He envisions himself as an exemplar of refinement amidst squalor. He prefers to remain a disreputable latter-day dandy. He pays $350 a month to occupy a tiny corner of a Hasidic-owned Brooklyn flophouse and empties his bank account purchasing expensive clothes. Nick is thirty-three and white (half-Jewish, half-WASP), a part-time graphic designer who receives occasional infusions of capital from his wealthy father. Unlike many of his Yale friends, who have quit smoking, lost their hair, gotten married, and bought “a brownstone in a part of Brooklyn they wouldn’t have set foot in five years earlier,” Nick Darby-Stern, the lovesick dope who narrates Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Dancing in the Moonlight,” has failed to convert his social capital into personal wealth. Ottessa Moshfegh (Krystal Griffiths / the Clegg Agency) In her short stories, Ottessa Moshfegh chronicles downward mobility on the part of the privileged-and in so doing exposes their unfitness to rule, if not to exist.
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