Homesick for Another World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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“The Beach Boy”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Beach Boy” Summary

John and Marcia, who have been married 29 years, have dinner with two other couples: Marty and Barbara and Jerry and Maureen. John and Marcia have recently returned from an anniversary trip to an unnamed tropical island, and they spend the evening telling their friends about the trip. Marcia loved the scenery but was saddened by the island’s corrupt government and widespread poverty. She and John tell the friends about their encounters with male sex workers—called beach boys—who followed them down the beach to proposition them.

After dinner, John and Marcia walk home across the park arm in arm. John thinks about how disappointed he is to be back to his normal life after vacation. Although John recognizes his privilege as a wealthy doctor, part of him wishes he could be as free as the people he saw on the islands. He thinks about Marcia’s attempts to avoid the sex workers on the beach, and how he wondered what it was, exactly, that they were offering him.

When John and Marcia get home, John makes popcorn while Marcia turns on a movie. While John is in the kitchen, Marcia dies unexpectedly on the couch. John, mistakenly thinking she’s asleep, sits down on the couch next to her and turns on baseball. He falls asleep and does not realize that Marcia is dead until he wakes up the next morning. John’s grief is profound. He acts erratically at the funeral and stops going to work. When he finds a half-developed picture of a sex worker among Marcia’s vacation photos, he becomes convinced that she cheated on him. John decides to return to the island and have sex with the same sex worker in order to get revenge on Marcia.

When John arrives to the island, a tropical storm is looming. He unceremoniously dumps Marcia’s ashes at the edge of the beach, then decides to get drunk in his room. When the storm passes, John drunkenly goes out in search of the sex worker from Marcia’s photos. He walks into the waves, which knock him over multiple times. Finally, a young male sex worker pulls him out of the water, saving his life. John attempts to proposition the boy, but finds that he cannot touch him, and that the boy’s skin is radiating heat. The young sex worker realizes that John has no money and walks away.

“The Beach Boy” Analysis

The emotional punch of this story comes from Moshfegh’s inversion of audience expectations for the protagonist, John. “The Beach Boy” is the ninth story in Homesick for Another World, and the first to feature an apparently healthy and loving romantic relationship. For readers encountering the stories sequentially, this story is a dramatic shift in tone. For the first half of the story, John and Marcia’s lives are presented as utterly “normal”: “[H]e woke up in the morning, saw patients all day long, returned home to eat dinner with Marcia, watched the evening news, bathed, and went to bed” (162-63). Their love is marked by the joy of physical intimacy; John describes listening to her “light and chatty” heartbeat, “a rhythm that made you want to waltz around the kitchen” (167). When Marcia dies, it is this physical intimacy that John misses most: “[H]e had been able to predict her every move, the arc of her sighs, her laughs, the twist of her shadow as it crossed a room” (169). These passages demonstrate the depth and ferocity of John’s love for Marcia.

In the second half of the story, however, John’s grief leads him to act irrationally, and the tone begins to shift dramatically. After he finds the half-exposed image of the male sex worker among Marcia’s vacation photos, John’s memories of Marcia begin to change: “[S]ecretly, all along she’d been a whore, he thought, a deviant, a pervert, carousing with prostitutes right under his nose” (181). His love for her physical form also changes, as he unceremoniously “dumps” (the verb is used three times on Pages 180, 181, and 183) Marcia’s ashes at the edge of the beach. The emotional whiplash from John’s love to his powerful grief to his drunken anger is disorienting for readers who expected (or maybe hoped) for a happy ending based on the opening pages of the story, but it becomes clear that John’s anger is both a displaced reaction to his grief and an excuse to explore aspects of his sexuality that he has never previously felt able to explore.