“The Apartment," in the Aug. 31, 2015 issue of The
New Yorker, is a powerful story of quiet desperation, set in Sweden, a
country more “buttoned up” than America, author Jensen Beach says in one of the
magazine’s regular author interviews.
Louise,
married with a grown child and seemingly leading a comfortable middle-class
life, is actually a hollowed-out alcoholic who hates her husband, her son and
presumably just about everyone else. In the background, is the road not taken –
an affair with an Iranian graduate student when she was at university. Instead
of pursuing that, she opted for a conventional marriage with another Swede.
