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.
Cline has written a thriller about trying to get by, a summer read for the precariat. It’s a novel driven by the suspense of what it takes to survive—a suspense that can take the pleasure out of anything, even a day at the beach ... Alex is a quiet heroine—almost like a mist of a person, barely there ... Cline does a pitch-perfect job of keeping Alex’s understanding of herself in sync with the reader’s. We are deprived of much of her backstory because Alex is someone who prefers not to dwell ... Cline avoids a simplistic eat-the-rich story on a number of levels ... Cline has written a beach read for the people who clean up once the party is over.
The way [Cline's] writing is hospitable to the senses represents the highest form of thinking ... Cline puts her fearsome talents to work depicting the deeply destructive capacity of a lone mind that is utterly sick of itself. Like a writer, Alex has an exacting gaze, a cold heart, and too little tact ... Alex notices so much that it literally hurts to read. That’s the pain of seeing the world through another’s eyes. Mere exposition or analysis would seem shriveled compared to the full force of these feelings ... She ruins herself as readily as she ruins lovely things. Cline trusts readers will understand why.
