By Emma Cline
A woman drifts through the Hamptons
Subject
Themes
Alex is twenty-two years old, living in a beach house in the Hamptons for the month of August with a man named Simon, a wealthy art dealer in his fifties. She has constructed a version of herself that fits his expectations: a recent graduate, modest, with no friction and no past. What Simon does not know is that she was working as an escort in New York, that her income had been collapsing for months before they met, and that she stole money and drugs from a man named Dom before coming out east. Dom's texts have been arriving with increasing menace throughout her stay.
Alex is twenty-two years old, living in a beach house in the Hamptons for the month of August with a man named Simon, a wealthy art dealer in his fifties. She has constructed a version of herself that fits his expectations: a recent graduate, modest, with no friction and no past. What Simon does not…
Emma Cline's second novel arrived in 2023 to significant critical attention, read by many reviewers as a concentrated refinement of the concerns that distinguished her debut, The Girls, in 2016. Where that novel examined girlhood and the gravitational pull of charismatic authority through the…
Alex is always performing. Before Simon wakes up, she is already running the maintenance routine: monitoring how many of his pills she has taken, rinsing her glass and putting it in the dishwasher, brushing her hair. When he comes home from the office, she sits waiting for him as though every…
The Hamptons in August is a landscape organised entirely around who belongs and who does not. The novel maps this with precision, and Alex moves through it as both an observer and an interloper, her position unstable in ways that the wealthy people around her can rarely see because they have never…
Alex lies constantly, and the novel is interested in this not as a moral failing but as a survival strategy that has its own internal logic. The lies she tells others are obvious: to Simon about who she is, to Nicholas about why she is walking on the highway, to Margaret about her name. These are…
The novel is built around a recurring structure: Alex faces genuine danger, survives it, and the world around her does not notice. At the beginning, she is caught in a riptide and nearly drowns. She navigates her way free by swimming parallel to shore. When she emerges, no one on the beach has seen…
Belonging, in this novel, is not a feeling. It is a set of conditions, and those conditions must be maintained continuously. The moment Alex stops maintaining them, she is out. Simon's house was never hers. The beach club terrace is available to her only as long as no one asks the right question.…
Alex is twenty-two years old, and she has been performing herself for long enough that the original version is no longer easy to locate. She arrived in New York two years before the novel begins, with enough energy to keep lists of restaurants and use false names and believe that what she was doing…
Simon is in his fifties, a dealer in the secondary art market, and he is the kind of man whose entire life has been organised around the maintenance of control. He exercises on a machine that climbs the equivalent of eighty flights of stairs each morning. He swims laps in the pool with manic focus.…
Dom exists almost entirely in the negative space of the novel. He is largely absent in person but persistently present as a threat, arriving as text messages, phone calls, and a name that produces a particular physiological response in Alex: a lurch in the stomach, a shortening of breath, a sudden…
Jack is nineteen, or says he is. He arrives at the beach with sheepskin slippers and a copy of Siddhartha in his bag, his father's enormous car parked haphazardly across two spaces. He is blond, with curly hair he is growing out and braces on his bottom teeth that he has learned to hide when he…
August in the Hamptons, and Alex is floating. She is twenty-two years old, staying in Simon's beach house, and her position there is built on a performance so sustained and precise that it has started to feel like a second skin. Simon is in his fifties, works in the secondary art market, and…
The morning after Helen's party, Simon dismisses Alex. He does it in the mild, professional tone he would use to conclude a business relationship that has ceased to be useful. His daughter Caroline might want to come out, he says. There is a train in an hour and a half. He does not look directly at…
Alex wakes in a clearing near the beach, where she has spent the night after being ejected from the house share. A deer crashes through the trees, startling her awake, and is completely indifferent to her presence. She walks along the highway until a white car pulls over: it is Nicholas, the house…
Alex follows Margaret to her family home, a low clapboard house tended by Karen, a live-in helper who has worked for the family for years. The house belongs to a different class of summer inhabitant than Simon's world: comfortable and abundant, but without the art and the careful restraint.…
Jack drives to a property belonging to the family of his former high school girlfriend. The main house is mid-renovation, construction halted by a planning dispute, and sits under a heavy blue tarp. The pool house is unlocked by a key Alex finds in the dirt of a potted plant. They go inside. The air…
Labor Day morning arrives overcast, and Alex wakes from anxious dreams she cannot quite recall. She prepares herself at the bathroom mirror with deliberate, almost ritual care, brushing her teeth until her gums bleed, recombing her hair until the parting is precise. She takes her last three pills.…
Alex is twenty-two years old, and she has been performing herself for long enough that the original version is no longer easy to locate. She arrived in New York two years before the novel begins, with enough energy to keep lists of restaurants and use false names and believe that what she was doing…
Simon is in his fifties, a dealer in the secondary art market, and he is the kind of man whose entire life has been organised around the maintenance of control. He exercises on a machine that climbs the equivalent of eighty flights of stairs each morning. He swims laps in the pool with manic focus.…
Dom exists almost entirely in the negative space of the novel. He is largely absent in person but persistently present as a threat, arriving as text messages, phone calls, and a name that produces a particular physiological response in Alex: a lurch in the stomach, a shortening of breath, a sudden…
Jack is nineteen, or says he is. He arrives at the beach with sheepskin slippers and a copy of Siddhartha in his bag, his father's enormous car parked haphazardly across two spaces. He is blond, with curly hair he is growing out and braces on his bottom teeth that he has learned to hide when he…
Alex is twenty-two years old, living in a beach house in the Hamptons for the month of August with a man named Simon, a wealthy art dealer in his fifties. She has constructed a version of herself that fits his expectations: a recent graduate, modest, with no friction and no past. What Simon does not know is that she was working as an escort in New York, that her income had been collapsing for months before they met, and that she stole money and drugs from a man named Dom before coming out east. Dom's texts have been arriving with increasing menace throughout her stay.