’s the perfect objective correlative for the difficulty of navigating a hostile world with failing instincts and the temptation to offload the unbearable weight of our conscience.

Both David and Alex are full of clichés. ‘He needed the plain American inputs. The known quantities.’ They both clock what is ‘correct’: ‘The correct genre of thought’; ‘This was correct, the correct situation, both of them here in this pool.’ Cline underscores the canned scripts that clutter our brains, but she drops in unobtrusive moments of beauty to startle the reader. In an elevator, ‘their floor was the only lit number, there in the double-breasted rows of buttons.’ A soap dispenser ‘deposited a meringue of soap in his open palm’. Such moments are a reminder of the singularity of experience, or the perfect dovetailing of word and experience, unavailable to machines and to brains that lapse into mimicry of machines. Beware the solitaire app on your phone. ‘You’re the boss, applesauce – lights out.’

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