The Guest v. Brainwyrms
The 2024 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 21 • QUARTERFINALS
The Guest
v. Brainwyrms
Judged by Dan Sinykin
Dan Sinykin (he/him) is an assistant professor of English at Emory University and the author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed Book Publishing and American Literature. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / dansinykin.com
Both novels are about sex, if radically differently. Brainwyrms is a work of gothic gross-out horror. (Descriptions of sexual violence ahead.) It takes place in transphobic Britain. Its two protagonists are Vanya, who is nonbinary, and Frankie, a trans woman. The first time they fuck Frankie pisses in Vanya’s mouth, “a beautifully crafted ivory urinal.” Much later, in a state of abjection, Frankie drinks the piss of an antisemite who looks like a tortoise. He bashes her head and takes her to an orgy where she is gangraped while watched by an enormously popular British author of young adult fiction who is famously transphobic. The author has white worms writhing in her mouth and eyes and vomits them onto Frankie.
Vanya has a fetish for being infested by parasites. Under the guidance of an older man, Gaz, they acquire a tapeworm to whom they become emotionally attached. Frankie, who lacks a uterus, has an impregnation fetish.
A story is told of a legendary furry who was addicted to eating his own shit. Eventually, his doctor tells him he needs to stop or he’ll die, but the Tumblr community eggs him on, and he eats his own shit again, and he dies.
I was taken by its weirdness, its refusal to play by bourgeois norms.
I did not expect to like Brainwyrms. I do not, typically, like horror. Though, for what it’s worth, my own personal liking is not the basis on which I judged these books for this Tournament, which would have determined the winner ahead of time sheerly by its genre; I committed to evaluating each book on its own terms. But I found myself increasingly compelled by Brainwyrms. I was taken by its weirdness, its refusal to play by bourgeois norms. It works in a tradition that dates to Horace Walpole’s 18th-century supernatural queer gothic The Castle of Otranto and that passes through the work of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, and Helen Oyeyemi. It is also a work of apocalyptic fiction. Its premise, its motivating context, as the author, Alison Rumfitt, sets out in a brief introduction, is the threat of a near-future when trans people are outlawed in the UK. The threat of communal extinction has been the core condition for apocalyptic writing since Antiochus IV Epiphanes sacrificed a pig in the Jewish Temple, instigating the Book of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Brainwyrms culminates in the coming of a destroying angel, of sorts, and ends with a hymn.
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Jane Austen began her career, with her first accomplished novel, Northanger Abbey, mocking the gothic for its sentimental melodrama. Later, in Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, Austen developed a subtle technique—free indirect discourse—that allows narrators to speak in the voice of characters, which creates a sense of rich inner life and intimacy for the reader. Emma Cline’s The Guest works in this tradition. It is laden with free indirect discourse. Where Brainwyrms is explicit, The Guest is discreet. The twist is that The Guest drops the least bourgeois of protagonists into this most bourgeois of forms: Alex, a precarious sex worker, though I’m not sure the phrase “sex worker” or “prostitute” or “whore” ever appears in the novel. She came to New York City at 20 from a background the novel keeps opaque, uses a fake name, becomes, in time, “no longer welcome in certain hotel bars.” She is only 22 now and has taken refuge in the vacation home of a wealthy older man, Simon, who does not know about her background, is properly dating her. She spends her time carefully performing the hidden labor of conforming, physically and psychologically, to his desire. But Alex fucks it up, gets his car in a fender bender and doesn’t tell him, flirts at a party with a younger man, and Simon asks her to leave. She has nowhere to go. So she spends the novel as a guest in one home after another, inventing versions of herself for the strangers she meets to keep herself housed until she can return to Simon, who, she thinks, will take her back after he has a week to cool down. This is gripping stuff, at least for awhile, like watching an acrobat do shots then step onto the high wire. Will she fall? Or like watching Harry Houdini bound and buried: How’s she going to escape this trap she’s built for herself? There’s a thrill embedded in the predicament, even as it plays out in slow, quiet, exquisite prose that pulled me along.
I puzzled until the deadline over which novel to choose.
Quite a bit different from an apocalypse. And yet. Both novels narrate the foreclosure of possibility for young people who are not men. It hurts to watch lives destroyed. As we learn from Alex when Simon buys her a new wardrobe: “The clothes were still fitted, of course, still marked her waist and breasts. It was just a more oblique way of achieving the same end, the more palatable because it was less obvious.” (Not that The Guest is without its obvious moments. When Simon observes that his wealthy neighborhood was once potato fields, Alex thinks, “It seemed to please Simon, imagining the process by which something worthless became something valuable.”) For both novels, foreclosure of the future is the point, the knowledge that propels the plots, which, in both cases, move the protagonists like water in a sink that can only go one place: down the drain.
I puzzled until the deadline over which novel to choose. I found it difficult to decide. Both are compelling, both flawed. The final quarter of The Guest is too predictable, and executed not such that we experience fatalistic dread but rather the mechanistic turning of gears; Alex’s mind swirls in narrower and narrower loops less like a lost young woman than a characterological algorithm. Brainwyrms suffers from its immersion in Very Online discourse, replete with himbos, cottagecore, and Twitter beefs. One chapter is titled “What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton,” which gives the novel’s inciting incident and has nothing to do with Clinton, a joke that falls flat. A riff off the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is trying too hard.
Enough of their flaws. I recommend them both. But I have to give it to The Guest for its brilliant Austenian prose, its expert use of free indirect discourse to investigate a blasted-out femininity in our new Gilded Age.
Advancing:
The Guest
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John Warner: Yet another great judgment that gives us additional cultural and historical perspective from which to consider these novels. I sometimes feel like a bit of a cretin when I read these judgments by people who know so much stuff and can provide this kind of context. For whatever reason, as a reader, I’ve always led with my immediate response—what I experience as I encounter a book—and have a hard time getting past that. As I read Judge Sinykin’s take I realize I know enough to know that what he’s saying makes sense, but I also recognize that my mind doesn’t work that way.
Kevin Guilfoile: Yeah, that was an interesting judgment, especially with respect to Brainwyrms. I definitely see the Lovecraft influence—not so much Poe and Jackson. I haven’t read Horace Walpole. But I agree that a novel needs to live alone in the hands of the reader, and every reader is different. Your appreciation of a novel might be improved because you bring some personal experience or knowledge to the reading. The author can be grateful for that assist, but can’t count on it.
I found this matchup interesting because each novel presents us with (what I found to be, at least) unlikable protagonists. I detailed in the last round the ways that Frankie and Vanya challenge the reader with their cruelty. The Guest’s Alex is a functioning sociopath, a serial user and discarder of people. The novel brings us along, however, by utilizing that close third person that Judge Sinykin talks about. We see the story unfold through Alex’s eyes, and we constantly get Alex’s justification for her actions. She is a charming person. Almost everyone who meets her is attracted to her at first. Every single one of them will eventually be burned by her.
There is a technique writers often use to take the edges off unlikable characters. Among the best known is All in the Family. Archie Bunker is a singularly repulsive person, a bigot and an asshole. But Edith loves him, and we love Edith, so Archie is redeemed just enough through her eyes that we can tolerate being in his living room for a half hour. Once we’re there, we can laugh at him.
The Guest employs a kind of inverse Edith Bunker effect. As the novel progresses we realize that anyone who has known Alex for any length of time, dislikes her. Often intensely. Maybe we were charmed by Alex at the outset, but as she leaves a trail of discarded relationships through the Hamptons, we realize she is playing the same game with us. You need a little nuance to get a reader to sit with a jerk for 300 pages, but Cline is a deft writer and The Guest has that gentle touch. There are probably readers who will decide, like Alex’s former friends, that they don’t want to spend any more time with Alex. It’s possible that Judge Sinykin’s waning interest in the third act was related to that. I rode that suburban commuter train all the way to the last stop, though.
John: It’s interesting the way a technique like the Edith-effect will work on us and how it suggests that when we read, we cannot escape our nature as social creatures. Even from just text on a page we can be manipulated through contextual clues. This is one of the reasons that I’m an AI skeptic, that even if these large language models can improve in terms of their output so they don’t seem so inhuman, they cannot work with the kind of focused intention that Cline manages in presenting Alex to us over the course of the novel. It’s a book that really brings her fully to life.
I’m with Judge Sinykin on how The Guest makes it to the finish line, though. To me, it seemed like the concerns of the story shifted in a way that allowed us to wrap up, and I’m not sure wrapping up was what we’d been heading toward.
Kevin: I am counting the Zombie ballots and Brainwyrms did not gross enough of them (see what I did there?) to make it into the top two. If the Zombie Round were held today, The Bee Sting and Chain-Gang All-Stars would be our Reanimated Readalongs.
Staff picks
This year we’re featuring some of our favorite independent businesses—including some owned and operated by friends (and friends of friends)—and today we want to direct your attention to editor-for-hire Rachel Knowles.
Rachel has extensive experience editing novels, short stories, memoirs, longform journalism, personal essays, and screenplays. Her clients have sold projects to places like Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, McSweeney’s, and the New York Times Magazine. She's worked with authors like Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), Jennifer Murphy (First Responder), and TMN’s Rosecrans Baldwin (Everything Now), who’s very lucky to be Rachel’s husband. So, whether you’re just starting out or you’re an established writer, she's here to help!