Alex needs a place to stay, just for a few days. After that, she plans to appear at a party held at the seaside mansion of her former love, Simon. What she wants is to move back into the mansion; as such, she hopes that Simon will reunite with her. Alex’s interest in Simon is obsessive, even desperate. And yet, there is nothing in Emma Cline’s 2023 novel The Guest to suggest that Alex’s fixation is any deeper than needing a place to stay, for as long as she can manage. Nor is it ever clarified if she considers herself a sex worker.

There is a lot about her that we don’t know. Reviews of the novel on sites like Goodreads and Reddit will mention Alex’s flat characterization—her seeming lack of depth or backstory, her absence of introspection, her surface-level thinking. This opacity, however, is a deliberate strategy of Cline’s. After all, it doesn’t quite matter how Alex thinks about herself. Instead, the novel focuses on how sheer material compulsion means that she is forced to subsume her desires to Simon’s: to try to please him, to look how he wants her to look, to act how he wants her to act. She needs to do everything right, at risk of having nothing.

In crafting this opacity, Cline is resisting the “trauma plot”: a form of expression of character—as Parul Sehgal has described it—that has become increasingly common in contemporary fiction. The commercial success of stories of personal suffering, Sehgal argues, has “elevated trauma from a sign of moral defect to a source of moral authority, even a kind of expertise.”

By contrast, Cline’s Alex is a figure utterly devoid of authority. Her only expertise is in the hard work of figuring out how to survive, despite having no money and no place to live.

Now let’s go backwards in the timeline of the novel’s author, Emma Cline. It’s 2017. And Cline’s ex-boyfriend is suing her. In the lawsuit, Chaz Reetz-Laiolo alleges that Cline plagiarized from his unpublished writing and used the material in her first novel, The Girls. Narrated by a woman who had, in her youth, been caught up with the Manson Family, The Girls was a splashy book when it was released in 2016. In a three-book deal, Random House paid Cline a $2 million advance for it.

In his suit against Cline, Reetz-Laiolo was represented by the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner. This was the same law firm that represented Harvey Weinstein, the notorious Hollywood producer, as he was fighting sexual harassment and assault allegations. Weinstein also hired private investigators to construct “dossiers” about the women whom he thought would expose him. These dossiers were meant to shame them: with details of their alleged sexual histories, for example, or pictures and messages showing how they continued to be friendly with Weinstein after he abused them. His lawyer, David Boies, knew about these dossiers and went along with the plan.

In 2017, Boies sent Cline a draft of Reetz-Laiolo’s complaint, saying that he planned to file it in court if she didn’t agree to a settlement. This draft included the same kind of dossier that Weinstein was even then employing. Titled “Cline’s History of Manipulating Older Men,” it featured details of her ostensible sexual past, including her private text messages and photos. This was to be used as evidence to corroborate Reetz-Laiolo’s claim that Cline was not, as the document read, “the innocent and inexperienced naïf she portrayed herself to be.” She was instead often prone to manipulating men to her benefit, extracting gifts and money. They were, basically, threatening to use this information to discredit Cline for the jury.

The “Cline’s History” section was later removed from the filing. The New York Times and The New Yorker had just published articles about the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and another piece about Weinstein’s hiring of private investigators was about to appear. Moreover, Cline’s lawyers included Carrie Goldberg, who has represented many victims of harassment, sexual shaming online, and revenge porn. Cline claimed that her ex had been abusive throughout their relationship; the New York Times reported that he was violently jealous, and that when Cline sold The Girls to Random House, Reetz-Laiolo threatened her again. Given Cline’s new high status, he warned, people “might be interested in naked photos of her,” or maybe they would want to read a “tell-all article about their relationship.”

Cline leaves on display the sheer fact of economic domination: the “mute compulsion of economic relations,” as Marx famously put it, which “seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker.”

In her wanderings through high-priced real estate, Alex is often aligned in the novel with the other household employees she encounters, although they are busy with their respective areas of work while she is mainly loafing about and observing them and other house guests. She notes the way people will try to dig into the staff’s backstories, to demonstrate “how comfortable they were fraternizing” with them. This fraternizing becomes another service that is expected of people who are already working, like when Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) worries over how to “banter” with his new American boss because he wants to please him.

“She had experienced her own version of it,” we read of Alex, reflecting on the guests who demanded to fraternize with the staff: “the men who asked her endless questions about herself, faces composed in self-conscious empathy. Waiting with badly suppressed titillation for her to offer up some buried trauma.”

The revelation of one’s inner life, in The Guest, is simply one more bit of compliance that people might extract from her. Tell us your story: Make it traumatic, so we can feel good about your employment here, your service to us, the little bit of money you are making doing what we ask of you in this gorgeous home. Her story would be a form of value added, amplifying their enjoyment, elevating their transactions with her by enabling them to believe that if Alex is “bad” in some way, she is nevertheless wounded, and so deserving of their interest—taking her out for dinner, giving her a place to stay for the night. Having sex with her would be more than just self-serving then, as an act of rightful charity on their part.

And yet, this revelation is additional work that Alex blankly refuses. She provides them nothing with which to cover over the basic fact of their power over her: power that they pay for with money. The economic relations are left simply to stand.

In 2018, a judge dismissed the plagiarism case against Cline, the one brought by her ex-boyfriend and his lawyers who were simultaneously defending Harvey Weinstein.

Two years later, in 2020, Cline published a short story in the New Yorker, called “White Noise.” The point-of-view is Weinstein’s.

We find Weinstein at home preparing to appear in court the following day, and his wandering thoughts delve into his own cunning deployment of the trauma plot. His lawyers counsel him to dress raggedly and use a walker for court performance, so as to extract sympathy. This advice brings to his mind other things Weinstein has said when trying to illicit a woman’s submissiveness: “my mother died today, he said, watching the girl’s face change.”

Meanwhile, next door, a new neighbor has moved in: American writer Don DeLillo. It occurs to Weinstein that he should produce an adaptation of the novel White Noise. This will restore him to his rightful social status, he believes. He doesn’t know DeLillo’s work at all well: he mistakes the first line of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, “A screaming comes across the sky,” for the opening of White Noise. The line appeals to him because it is about what he thinks of as a “rending of the known world,” and this is how he understands the case against him, and the moment it expresses: a screaming across the sky, a rending.

Weinstein hopes his moment of crisis may be repaired through the lionization of another male creative—through the patrilineage connecting one great man to the next—fortified by his production of the White Noise film. He even imagines that, despite the charges against him, his granddaughter will love him, because she will be in his debt when she gets to intern on the film set, and inevitably DeLillo becomes a friend and writes her a college recommendation letter.

Thinking about all this future promise, Weinstein texts a friend, “we as a nation are hungry 4 meaning.” Surely his own trial is the best evidence of that.

The trauma plot and the slut-shaming dossier are actually parallel formations, reveals “The Guest.”

Let’s return then to The Guest. We have left Alex refusing to tell any sad stories and finding herself dependent on the whims of wealthy, powerful men for life’s basic necessities.

Alex is “a reluctant reader of her own self,” according to Jane Hu. But, by contrast, I think that nothing like a reading of her “self” is relevant to the struggle Alex faces in making it through each single day. Having a legible self is just another responsibility to others that she can’t afford.

Hu argues also that “The Guest largely remains at the level of mere forms, rarely venturing to probe what might be troubling the waters beneath such glistening stillness.” Yet the novel is, rather, full of images of things emerging from beneath the surface. And this is more and more true as it progresses.

As Alex runs out of resources, she gets more desperate and less put together. Pools get muddier, people’s faces get more wary in her presence, worries start to trickle up, and she is always waiting for a man she stole money from to find her and hurt her. This gradual oozing up metaphorizes the whole reality beneath the novel’s apparent surface: first, the fact of the tremendous wealth of everyone around Alex; second, the way she is controlled by and kept out of that wealth’s orbit, even as she passes through posh homes and luxury vehicles.

Cline’s writing of the novel was inspired, in part, by John Cheever’s short story, “The Swimmer.” Here, a man sets out on a swimming tour of the neighborhood, going from party to party, toward a home where it turns out that he is not wanted. He is passing through a landscape of wealth from which he is excluded ultimately: “Oh, how bonny and lush were the banks of the Lucinda River!,” he thinks. “Prosperous men and women gathered by the sapphire colored waters while caterer’s men in white coats passed them cold gin.”

This is precisely Simon’s world. When Alex shows up at his party in the novel’s climactic scene, she becomes a figure of the oozing return of the repressed herself. Far from manifesting a “glistening stillness,” she is its very interruption, destroying the illusion by her sheer presence: messy and tired, seeking a reconciliation with Simon that we know is not coming.

We are waiting for some description of the horrified look on his face. Waiting for his reaction to seeing her on his property, uninvited and unwelcome, having broken out of her expected role as a woman subservient to his whims and oriented only by his needs.

The quintessential character of today’s trauma novel, according to Sehgal, is “withholding, giving off a fragrance of unspecified damage,” at least at first. She is “Stalled, confusing to others, prone to sudden silences and jumpy responsiveness.” We sense constantly that something “gnaws at her, keeps her solitary and opaque, until there’s a sudden rip in her composure and her history comes spilling out.”

This withholding, stalled figure in The Guest is Alex. And, indeed, the novel plays with the tension of us waiting for a moment of dramatic revelation.

Here she is in the novel’s final scene, smiling in Simon’s direction, wishfully thinking that “Everything had turned out fine.” But he doesn’t come over to her. Alex thinks, instead, “this was all wrong”—“his eyes seem to look at something beyond her.”

The novel concludes with them in this frozen diorama. No sudden rip. No spilling out. No revelations and reconciliations. He is looking right past her. He couldn’t care less about her trauma plot.

The Guest is an instance, then, of what Christina Fogarasi has described as the “anti-trauma trauma novel,” in which trauma as a form of narrative “prosthesis” is refused, precisely because it “abstains from mentioning the systemic forces undergirding” anyone’s suffering. Who is Alex? How did she come to be here? The novel’s refusal to answer these questions is a way, too, of refusing the authority of the Weinstein-style “dossier,” which can exculpate or shame, excuse or condemn.

Instead, all that Cline leaves on display is the sheer fact of economic domination: the “mute compulsion of economic relations,” as Marx famously put it, which “seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker.” Cline pinpoints the stark truth of this domination within a contemporary landscape of unspecified, informal sex work, on the fringes of a society of spectacularly wealthy asset holders. In other words, Cline pinpoints a landscape not unlike the creative industries: where women often find themselves doing what they can to attract and sustain the attention of people like Weinstein, who have the power to make careers for them or let them sink into oblivion.

The trauma plot and the slut-shaming dossier are actually parallel formations, reveals The Guest. They are both formations that deliberately look away from material reality—the determining force of the law of capital in shaping what a woman is willing to do for a man—and, instead, locate particular compulsions and proclivities in a woman’s traumatic back story, compromised morality, and history of intimate entanglements.

What Weinstein’s case made so clear—as did Jian Ghomeshi’s in Canada—is the weaponization of the personal story (including the plunge into traumatic interiority) in the busy activity of figuring out how a woman really felt about a man after he did what he did, not just what affect she performed but how she really felt, in her heart of hearts. This is all deployed to disguise and excuse the actual domination that compels people to do horrible things, like maintain relationships with evil men, and that compels people even to feel shitty feelings, like gratitude toward these demons, or sympathy, or—dare I say—love.