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.