In Emma Cline’s new novel, The Invitation, a woman bums her way through the Hamptons. A conversation about wealth, survival strategies and the question of what morality actually is.
Seven years ago, “The Girls” was one of the big novels of the summer: the story of a girl caught in the web of a bizarre post-hippie cult in late ’60s California, clearly modeled on the Charles Manson family. The then 27-year-old author Emma Cline, who herself hails from the San Francisco area, was not only declared the new US literary star because her debut played so brilliantly with the connection between female self-determination and masculine thirst for power, between youth rebellion and bloody terror , but also because she had received a total of two million dollars in advance from Verlag Random House for “The Girls” and two other books.