43: Aging, Warped, and Wannabe Bourgeoisie
“More than ever, this place seemed like a collection of houses, everywhere she looked, or more like a collection of gates. A good trick, when you thought about it. How everything was private, everything was hidden. The better to keep you out if you didn’t belong. It was unthinkable, enraging, how many of these houses were empty.”(Cline)
At a time when class awareness pervades collective consciousness, when I am asked by rich customers at my server job in a coastal tourist town: “is it hard for locals to find housing here?” I feel that literature exploring the dynamic begins to clarify the mirage. Social capital, navigating pretenses, serial dating, and a lack of belonging are all themes seen through the beguiling eyes of young womanhood in both The Guest by Emma Cline and Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados.
Happy Hour is a story of a 21 year old girl named Isa who moves to New York City with her best friend with little more than a sublet and a loose idea of how to scrape by with a series of side jobs and bold socialite acts--think of a lower stakes Anna Delvey. The Guest is a story of a 22 year old girl named Alex who morphs into a skillful social drifter among the East End of Long Island after her older, rich, pseudo-boyfriend sends her on her way while she’s secretly homeless and being stalked by an ex she swindled. *Anxiety by Doecchi plays*
Doechii’s album cover of Alligator Bites Never Heal. 2025.
Both narratives hinge upon the social capital of young, pretty women and the chameleon-like quality of weaponized desire.
“Beauty is a funny thing. It tools you into thinking you like someone when really all you want is to possess them. Ultimately, I guess that's what desire is. Something I find so beautiful should be mine!”(Granados)
Both Cline and Granados explore the phenomenon of young women being desired by older men, by party-throwers, by artists, by those who see youth and beauty as a symbol of power and desirability. Isa and Alex are both keenly aware of how this imposed power can be leveraged as social currency and under the pretenses of dates, business arrangements, and power dynamics. They use it to their advantage until it’s to their detriment, then they disappear like lovely, calculating wraiths into the night.
The ultimate scamming socialite, Anna Sorokin aka Anna Delvey.
“You could be the perfect girl for Anybody. We are conditioned to be obsessed with people falling in love with us. Reaching that point is seen as a success. We’re always asking, ‘Why do they act this way?’ and then morphing, cooing, comforting. By the time you win them over, you don’t know how to really love them in return because we never ask ourselves enough about what we want. Don’t ever forget you have the ability to choose.”(Granados)
Note the capital “A” in Anybody--fill in the blank, it beckons, why not? As if in some distorted game of Barbie dreamhouse. The idea of dating as a fully transactional relationship--with only a small undercurrent of a predominantly lost hope of true love--becomes a serial act in cultivating a life of shucking responsibility in pursuit of glamour granted by loving acts.
“Money was limited, but my taste was not.”(Granados)
Throughout both novels, there is a keen sense of class disparity as both Isa and Alex notice the way women of means conduct themselves, both in the interest of imitating them as well as identifying them. Circling birds mean there are fish, and both Isa and Alex go for the winning catch.
A house for sale on Long Island, NY by Sotheby’s. This is how I imagined the setting of The Guest.
“All the women [...] hated each other, hated each other so much, just so they could avoid hating their husbands. Only their little dogs, blinking from their laps, seemed real: they were the women’s souls, Alex decided, tiny souls trotting behind them on a leash.”(Cline)
The implicit soullessness of those with wealth throughout these small vignettes serves as both a typical, archetypal observation as well as an assumed camaraderie with an audience who “gets it”. Yet, both Isa and Alex at times admire the vapidity, the simple egoism, the blatant excess of the nouveau riche--after all, they are both its beneficiaries in both stories, however performatively they scoff at the disparity of it all.
“Sometimes making bad decisions really takes no time at all. In fact, you realize you've been itching to do it all along. Deep down, I think it comes from being so angry at having to restrict yourself all the time. Because in the end, no matter how you behave, someone will always dash your life's work away with little to no regard. We are always swimming against the tide. How's that for justice? If I am reckless, it is because I am tired.”(Granados)
It is this perceived invisibility in the wide, seemingly unfair world that dictates both Isa and Alex’s sense of not belonging, that fuels their rebellions into compounding chaos. Their lives become unstable, unbound, unnoticed.
“Maybe she was the ghost she had always imagined herself to be. Maybe it was a relief.”(Cline)
Altogether, Isa in Happy Hour is much more reliably held by New York City than The Guest’s Alex is by Eastern Long Island. Isa is playfully testing the waters with her best friend Gala and stakes are low, the tone silly--it’s happy hour of course. The youthful stamina of Isa contrasts with an Alex that is used to the game, aging out of innocence, while a shadowy threat looms overhead.
Overall, I think I enjoyed Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados more than The Guest by Emma Cline. I listened to Happy Hour on audiobook and physically read The Guest (from a magnificent free library hardback I might add--what a glorious cover design!).
When reading about the hard-to-articulate phenomenon of being a conventionally attractive young woman in a world whose mythos claims that it can be the most important weapon, the most valuable tool, yet provides no clear way for said inherent social capital to pave the way for a brighter future, I want it to be GRITTY and for the voice to have BITE. I want Riot Grrrl and M.I.A to sound off in my mind. Otherwise, it’s just kind of sad lol.
So if you’re stuck between these two novels and would rather feel young, wild and free instead of aging, warped, and bourgeoisie, read Happy Hour.
Thanks for reading, as always. - Gabby
