The summer of 2008, on the east end of Long Island – it was the disintegration of a dream, those mad, tilting moments between dream and fantasy and fever dream and nightmare. It was the summer of the Montauk Monster and the first season of the Real Housewives of New York and flip video cameras. Clubs and yoga studios and fancy beachware shops played “Gold Digger” with equal, unself-conscious abandon. Gas was nearly $5 a gallon. At the picnic tables outside The Talkhouse, dazed men in black Bear Sterns half-zips haphazardly toasted their own demise. 

I had eighteen hundred dollars in my checking account. This had seemed like plenty, before. Very quickly I came to understand that it was nothing, a dinner, a bottle of Grey Goose and a third of a table at Pink Elephant. I was staying for free at the summer home of a man who ran his own hedge fund; I had been given use of the company car, an old Range Rover belonging to one of the founders. I was able to live in an airy shingle-style house next door to the former mayor and sleep on a Tempur-Pedic mattress and eat at Nick and Toni’s because I was not paying for any of it; because somebody or several somebodies had been generous.  

At school, and in relationships, I had been the generous one. I liked paying for dinner, for rounds of terrible shots and the even more terrible handles of vodka we’d buy from the Russians on Second Avenue. I did not want to be obliged to anyone. Now I was obliged to men I barely knew; men who didn’t mind opening their home to a stranger, who didn’t mind adding one more to a reservation – and the only way to handle all these debts was to push them to the back of my mind. To be gracious and fun and nineteen in the right way – mature, and selectively wide-eyed. 

In fact, none of this was challenging; it was simple to barnacle onto other’s lives, an extension, in a way, of the social reporting I’d been hired to do. When I’d been offered the job, I’d suggested to my boyfriend that he join me. Nineteen year old boys are not guests of guests, unless they are guests of guests of other nineteen year old boys. That this was not immediately obvious to me – to either of us: a mistake. 

He found work at a high end swim suit shop and rented the cheapest room in the cheapest three bedroom on the one road in town reserved for service workers. But there was a lag between when he arrived and when he found that room, and it was this lag, the panic of it, the reminder of my own powerlessness, as a barnacle with $1,800 in her checking acount, to do anything about, that I recalled most keenly when reading The Guest. 

At the start of The Guest, a young sometime escort is unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, a much older man in whose summer home she’d been living, and taken to the train station. Ostensibly, she is meant to return to her apartment and the life she had before she barnacled onto his; in reality, past misdeeds mean she has no apartment to return to, only a very angry man from whom she stole an unclear and long gone amount of money. Having nowhere to go, she decides to stay, and most of the novel unfolds over the course of the ensuing six days, the days between the breakup and her ex’s summer party, which she has decided to crash in the hopes of winning him back.  

The Guest is Dante’s Inferno, an inverted hero’s journey, minus much (but not all) of the comedy, plus lots and lots of drugs and drinking and sex and set in – Wainscott? Water Mill? One of the smaller, quieter hamlets right on the shore. There are many moments in which Alex slots seamlessly into whichever situation seems most likely to further her chances of making it to Simon’s party; the variation of these situations unified by the relentless desire for validation, and the terror of its remove.

A few years after the summer of ‘08, after the housing market cratered, after the recession’s realization and nadir; long after the stock market had rebounded and the men from the Talkhouse had found replacement vests, I returned to Long Island to spend a weekend at the summer home of a boy I’d met during study abroad. Two days of typical early twenties drunkenness and activity – a day at the beach, where I’d managed, after a few misbegotten attempts, to stand atop my rented surfboard and ride the tail end of a barely wave into the shore, a night of dancing to a B-52 cover band at a dive bar along Sunrise Highway, late afternoon cocktails at the cypress-edged pool, where cousins, bold, athletic, familiar came and teased and went, against occasional reminders of where I was, and with whom – a dinner party for the Clintons, the best friend who’d recently lost a considerable amount of weight and had driven up in a screaming red Maserati, top down, french collared Turnbull & Asser unbuttoned just so – that were no less pleasurable for their being, more or less, anticipated shifted over abruptly, on Sunday, to formality and preparation.

His mother, fluttery, appraising, blond, was hosting a luncheon for a prospective member of her beach club. The food wasn’t the point; she could have served sand in red solo cups and her guest would have tucked in gamely. But there was a flurry of fretting and logistics and passive inquiries as to the state of this or that room, of whether there was enough lobster salad,  of which blue shirt the boy would wear. She had laid two options out on his (faintest glance my way) unmade bed. I biked into town and came back with an ivory and tangerine jaquard midi skirt from J. Crew. I paired the skirt with the ivory lace shirt I’d worn to the dive bar, liking the contrast between the theoretical elegance of ivory lace and its patchwork transparency. Nice dress, the boy said to me, when I came down. The applicant complimented the boy’s blue shirt and my skirt in the same breath; what a nice couple you make. When she spoke, she looked to me as as as to the boy and his mother for approval. That was about when I realized the trick foundation of the whole endeavor, which, in that moment, was not contingent upon but eased by my own participation.    

Alex, with her “desire for the night to sharpen into action,” can only participate for so long. With increasing inevitability, she transgresses, pushes her finger against the famous oil painting, sleeps with the wrong man, sleeps with the wrong boy in the wrong house. 

The Guest, like swimming pools and beachfront and summer itself, and like the stories it draws from and has been compared to – “The Swimmer,” Play It as It Lays (I’d venture it shares some of the rudderless and apathetic horror of Less than Zero, to say nothing of its neon cover) is a novel of menace. Menace requires loveliness, tranquility, in order to effectively rend it.

I am not making much of a pitch for The Guest; like American Pyscho and unlike Play It As It Lays, it is not a novel I’d recommend indiscriminately. But it is engrossing, disturbing, pacey –  and nails, perfectly, that specific desperation that sets in when you’ve no place of your own in a place where almost every house is locked and gated and private and so wildly out of reach that access demands an embrace of surreality, a suspension of your own belief. 

Or you could skip all that, those unnerving aspects of summer, those unsympathetic people – and watch Somebody, Somewhere, instead. The second season, which aired this spring, is a deft and generous buddy comedy, a tale of two sisters re-establishing themselves in their own right, a love story, a second love story. It’s got a wedding, a seductive smart fridge, opera, and Bridget Everett wearing the hell out of a magenta suit. Plus a very strong case for Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” which has quickly become my Song of the Summer™. It is worth noting that Gloria, always on the run now, voices in her head, is not so very different from Alex; but through a glass lightly, with jabs of synth and swells of horn.

Unrelated, but also worth a watch/read/listen:

+ Season 2. of The Bear, but especially “Honeydew” and “Fishes.” Marcus abloom in twilit Copenhagen, plus the most agonizing family dinner you’ve (hopefully) never been to. A clean fork, a peeled mushroom, the beautiful food born of anguish, love, history, pride, desolation, tremulous hope, memory, devastation. The quiet of the early mornings in three-star kitchens; the crash of a car through a wall; forks hurled and polished and lined up soldier-neat on crushed black velvet. Forks as denouement and forks as beginning. As with the first season, the soundtrack is killer.

+ This Atlantic photographic essay on the Vatican’s clavier, keeper of the keys. It invoked in me a curious interest in extremely specialized jobs, the how and who of them. Plus, echoes of The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler; the imaginarium of the museum at night.

+ This New Yorker profile of the pitcher Daniel Bard and his cases of the yips.

In game six of the 2010 ALC championships, Bard, then a rookie closer for the Red Sox, threw one of the most astonishing pitches of all time: a ninety nine mile per hour fastball that jigged at the very last second. The following summer, Bard”s game unraveled. His pitches hit the dirt, or went wide, or bruised the batter – he didn’t even know, before he fired them, where they might go. He was demoted to the minors, triple to double to single. Then he was fired. For years, he was gone from the game entirely.

Daniel Bard is back, now, and pitching for the Rockies. But one gets the sense, reading the story, that back is precarious, that it can be undone just by looking too closely.

+ This Strict Scrutiny episode on the court’s recent decision, in Allen v. Milligan, to preserve section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The decision was upheld, in large part, due to Judge Jackson’s effective reminders, during oral arguments, that the 1868 framers’ use of the equal protection clause in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments was deliberately race conscious. (That three of her conservative colleagues agreed with her on the clause’s purpose here only to opt for a race-blind interpretation in the ensuing overturning of affirmative action is baldly shameless; at least Thomas, who dissented in both, sticks to his hideous positions.)

+ Plus: “Ginni and Clarence: a Love Story” chronicles, in arresting detail, the Thomas’ centripetal union, its conspicuous bibles and partisan accessories, its Coke can denialism and grudge-match theatrics, the pugilism, embittered, reflexive, that enables a wholesale contempt for ethics, to say nothing of integrity, to say nothing of empathy. Ginni’s many early, full-throated resettlements and reinventions, her penchant for tilting at windmills, call to mind The Darling‘s Olenka, whose “husband’s opinions were all hers. If he thought the room was too hot, she thought so too. If he thought business was dull, she thought business was dull.” Only Olenka’s husbands keep dying; her opinions die with them.

+ Pineapple Street. Jenny Jackson’s first novel is easy-breezy Austen-lite transposed to contemporary Brooklyn Heights. Get past the wincingly bad first chapter and it nonetheless has something of substance to say about inherited wealth: at the start, the story’s three siblings and principle heirs to a real estate conglomerate and a limestone on the titular street, are guarded against newcomers, cosseted and spoiled and clannish and dull. Watching them, with the (unwelcome) help of outsiders, come to terms with this, and set about changing for the better, is surprisingly affecting. Which isn’t to say that each of the characters isn’t thin — really, only the matriarch, Tilda, is fully realized, and her exchanges with her daughters, on and off the tennis court, are a pure treat.

+ And while we’re on the New York novel train, another plug for City on Fire, the novel, given the baffling travesty that is the Apple TV adaptation. Yeah, it’s a long book; there’s too much exposition, some unnecessary backstories — but you can skip these parts (in re-reads, I do) without missing the great + ambitious and intricate + inventive story, whose plot is undergirded by the city in its rapscallian, tilt-a-wheel drop-dead bristle.

The show takes place not in 1977 but in 2003; the cited reason, in addition to cost savings, is because there were blackouts in both times, and because 2003 was slightly removed from a period where “people weren’t sure New York was going to make it.” This is all so inane that it makes me wonder if anyone involved with the show managed to read the book at all.

{immaterial but: I was in the city during the 2003 blackout; I had come with my friend to go shopping; we were staying at my aunt Betty’s apartment on the upper east side and my friend had come down with some sort of stomach bug from which she was quietly recuperating on the bathroom’s penny-tiled floor while I assessed and reassessed the back pockets of my new Seven jeans when the lights went out. What ensued was not bedlam and chaos but something more like a spontaneous block party, one of those moments when the summer’s conspiratorial heat and tummult and refuse; its cornupcopia of bodies, jostling, and accents, blending, binds together by the tacit agreement that it should. The owner of the upscale produce shop across the street handed out watermelon popscicles; at at table outside the seafood restaurant down the block, a tall man in a clean toque shucked oysters and piled them on the rapidly melting ice. It was a festive blip, relatively speaking. Not even relatively. The grid came back on; the city continued its headlong shinycleanmoney rise.}