New Yorker Fiction: Life is a Downer

If one reads fiction in The New Yorker regularly, as I have over the past couple of years, it is hard to escape coming to the conclusion that life is fundamentally a downer and often disgustingly so.

One of the latest such depictions is "The Beach Boy" from the magazine's Jan. 4, 2016, edition in which a Manhattan dermatologist who initially appears to be leading a reasonably satisfactory, comfortable middle class married life falls to pieces and ends up drunk on a tropical beach, attempting unsuccessfully to get the attention of a male prostitute he thinks could tell him something, surely degrading, about his former wife.

His former wife? Oh, I almost forgot. In an extremely well-wrought and imaginative plot twist, she dropped dead. Just like that.  This development was required it appears, to expose John, the dermatologist, as the pathetic creature he really had been all along.



What's going on here? This story was written by an American woman author named Ottessa Mashfegh,  and it appears she has an agenda.

"One might say that New Yorkers like the folks in “The Beach Boy” are especially susceptible to the kind of stupidity I love to write about—the stupidity of entitlement. John and Marcia [the dermatologist's wife] do, after all, live in the bubble at the center of the universe," she said in a New Yorker author interview.

That would be the Upper West Side of Manhattan where most people get around by riding subways.

In sharp contrast to the entitled about whom she was writing, Ms Mashfegh was very recently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

So, John and Marcia, having visited an unnamed tropical island for their 29th wedding anniversary, are depicted telling their friends things about the place in the most stereotypical terms:  beautiful beaches and sunsets, but beggars, male prostitutes and administrative or political chaos. And the natives speak English! Food hung on trees, but garbage filled the streets.

"Their friends wanted to know what the prostitutes had looked like, how they'd dressed, what they'd said. They wanted details."

Get the picture? These people are shallow and, well, stupid -- and what happens to John after the death of his wife is thus well deserved.

First, he doesn't seem to recognize his wife is dead so he watches television, eating popcorn, while stilling beside her until he falls asleep. Then he can't handle his wife's memorial event and in the process, concludes he doesn't really like many of their former friends.

In the middle of the event, "he belched loudly, from the depths of his gut, as though releasing some dark spirit that had been lodged down there his whole life." Toward the end, as his wife's choir sings "lifelessly." He retreats to the bathroom where he urinates and defecates.

And so it goes. Down, down, down. Even his seemingly comfortable, seeming happy former life was a fraud. He'd been dominated by his more socially popular wife, John concludes in retrospect. She'd controlled him, made him "a slave to decorum." That had been a downer, too, even if he hadn't recognized it at the time. Remember, we are talking here about "the stupidity of entitlement."

Welcome to a great deal of New Yorker fiction. Think theme and variation.