Paul Yoon Reads Fiona McFarlane

This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear Hostel by Fiona McFarlane,

which appeared in The New Yorker in March of 2024. I don't know how Mandy and Roy felt about the hostel, only that they walked past it one night and heard someone crying in the park. According to Roy, he knew at once that the person crying was a girl, but Mandy was less sure. The story was chosen by Paul Yoon, who's the author of five books of fiction, including the story collection The Hive and the Honey, which won the Story Prize in 2024.

A new novel, Aetna, will be published next month. Hi, Paul. Hi, Debra. Thank you for doing this.

I'm so happy to be here. So what made you choose Fiona McFarlane's story, Hostel, to read and discuss today? Well, the quick answer is I absolutely love it. I think I'm always looking for when a story gives me a sense of mystery, beautiful mystery.

And this story did that on sentence one, you know, where you realize the story that we're about to witness or read is a story that the narrator has yet to tell her husband. And so in that way, I was completely intrigued. It's almost like we're in on a kind of confession or a secret that her husband has yet to be a part of. So it's the way it pulls you in at the very opening.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, this kind of idea where if a story is trying to teach us about its world as quickly as possible, this one is sort of telling us that things might be at a remove or there might be secrets or stories that are not told. And so immediately that structure has been kind of built. And I was really intrigued by that.

And it's extremely mysterious. Well, did you first read it when it came out in the magazine or did you read it in the story collection? Oh, no, I read it when it first came out in the magazine. I read almost every short story, the fiction, every week.

So it was a pure joy to read. I've been a huge fan of Fiona's for a long time, but I wasn't aware that she was working on a story collection, sort of a link story collection.

So I wasn't aware that this was a part of a bigger project. And so I just kind of read it as a standalone story. And yeah, I was just so excited by it. And then Highway 13 came out, and I was even more excited by that too.

Right, so it became part of McFarlane's collection, Highway 13. Right, which is about a fictional serial killer. And the killer himself is never sort of center stage, right? It's all about the characters who are in the periphery.

And this story, Hostel, seems to kind of take that spirit as well and embrace it, where you think the story is about one thing and then it moves to something else. It's constantly sort of subverting your expectation. Absolutely.

We've now given away that there is a serial killer who will be involved at some point. So that will now be the mystery that people will listen for as you read the story. Although I would argue that's only one of many mysteries in this story, which is why I love it. Absolutely.

Well, we'll talk some more after the reading. And now here's Paul Yoon reading Hostel by Fiona McFarlane. Hostile I've never told my husband this story, but I suppose I will eventually, on some sticky night in, say, February, as we lie naked in bed with the ceiling fan set at its highest speed.

We'll be waiting for a storm to bluster in from the south, and I'll see the relevant part of him lying flushed and heavy against his thigh, and I'll think about how I'd consider taking it in my mouth if the room were cooler by as little as 2 degrees. That will remind me of Roy and his wife

and I'll feel like talking about them. And I'll start by telling my husband that I used to know this couple who, on learning they were going to have a baby,

began taking long walks together in the evening. I might not use their real names. It would be hard, though, not to reveal Roy's, which seemed almost to have shaped his personality.

His given name, much to his embarrassment, was royal, and in defiance of his parents' grandiosity, he cultivated an unroyal persona. He was a humble guy, self-effacing. He lived his life, at least his public social life, as if he were answering a survey about it.

If someone asked, how was your trip to Fiji, Roy? His answer might be, I'd describe myself as having enjoyed it. The trouble was that he took his humility to such lengths that he actually came across in the end as kingly, detached, benevolent, devoid of individuality. His opinions and tastes and

desires were as carefully bland as a king's must be. A polite king, I mean, who coexists with a constitution and whose irrelevance now and then sparks a complicated optimism about the possibility of a republic. Or, of course, a queen. There's no need to use Roy's wife's real name. In fact, she's no longer his wife. I'll call her Mandy. A name like this reveals

nothing about her except perhaps that she was pretty and athletic. The evening walks were a response to Mandy's fear that pregnancy might change her body. It's not that Mandy was vain. She just liked to be good at everything she did. So she liked to be good at having a body.

At the time, Roy and Mandy lived in Newtown, which I'll explain to my husband is a crowded inner city Sydney neighborhood that back in the 90s was grimy but beginning to gentrify. They were part of that gentrification.

They'd bought a tall, shuttered terrace house in North Newtown and fitted it with many skylights so that sunlight filtered down like luminous smoke through the stairwells and woke them each morning from a gleaming square above their bed.

You could sit on their guest's toilet and see the undersides of airplanes. The kitchen, too, was new, and they painted the front door an intrepid red, as if to advertise their plucky personalities. They were both lawyers with good salaries,

and the timing of the pregnancy was part of a long-term plan