{"id":1967727,"date":"2023-07-09T05:35:02","date_gmt":"2023-07-09T09:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/great-exploitations\/"},"modified":"2023-07-09T05:38:19","modified_gmt":"2023-07-09T09:38:19","slug":"great-exploitations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/great-exploitations\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploiting Greatness"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">4<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fgreat-exploitations%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1967727&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div>\n<h2>Unremarkable Charm: A Review of &#8220;The Guest&#8221;<\/h2>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Beautiful, disgruntled housewives or girlfriends of rich men are treasured in American literature, from Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin\u2019s <em>The Awakening<\/em> to Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon\u2019s <em>The Crying of Lot 49<\/em>. In fact, the appetite for tales of these types of women is so avid that it\u2019s hard to mess them up. But in <em>The Guest<\/em>, Emma Cline manages to offer a heroine (anti-heroine?) so unremarkable, so devoid of charm, it\u2019s almost an achievement in and of itself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And maybe that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n<h3>The Story of Alex<\/h3>\n<p><em>The Guest<\/em> tells the story of 22-year-old Alex, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/great-exploitations\/\" title=\"Exploiting Greatness\">high-end escort turned live-<\/a>in girlfriend of Simon, an older, wealthy executive with a penchant for stability and routine. It\u2019s summer in what appears to be the Hamptons, and Alex\u2019s listless days are filled with beach trips and painkillers, until she commits a <em>faux pas<\/em> at a dinner party and is abruptly ejected from Simon\u2019s manicured mansion and life.<\/p>\n<p>From there, the novel oscillates between upstairs\/downstairs-style narrative to grifter account, only half-heartedly accomplishing either. That may be intentional, the novel coyly suggests a few times, but is it a cop-out on the part of the author? Either way, it\u2019s debatable if the novel is intriguing enough to make the exercise worth it.<\/p>\n<p>Part of the lack of personality stems from Alex\u2019s former life as an escort. She explains that the key to client cultivation is subduing her own quirks and turning herself into a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/nation-building-101\/\" title=\"Nation-Building 101\">blank slate<\/a> onto which potential patrons can project their own fantasies. She defaults to these skills to survive in the Hamptons once Simon kicks her out, closely observing those around her\u2014from entitled homeowners and their apathetic children to the butlers, gardeners, and nannies who make their fiefdoms run\u2014to procure food, shelter, and electricity to power her dysfunctional mobile phone.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a metaphor being constructed here, one meant to lecture readers about class and privilege. America has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/bidens-surgeon-general-suggests-fox-news-should-fire-jesse-watters-or-endorse-violence\/\" title=\"Biden\u2019s Surgeon General Suggests Fox News Should Fire Jesse Watters Or \u2018Endorse Violence\u2019\">turned people<\/a> at the bottom of the economic ladder into products to be consumed by greedy consumers at the top. Alex articulates this point most successfully in her commentary on 21st-century art collection. She notes that &#8220;sometimes the work was a mere idea of the work, existing only as an image emailed back and forth, collectors reselling a piece they bought before they even ever saw it in person.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Cribbing from postmodern theory, she convincingly emphasizes the primacy of marketing, advertising, and hype over a painting\u2019s inherent value\u2014defined, perhaps, by the spiritual toil that went into producing it, and its degree of participation in God\u2019s creation\u2014and compares this to how sex work functions. The hyperreality generated by advertising, she seems to say, commodifies the most beautiful and transcendent parts of life\u2014art and sex\u2014rendering them into the transactional byproducts of shrewd power brokering.<\/p>\n<p>To Cline\u2019s credit, Alex is complicated enough that this lecture comes across as less annoying than it would otherwise be: she\u2019s not just an avatar of woke moralizing. She\u2019s flawed insofar as she\u2019s too self-absorbed to recognize her own contribution to the chaos and excess she condemns, giving herself a pass for what she seems to think is the inherent virtue of being essentially homeless. She inconveniences the working class with whom she supposedly sympathizes, while violating the affluent to degrees beyond what they deserve for their supposed crimes of privilege.<\/p>\n<p>In this way, the novel is reminiscent of HBO\u2019s <em>White Lotus<\/em>, to which other reviews have compared it. The popular series is notable for casting a critical eye not just on wealthy patrons of the titular resort, but on the flawed men and women who help run it, and everyone in between.<\/p>\n<p>Then again, aside from the contradiction of being both class-conscious and self-absorbed, Alex isn\u2019t that complicated after all. The plot goes out of its way to deny readers any indication of Alex\u2019s background: where she\u2019s from, why she became an escort, or what her future goals might be. This blank-slate anonymity is part of the larger argument the novel is trying to construct\u2014but at what cost? There\u2019s no personality for readers to latch onto, just a portrait of a woman reduced to survival mode, with a keen instinct for social observation.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting that female protagonists in these types of tales are becoming more and more wan and detached from familial and romantic connection. They also keep straying farther from the traditional female plot, that of marriage and reproduction. (Even Edna had a husband and children!) Feminists will celebrate this as some type of victory for liberation, however flawed. But it makes for a boring, sad story of a single woman that reinforces the categories of a sterile, vapid, materialistic world, where the only fertile force is debt, which seems to multiply.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Guest<\/em> is not a remarkable novel\u2014and that\u2019s by design. Those who enjoyed the sparklingly offbeat accounts of other female scammers\u2014like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thecut.com\/article\/how-anna-delvey-tricked-new-york.html\">Anna Delvey<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thecut.com\/2019\/09\/the-story-of-caroline-calloway-and-her-ghostwriter-natalie.html\">Caroline Calloway<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/style\/2016\/11\/how-sarma-melngailis-became-a-runaway-fugitive\">Sarma Melngailis<\/a>\u2014may enjoy it. But be warned that the book has been stripped of the glitter and peculiarities that made those other women memorable\u2014all in the service of spinning a yarn into a parable.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Guest: A Novel<\/em><br \/> by Emma Cline<br \/> Random House, 304 pp., $28<\/p>\n<p><em>Nora Kenney is director of media relations at the Manhattan Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>American literature, the portrayal of beautiful, discontented women involved with wealthy men is highly valued. Examples include Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin&#8217;s The Awakening and Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon&#8217;s The Crying of Lot 49. These stories are so popular that it&#8217;s difficult to go wrong with them. However,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1528,"featured_media":1967728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[544],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1967727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-free-beacon"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1528"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1967727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1967728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1967727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1967727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1967727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}