Fiction Responding to Fiction

The Guest and “The Swimmer”

One of my favorite things about reading fiction is thinking about the connections between one text and another. Often, there are subtle echoes that may or may not be conscious on the part of a writer. A reader also often brings their own baggage to the page, perhaps seeing connections because of their prior reading history. But there is fiction written deliberately to be in conversation with another work.  For several years, I wrote a column at the Ploughshares blog which looked at pairs of short stories, one written in response to an earlier one. I find this fascinating. Not only do you have two wonderful pieces that stand on their own, but the opportunity to consider the interplay between the two creates another layer of meaning.

I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed The Guest by Emma Cline. I hadn’t read anything about the book when I began it—I liked The Girls very much, and I’ve enjoyed Cline’s short fiction. So I dove (sorry) into this slim novel without knowing much of anything about it. It’s actually the best way to read a book, I think, even as it’s often hard to do. To only bring to the page your interest and trust in the writer.

The book focuses on Alex, a 22 year-old sex worker, who has made some risky choices in the recent past. It’s the end of August, and she’s in the Hamptons, living in the home of one of her clients. Shortly after the book begins, he asks her to leave. She, however, has nowhere to go, and she convinces herself that if she can just make it one week, until Labor Day, she can return to his home for a party, and he will welcome her with open arms. So begins the week of the book, beautifully set in that last bittersweet week of summer. A perfect container for a novel: the tension is ratcheted up right from the start.

Alex moves from place to place, from person to person, trying on different personas as she simply tries to make it through the week, to find a place to sleep, to find food. Most everything changes day by day, but one thing doesn’t change—in part because of where she is—and that is her desire for water, her desire to swim. When the book opens, she is at the beach and goes for a (somewhat dangerous) swim. At the end of the novel, she is indeed at that Labor Day party, standing by the side of the pool. Every place and person that she’s with during the novel has access to water—natural or manmade—and her desire for water is second only to her desire to make it safely to the end of this week.

My first connection, outside of the book, was to Succession and Kendall Roy’s association with water. Alex finds herself in a world that is inhabited by Kendall Roys. Many viewers of the final episode of the series were convinced that Kendall’s final scene, near the water, was simply a prelude to his death. Throughout the series, there was an insistent relationship between Kendall and water. That same underlying worry exists in The Guest as well—what, exactly, is Alex’s desire for water? Is it to brush up against death? Or will it ultimately go one step further?

But then I realized that swimming is important to her, too. It’s the spine of the book, really, and that’s when that wonderful thing happened for me, when the lightbulb went off, and I realized the connection with John Cheever’s classic “The Swimmer.” In the short story, Neddy Merrill decides to swim home after an afternoon party and a few too many drinks, and off he goes, moving from one suburban backyard to the next. At some point in the story, we begin to realize that we’ve moved a bit away from reality. Seasons begin to change. Neighbors behave oddly. And at the end, we begin to understand why.

Cline’s book is successful in part because of the way in which it is not like Cheever’s story: we (and Alex) are not allowed to leave the real world. Nothing, even early on, goes particularly well for Alex—it is clear to the reader, I think, that her plan is ill-conceived. We are held in the tight container of the week leading up to Labor Day, and we are with Alex as she gets stuck in one bad situation after the next. But the forward momentum of the book certainly echoes the story: they both move forward in time as the main character swims from place to place to place. Neddy has been drinking and that adds a certain level of haze to the story; Alex takes pills to soften the edges. Alex is in the uber-wealthy Hamptons in the present day while Neddy is in the affluent Connecticut suburbs in the early 1960’s. We feel the weight and the length of each of their journeys.

Of course, their relative positions in the world are vastly different. Neddy is the quintessential white American male of the mid-century, the master of his universe. (Of course, part of Cheever’s mission here is to question that role and that world.) Alex, on the other hand, is female and a sex worker. It is fascinating that the only other people who seem to see who she actually is, as she tries on one persona after another, are the others who work in service. In some other imaginary world, Alex would work for Neddy, and yet here she is, echoing his literary narrative. For Neddy, though, the swim through time is a lark, at least at the start, a fun thing to do at the end of a drunken, lazy Sunday afternoon. For Alex, it is what she needs to do in order to survive. Cline has updated the story to reflect a changed world.

I’ve since read interviews with Cline where she states—of course—that the novel is loosely based on “The Swimmer.” In particular, she was taken with the end of the Cheever story, the hollowness and the surprise, and she wanted her novel to end with that same tone. I think she achieved that, and I love that idea—that the writer is responding to a tone, figuring out a way to leave her reader with that same feeling. It is fiction responding to fiction, not only as a replication or an updating but of the way fiction makes us feel.

In one interview, Cline also mentioned that when she reread “The Swimmer,” she found it was different than what she had remembered. So her original connection to the story—and perhaps the inspiration for this novel—was based on somewhat of a false memory. I love that, too, that fiction sticks with us and morphs over time, our memory holding on to some aspect of the text that’s important to us, that resonates for whatever reason. For her, the tone was clearly the thing, and that’s what she responded to.

A writer I know was writing a short story in response to a classic William Trevor story. He told me that he deliberately did not reread the story when he began writing his version, saying that the important pieces of the story would remain. I think this is similar to what happened to Cline. We may read for character or plot or setting but, in the end, it is the way in which fiction touches us, the way in which we are changed by reading that particular piece, that stays with us. And for a writer, that resonance may be just the thing that sparks whatever is next.

Photo by Juan Patlan on Unsplash