{"id":17266,"date":"2015-12-28T01:41:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T05:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=17266"},"modified":"2015-12-28T20:04:55","modified_gmt":"2015-12-29T00:04:55","slug":"ottessa-moshfegh-the-beach-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2015\/12\/28\/ottessa-moshfegh-the-beach-boy\/","title":{"rendered":"Ottessa Moshfegh: “The Beach Boy”"},"content":{"rendered":"
Ottessa Moshfegh's \"The Beach Boy\" was originally published in the January 4, 2016 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>. Click here<\/a> to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker<\/em> webpage.<\/pre>\n
\"January<\/a>Welcome to a new year of New Yorker<\/em> fiction! I want to take a brief moment to thank you who come and add to the discussion here. Sometimes it is a big discussion. Sometimes it is small. Sometimes we applaud the magazine and sometimes we wonder why we bother. But this community is valuable and meaningful, so thank you, and I hope 2016 is a strong year! It’s starting out with a young writer . . .<\/p>\n
Indeed, this is Ottessa\u00a0Moshfegh’s first piece to be published in The New Yorker<\/em>, though some of her work has already appeared in The Paris Review<\/em> (six times!) and Granta<\/em>, and her debut novel, Eileen<\/em>, came out to positive buzz toward the end of this past summer. I myself am completely unfamiliar with her writing.<\/p>\n
I look forward to your thoughts below!<\/p>\n
Here are Adrienne’s initial thoughts to get us started:<\/em><\/p>\n
A couple, steeped in privilege and an elite lifestyle, meet with an untimely death and grief upon returning home from a vacation on an island.\u00a0The story is meant to explore a man’s experience with a controlling marriage, too-tightly fit career, and the lack of choice and freedom he feels inside his life of privilege and ease.<\/p>\n
There were great images in this piece. They juxtaposed each other in a subtle, and quietly jarring way, yet they felt forced.\u00a0This piece could have been an organic exploration of relationships, emotions, desires.\u00a0Instead of allowing the reader to watch the story unfold in a natural and life-like flow,\u00a0Moshfegh tells <\/i>us what to see and think, and when, in an overt manner.\u00a0<\/i>The characters are well-developed, but they are pushed from scene to scene, moment to moment, by the author. I wonder what John would have thought about the last picture on the roll if particular thoughts were not insisted upon him . . .<\/p>\n
I tried to find the criteria used to select fiction for the magazine.\u00a0I found this response from Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker: <\/span><\/a>“We have no concept of “trademark” New Yorker<\/em> fiction. It is next to impossible to define one limited category that would contain work by Haruki Murakami<\/span><\/a> and Alice Munro<\/span><\/a>, Edwidge Danticat<\/span><\/a> and Jonathan Franzen<\/span><\/a>, Jhumpa Lahiri<\/span><\/a> and David Foster Wallace<\/span><\/a>, William Trevor<\/span><\/a> and Aleksandar Hemon<\/span><\/a>, John Updike<\/span><\/a> and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie<\/span><\/a>, Gabriel Garc\u00eda Marquez<\/span><\/a> and Antonya Nelson<\/span><\/a>, to name just a few of the very different writers we\u2019ve published in recent years. What is important for us is that a story succeed on its own terms. If the writer\u2019s goal is to be linguistically inventive, he or she needs to pull that off and do something fresh; if his or her goal is to have an emotional impact, that must come through in some powerful way. The styles and approaches can be as different as is humanly possible, as long as they\u2019re effective.”<\/p>\n
“The Beach Boy” feels like it is on its way to “suceed[ing] on its own terms” but is not quite there yet.\u00a0Such dramatic and sudden shifts in personality do<\/i> take place in times of grief, in times of great upheaval, and sudden freedom.\u00a0This transformation is covered in a brief paragraph, but it reads like it’s trying to create effect —\u00a0make <\/i>readers see the change — rather than allowing them to discover it on their own, notice it by connecting to their own life experiences while reading. The narrator feels as controlling as Marcia, without being as light-handed and airy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week\u2019s New Yorker<\/em> fiction is Ottessa Moshfegh’s \u201cThe Beach Boy.\u201d Read the full post and join the conversation<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,826],"tags":[],"coauthors":[505,812],"class_list":["post-17266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-ottessa-moshfegh"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Moshfegh-The-Beach-Boy.jpg?fit=690%2C942&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-4uu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17266"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17273,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17266\/revisions\/17273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17266"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}