Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.
Deceptively simple ... What follows could be read as an entertaining series of misguided shenanigans interrupting the upper class’s summer vacation, but under Cline’s command, every sentence as sharp as a scalpel, a woman toeing the line between welcome and unwelcome guest becomes a fully destabilizing force. And not just for her hosts, but for the novel itself ... Cline’s old-fashioned prose style at times had me in a shimmering state of déjà vu, bringing to mind the nimbleness and nuance of John Cheever, who also captured the rot beneath wealthy suburbia ... More novels should probe the stakes of female performance.
Must read ... While the book is a page-turner literally set at the beach, it’s not a stereotypical beach read ... Alex’s movements create a deep sense of dread for the reader—as the pages turn, our anxiety rises ... So captivating.
As Alex starts losing her grip, readers might expect her to turn to backstory, dredging up biographical details that could explain her deviant, often self-destructive, behavior. But Cline’s narration lingers stubbornly, stickily, on the surface ... [An] aggressively spectral heroine ... An uncanny impression of a realist world, populated and furnished with a plausible cast of realist characters.
