david foster wallace essay cruise

8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online

If you've talked to me for more than five minutes, you probably know that I'm a huge fan of author and essayist David Foster Wallace . In my opinion, he's one of the most fascinating writers and thinkers that has ever lived, and he possessed an almost supernatural ability to articulate the human experience.

Listen, you don't have to be a pretentious white dude to fall for DFW. I know that stigma is out there, but it's just not true. David Foster Wallace's writing will appeal to anyone who likes to think deeply about the human experience. He really likes to dig into the meat of a moment — from describing state fair roller coaster rides to examining the mind of a detoxing addict. His explorations of the human consciousness are incredibly astute, and I've always felt as thought DFW was actually mapping out my own consciousness.

Contrary to what some may think, the way to become a DFW fan is not to immediately read Infinite Jest . I love Infinite Jest. It's one of my favorite books of all-time. But it is also over 1,000 pages long and extremely difficult to read. It took me seven months to read it for the first time. That's a lot to ask of yourself as a reader.

My recommendation is to start with David Foster Wallace's essays . They are pure gold. I discovered DFW when I was in college, and I would spend hours skiving off my homework to read anything I could get my hands on. Most of what I read I got for free on the Internet.

So, here's your guide to David Foster Wallace on the web. Once you've blown through these, pick up a copy of Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

1. "This is Water" Commencement Speech

Technically this is a speech, but it will seriously revolutionize the way you think about the world and how you interact with it. You can listen to Wallace deliver it at Kenyon College , or you can read this transcript . Or, hey, do both.

2. "Consider the Lobster"

This is a classic. When he goes to the Maine Lobster Festival to do a report for Gourmet , DFW ends up taking his readers along for a deep, cerebral ride. Asking questions like "Do lobsters feel pain?" Wallace turns the whole celebration into a profound breakdown on the meaning of consciousness. (Don't forget to read the footnotes!)

2. "Ticket to the Fair"

Another episode of Wallace turning journalism into something more. Harper 's sent DFW to report on the state fair, and he emerged with this masterpiece. The Harper's subtitle says it all: "Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows."

3. "Federer as Religious Experience"

DFW was obviously obsessed with tennis, but you don't have to like or know anything about the sport to be drawn in by his writing. In this essay, originally published in the sports section of The New York Times , Wallace delivers a profile on Roger Federer that soon turns into a discussion of beauty with regard to athleticism. It's hypnotizing to read.

4. "Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise"

Later published as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in the collection of the same name, this essay is the result of Harper's sending Wallace on a luxury cruise. Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun."

5. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This is definitely in the running for my favorite DFW essay. (It's so hard to choose.) Fiction writers! Television! Voyeurism! Loneliness! Basically everything I love comes together in this piece as Wallace dives into a deep exploration of how humans find ways to look at each other. Though it's a little long, it's endlessly fascinating.

6. "String Theory"

"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

Originally published in Esquire , this article takes you deep into the intricate world of professional tennis. Wallace uses tennis (and specifically tennis player Michael Joyce) as a vehicle to explore the ideas of success, identity, and what it means to be a professional athlete.

7. "9/11: The View from the Midwest"

Written in the days following 9/11, this article details DFW and his community's struggle to come to terms with the attack.

8. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage "

If you're a language nerd like me, you'll really dig this one. A self-proclaimed "snoot" about grammar, Wallace dives into the world of dictionaries, exploring all of the implications of how language is used, how we understand and define grammar, and how the "Democratic Spirit" fits into the tumultuous realms of English.

Images: cocoparisienne /Pixabay; werner22brigette /Pixabay; StartupStockPhotos /Pixabay; PublicDomainPIctures /Pixabay

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Why's This So Good?

October 18, 2011, “why’s this so good" no. 16: david foster wallace on the vagaries of cruising.

Megan Garber

Tagged with.

For seven days and seven nights in mid-March of 1995, David Foster Wallace took a cruise.

He did not have a very good time.

The results of the voyage are recorded in “ Shipping Out ,” an extended essay, framed playfully as an ad for a cruise ship, that ran in Harper’s in early 1996. (It was later re-titled “ A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again ” and set as the anchor to Wallace’s 1998 essay collection of the same name.)

Had “Shipping Out” been written by someone else – had it been written, actually, by anyone else – the result would probably have been a perfectly lovely magazine essay embodying the kind of rhetorical doubling that perfectly lovely magazine essays tend to strive for: on the one hand a travelogue with a transformative narrative arc and appropriately Dickensian details…and on the other a cultural critique of the m.v. Zenith , its curiosities, its context, and the various Global Phenomena it represents: economic entitlement, imperative leisure, people who use “cruise” as a verb.

But Wallace isn’t just a writer. He is a philosopher with a writer’s imagination. And “Shipping Out,” despite its lyricism (“I have felt the full, clothy weight of a subtropical sky”), is an argument whose poetry and provocations orbit around a single point: “There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad.” A thesis Wallace will prove through taxonomic considerations of ship-borne sorrows, through vignettes conveying both humanity and the absence of it, through rhythmic repetitions of the word “despair,” through inventories of assorted atrocities that have, in the topsy-turvy moral terrain of the Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise, adopted the guise of Mandatory Fun.

These indictments will all be incredibly un-subtle. Wallace rechristens the Zenith the Nadir , which name it will maintain for the remainder of the voyage’s 18,000 words.

“Shipping Out” begins with a list. “I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue,” its author tells us, the “now” hinting – three words in! – that a Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise comes with certain obligations.

I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that look computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.

I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship’s Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the trapshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is. I now know the precise mixological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a Fuzzy Navel. I have, in one week, been the object of over 1,500 professional smiles…. I have absorbed the basics of mah-jongg and learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo. I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children.

I have eaten more and classier food than I’ve ever eaten, and done this during a week when I’ve also learned the difference between “rolling” in heavy seas and “pitching” in heavy seas. I have heard a professional cruise-ship comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.”

He goes on in this way for an entire page-and-a-half, an inventory of experience that is often amusing and occasionally confusing and always, until the end, refusing to stop. And while the nouns-without-verbs approach is often the wrong one – there’s a fine line, after all, between listing and laziness – here, it allows Wallace-the-narrator the freedom of panoramic memory, and Wallace-the-author the ability to mold memory into argument. (“List,” intr. v., arch. ShipSpeak , “to tilt.”)

This is, in other words, narrative without a narrative, its arc propelled by the suggestive spray of bullet points. The items pop; they peal; they pierce. In their tell-don’t-show insistence, they speak to the aggression that simmers beneath the pseudonymous servility of the m.v. Nadir , the struggle between entitlement and indignation that reveals itself gradually, mercilessly, in the buildup of such apparently innocuous announcements as “I have met Cruise Staff with the monikers ‘Mojo Mike,’ ‘Cocopuff,’ and ‘Dave the Bingo Boy.’ ”

Wallace is plunging us, forcefully but (this being Wallace) also charmingly, into the world of the Nadir .[1] In ceding his story, at least at its outset, to a kind of narrative nihilism, he is revealing the essay’s upshot – sadness, emptiness and the causes/manifestations thereof – even before he comes out and, un-subtly, says it. Conga lines notwithstanding, this was not a fun trip. It was actually, for no specific reason and for every big reason, kind of a horrible trip. And right away, as ship leaves shore, Wallace has stretched his Caribbean Cruise to taut implication. We are about to learn what it means to spend seven days and seven nights on an island of floating fun, surrounded by nothing save a sea of very bright blue and 1,500 professional smiles.

“Shipping Out” is, again, framed – and, within its Harper’s setting, designed – as a brochure (“THE FOUR-COLOR BROCHURE”) advertising the Nadir and its assorted delights. On the one hand, this is an extended visual joke at the expense of the ship’s own very real, very earnest, very cringe-worthy marketing document. (“When the curtain comes down after a standing ovation, the talk among your companions turns to, ‘What next?’ Perhaps a visit to the casino or a little dancing in the disco? Maybe a quiet drink in the piano bar or a starlit stroll around the deck? After discussing all your options, everyone agrees: ‘Let’s do it all!’ ”)

The advertorial overlay, though, is more than a frame: It’s also a visual explanation of why the Nadir is, finally, so sad. The brochure, like the Luxury Cruise itself, is not an invitation so much as an exhortation. It requires things of you, the carefree vacationer, the primary among them being that YOU WILL HAVE FUN. It’s persuasion that takes the persuading for granted.

This is advertising (i.e., fantasy-enablement), but with a queerly authoritarian twist. Note the imperative use of the second person and a specificity out of detail that extends even to what you will say (you will say “I couldn’t agree more” and “Let’s do it all!”). You are, here, excused from even the work of constructing the fantasy, because the ads do it for you.

You are excused, in other words, from choice – and thus, finally, from yourself. “The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure but that you will ,” Wallace says.

They’ll make certain of it. They’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. You will be able – finally, for once – to relax, the ads promise, because you will have no choice.

Again, the lack of subtlety here is powerful. “You will have no choice” ranks among the most chilling sentences in the English language; Wallace plunges us into it. The advertisement, the embodiment of the Nadir ’s ethic of cheery indenture, literally surrounds Wallace’s discussion of the ship’s constraints. The mandatory fun is inescapable.

In the face of all this fun – the Midnight Buffets, the shuffleboard games, the anonymous Towel Boys, the upscale cruise companions – Wallace (inevitably, he suggests) starts to lose it a little bit. Five-star meal after five-star meal, lobster after lobster, make him constantly hungry. Room service taking longer than a few minutes to arrive makes him cranky. Likewise the smudge on the elevator window. Likewise the lack of volume control in hallway speakers. Little indignities are, suddenly, everywhere.

Finally, we get a plot. And it is an anti-arc, a movement toward regression and moral morass. Wallace becomes greedy. He becomes needy. He talks about his tummy. (“The fact that adult Americans tend to associate the word “pamper” with a certain other consumer product,” Wallace points out, “is not an accident.”)

In most stories, plot points are defined by ruptures in normalcy, by frustrations of expectation. In “Shipping Out,” the key moments of dramatic transition play out in fusion, in the blending of expectation and reality. Wallace, once so defiantly detached from the Nadir ’s insistent indulgence, succumbs to it. The divisions he’s so carefully constructed through his own objectivity – the human over here, the hedonistic over there – collapse into each other. Need, moralized, feeds on itself, daring him – requiring him – to take one more trip to the Five Star Caravelle Restaurant, to take one more turn at the craps table. The Luxury Cruise converts WANT (Wallace renders it, appropriately, in caps) into not just an impulse, but something worse: an imperative.

But if enjoyment is an ethic, and you’re not having any fun…what then? What happens in a world whose only purpose is desire? A few weeks prior to his own sail, Wallace mentions, a sixteen-year-old boy had done “a half gainer off the upper deck of a Megaship,” killing himself. The incident was ruled a suicide. This is, of course, its own moment of tragic foreshadowing. But it’s also remarkable how perfectly logical the boy’s jump seems in the context of the world Wallace has created – a world in which “the very sun itself seemed preset for our comfort”; in which the Caribbean’s “almost retouched-looking prettiness” looks not beautiful, but “expensive”; in which even the purest of sights carries the weight of synthetic appropriation. A world in which the only choice that seems, finally, fully yours – the only choice that seems fully real – is a leap.

******* [1] It’s worth noting here, via shameless-rip-off-of-Wallace’s-trademark-footnote, that Wallace “underwent” (his word) his maritime holiday for the sole purpose of writing about said maritime holiday. He approaches his time aboard the Zenith/Nadir not as a sunscreen-swathed fun-seeker, eager to shed his conscience along with his cares and most of his clothes, but rather as a reluctant, or at least recalcitrant, observer. One whose shipboard baggage includes, instead of the 1995 cruiser’s typical Bermuda-short/flip-flop/fanny-pack trifecta, a journalist’s penchant for skepticism and a novelist’s bias toward Bigness. There is, as such, an element of fatalism animating Wallace’s experience of his Seven-Night Luxury Cruise. An enjoyable cruise would have made for a boring essay. He is, in his way, a colonist.

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab , where she writes about the future of news.

For more from this collaboration with  Longreads and  Alexis Madrigal , see  the previous posts in the series . And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

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The intersection of “breaking bad,” marty robbins and “el paso”, “telling true stories: is it worth it” by tom junod, interview with ed kashi: taking it beyond the media.

Jeffrey Meyers

The dreadful cruise of david foster wallace.

……. Philip Roth, blurbing on the dust wrapper of Saul Bellow’s collected nonfiction, declared, ‘Rare are the novelists who write nonfiction comparable in strength to their fiction.’ In fact, the opposite is true.  David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) exemplifies the general rule that applies to most postwar American novelists, whose realistic essays are more powerful and persuasive than their imaginative works. The incisive nonfiction of Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates is far better than their novels. Wallace’s 1,079-page magnum opus Infinite Jest (1996) is unreadable; his essays combine Bellow’s intelligence with Nabokov’s wit. His brilliant essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (in a book with that title, 1995), is one of the very best in American literature. It contains all the qualities of the genius who was also an accomplished athlete, mathematician and philosopher. ……. Wallace’s comic and caustic 100-page essay eviscerates his seven-night Caribbean Celebrity Cruise on the megaship ‘Zenith’ (which he irresistibly calls ‘Nadir’) from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Cozumel, Mexico and back. The ship has Greek owners and officers and is stuffed to capacity with 1,374 passive passengers. Wallace assumes an ignorant and naïve persona who’s never been on a ship or out of America.  Suspected of being an over-inquisitive journalist, he’s not allowed to see the bridge, galley and staff quarters or interview any of the crew. Though he’s obliged to observe the passengers and describe the cruise, he pretends to be agoraphobic to avoid his shipmates and their banal activities. Paradoxically, he spends a lot of hermetic time in his single cabin and does not go ashore for the organized excursions. ……. Wallace calls his writing a ‘hypnotic sensuous collage.’ He achieves dazzling effects with deliberately offensive exaggerations as well as abbreviations and pedantic footnotes, elevated and debased diction, current slang and esoteric words to keep us alert: erythema, popliteal, sapropel, piacular and fianchetto. He consistently and amusingly undermines the luxurious ambience by emphasizing physical deformities and making repulsive comparisons. The ship has a snout, the hostess wears an orthopaedic shoe, the waiters seem to have broken and withered arms, the crowd resembles exudations of ectoplasm. The Florida oil derricks bob fellatially, claustrophobia is uterine, the ship’s horn flatulent, the clothing menstrual pink, the elevators anal retentive, the shower cataract loosens his sphincter, and he worries about an ever-threatening outbreak of salmonella and E. coli . His startling diction turns the ship into a floating medical facility with blatant revelations of bodily functions that usually remain hidden. ……. The super-charged toilet merits special consideration. The swirling sea reminds Wallace of his flushing WC. The malevolent vacuum-exhaust frightens him.  The ‘flush produces a brief but traumatizing sound . . . as of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale. . . . Your waste seems less removed than hurled from you.’ In this ‘existential-level sewage treatment’ his innards could easily be sucked right out of him. The toilet theme concludes with a long, laborious joke by the egomaniacal Cruise Director. He recounts how his naked wife was trapped in the excremental void with ‘her own personal pudendum clearly visible above the rim of the occlusive seat that holds her fast.’ ……. Wallace makes a whiplash attack on the lying, paid-to-write, prostituted advertising brochure by the American author Frank Conroy.  With ecstatic approval Conroy asserts, ‘For all of us, our fantasies and expectations were to be exceeded, to say the least. . . . It is hard to imagine a more professional, polished operation, and I doubt that many in the world can equal it.’ In contrast to Conroy’s “sinister and despair-producing” imaginings, Wallace tells us what the cruise was really like. He condemns the vulgarity and excess of this unreal world, the oppressive aspects of insincere service and overwhelming luxury. ……. He reverses the traditional travel-as-torment trope by writing about a supposedly fun cruise instead of the leeches and leopards of the Amazon jungle. He doesn’t fit in on the ship (or anywhere else, even with himself); and there seems to be something radically wrong with a man who, unlike all others, refuses to enjoy the cruise.  What pleases the average dolt—the bingo, the disco, the casino and the gift shop with special bargains—is torture for him.  The abysmally untalented ‘entertainers,’ who can’t get a gig on land and have reached the ‘Nadir’ of their profession on the ship, are embarrassing.  It’s quite impossible to politely sneak away from their small and ever-shrinking audience. ……. Eavesdropping at the Guest Relations Desk, he hears grown-ups ask ‘whether snorkelling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeet-shooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleep on board and what time the Midnight Buffet is.’ He is trapped with these foolish people who sit with him at the same table for every meal—one of the worst aspects of the cruise. If he ever managed to escape terminal boredom, the only person willing to exchange places would probably come from a table even worse than his. To avoid his tablemates, he eats an early breakfast while the others sleep in (if there are no unstoppable announcements in the cabin). Pretending to be hard at work, he takes many of his meals alone in his ‘own personal’ space. ……. The keyword in the ship’s marketing brochures is the nearly insanity-producing  ‘pamper,’ as in ‘pamper yourself. . . . let us pamper you. . . . as you’ve never been pampered before.’ The ad-men seem absurdly unaware of the Pampers product (there are actually Pampers Cruisers) for incontinence, which affects an alarming percentage of elderly passengers. In contrast to the ‘Ecstasy’ cruises, which feature conspicuous carnal consumption for singles in their 20s, Wallace is pleased to report there is no concupiscent behaviour aboard the ‘Nadir’. ……. Wallace gets a lot of comic mileage by seeing everything from his own perverse perspective and transposing all the supposedly pleasant experiences into soul-shattering negatives.  ‘Duty Free’ not only means cheap liquor but also mindless freedom from all responsibility. He degrades the ship’s tricky manoeuvring to the dock to ‘parallel parking a semi into a spot the same size as the semi with a blindfold on and four tabs of LSD.’ The waiter’s towering pepper mill threatens ‘to put pepper on pretty much anything you don’t lean forward and cover with your upper body.’ Snorkelling passengers, whom he observes from the upper deck doing the Dead Man’s Float, look ‘like the massed and floating victims of some hideous mishap—a macabre and riveting sight.’  His most outrageous comparison (which made me laugh out loud) occurs when passengers boarding the ship are assured by a megaphone not to worry about the luggage that will follow them later on.  Wallace finds this ‘chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List .’ ……. Passengers, wobbling uneasily between doing absolutely nothing and doing it all, are placed in protective custody and confined in a cross between a high-class prison and a convalescent home with a cosmetic mortician. Wallace is especially bugged by the staff’s micromanaged, undeserved attention and their ‘steely determination to indulge the passenger in ways that go far beyond any halfway-sane passenger’s own expectations.’ The Towel Guys are always on hair-trigger alert. When Wallace gets up for a moment to put zinc oxide on his nose and gaze at the sea, the Guys race in behind his back to steal his towel and change the angle of his chair, forcing him to reequip and readjust all over again when he returns to sit down. ……. His room cleaner, the diaphanous, elusive and manically obsessed Petra, seems to be spying on him from some secret place in the narrow corridor. In Chaplinesque scenes, whenever he leaves his cabin for more than half an hour—he tests this by departing for exactly 29 and 31 minutes—she rushes in to give his room a completely unnecessary re-cleaning, including a newly minted mint chocolate on his fluffed-up pillow. Wallace finds something creepy and ‘deeply mind-fucking about this Type-A personality service and pampering.’ ……. Where others see beauty under the warm zephyrs and azure skies, Wallace sees only decay, corrosion, disintegration and death on the primordial and surrealistic ship of fools. As the mercifully short cruise progresses, his mood becomes increasingly dark and he’s overcome by a tsunami of woe. He feels shame and guilt, a deep, accretive uneasiness and irritation about the unwanted attention and unwarranted comfort. He descends from tolerable dissatisfaction and grievances to uneasiness and discomfort, is unbearably sad and ‘as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty,’ and finally sinks to absolute despair. The ship becomes sinister, and even the innocuous game of shuffleboard fills him with Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread: ‘everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death.’  It seems, in an eerie foreboding, that Wallace is cascading toward the depression, paranoia and breakdown that eventually led to his suicide: ‘a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that also presents as a fear of death.’ ……. Two serio-comic scenes symbolize the unreality of the cruise experience. While solipsistically playing chess with himself in lieu of another partner (not as boring as it sounds), Wallace is approached by a spooky and preternaturally precocious nine-year-old child.  She tugs at his sleeve, calls him ‘mister’ and asks him to play. He politely condescends, and after losing his rook the serious carnage starts.  In another reversal of expectations, he suffers a humiliating defeat in 23 moves. The girl walks off without even suggesting a return match. ……. An excruciating professional hypnotist, who recalls Wallace’s ‘hypnotic sensuous collage,’ symbolizes the deceptive nature of the cruise.  He exploits the foolish victims who surrender control and regress to infantile dependence.  The hypnotist compels the various humiliated victims to believe that ‘a loud male Hispanic voice is issuing from the left cup of her brassiere,’ that ‘a horrific odor is coming off the man in a chair next to her,’ that ‘the seat of his chair periodically heats to 100 degrees C.,’ that ‘they are not just nude but woefully ill-endowed, and are made to shout “Mommy, I want a wee-wee!”‘ ……. The passengers are treated with callous indifference unless they’re actually on the ship. They must wait for hours to board and wait even more hours for their plane when they are prematurely evicted. It also takes a lot of time for the funereal procession of the 1,374-people to leave the ship and get into the long line of busses, which severely limits the already limited time spent on land. It’s not clear why the passengers accept and even love the conditions that Wallace finds so dreadful. They seem to take it stoically on the chin as part of the experience and must suffer a kind of premature penance that makes them worthy of the hedonistic voyage. These people like to be pampered with the sybaritic comfort and slavish service, and don’t see how they are being manipulated and what is really happening to them.

Jeffrey Meyers has lectured on cruises to Quebec, the Amazon, Burma and twice to Southeast Asia.  Even though he went for free, he could not bear the delays, the crowds, the passengers, the activities and the entertainment.  Wallace’s experience matched his own.

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Diving Into the “Uncanny Despair” of the Cruise Ship Narrative

Lara williams on david foster wallace, wabi-sabi, and the luxurious veneer of decay.

I know the opening paragraphs of David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” so well I could probably recite them by heart.

I have learned that there are actually intensities of blue beyond very, very bright blue. I have eaten more and classier food than I’ve ever eaten, and eaten this food during a week when I’ve also learned the difference between “rolling” in heavy seas and “pitching” in heavy seas. I have heard a professional comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.”

It has the rhythm of indulgence. The childlike breathlessness of recounting a very exciting anecdote. I! I! I! Here I am! A person full of stuff! It is the title essay of his 1997 collection , originally commissioned by Harper’s magazine (called “Shipping Out”), exploring his one-week experience aboard a cruise ship—a boat named The Zenith. It was this essay, and the Jon Ronson story Lost at Sea , that inspired me to write a novel set on a cruise ship.

Like in his essay “ Consider the Lobster ,” a similarly complicated travelogue that is about so much more than travel, Wallace finds the despair in the pageantry:

Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay.

An early draft of my novel, The Odyssey , imagined a near future in which beach holidays were rendered impossible due to coastal erosion. Cruises become the de-facto luxury vacation, the place to go to relax and indulge. However, the more time I spent with the novel, the more I realized that like Wallace, I was interested in the cruise ship as this uncanny site of despair. I’ve always been interested in place in my writing, and this is what attracted me to writing about a cruise ship: it has this overcompensatory hyperarticulation of place yet is essentially placeless. “There’s something about a mass market luxury cruise that’s unbearably sad,” Wallace writes.

The Odyssey is set on a gargantuan cruiseliner called The WA, helmed by the monomaniacal captain of the ship, Keith. He is obsessed with the Japanese aesthetic tradition of Wabi-sabi: a concept that celebrates the transient, that accepts decay. “Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness,” writes artist and aesthetics expert Leonard Koren in his book Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers .

Some of the themes I was interested in exploring in the book were cultures of work and the search for meaning. When I came across the concept of Wabi-sabi at an art exhibition, I knew it would work for the cruise ship setting: speaking to the tenuousness of being on a huge heavy mass floating out at sea, the precarity of dayglo abundance. Decay is the only place left to go. On The WA, passengers routinely drop dead: the implication being that they find it all a bit much.

When I was around 12, when my parents were still together (and could afford it!), they took my sister and me on a cruise of the Mediterranean. I don’t remember a lot about it other than spending much of my time in the cabin, too spoiled, self-conscious, and hormonal to enjoy any of the manifest activities on offer. But one thing I do remember: it wasn’t exactly relaxing. Wallace writes of the marketing brochure for the cruise exclaiming RELAXATION BECOMES SECOND NATURE . “Not hard work but hard play,” he goes on to say.

A theme I am consistently interested in writing about is a kind of death drive compulsion to engage in experiences that are in some way annihilating: eating to the point of being sick, obsession and sex. If the customers on The WA are seeking annihilation through pampering, the protagonist of The Odyssey, an employee of The WA, is seeking annihilation through work. The employees facilitating Wallace’s experiences of “constant activities, festivities, gaiety, song; the adrenaline, the stimulation,” exist in its fringes. If Wallace writes the chromatic experience of the guest, Jon Ronson explored the arduous and isolating experience of being a member of the crew—something Wallace only skirts around, mostly in the footnotes.

This is perhaps because the ship’s hotel manager will not allow him to interview any staff on the record, or to see the staff decks or galley. A press liaison officer later tells him the staff are all part of one big family . Wallace comments this is not what he observes, stating, “[they] worked almost Dickensianly hard, too hard to feel truly cheery about it.” He also explores the perplexing ways the guests interact with the staff: asking the Guest Relations Desk whether the staff sleep on board, complaining about minor aesthetic imperfection at the dinner table. The staff exist as ever-smiling, eager to serve (at least in the guests’ eyes) facilitators of the broader cruise artifice, as performative as the fake pier the passengers dock from.

Wallace comments on the fundamentally infantilizing experience of requiring so much cloying, pandering customer service: a “pamper-swaddled” self emerges:

[The] infantile part of me is, by its very nature and essence, insatiable. In fact, its whole raison consists of its insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the insatiable-infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.

I partly intended The Odyssey as a satire of contemporary work cultures, of the broader economy and class structure driving them. A reference I used for The WA is a cruise ship called the Symphony of the Seas , a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, currently the largest there is. It features glow-in-the-dark laser tag, robotic bartenders, two surf simulators. The more time I spent reading about it, the harder it felt to satirize, such is the eye-watering color saturation of its ridiculousness.

I have spent an awful lot of time looking at the Royal Caribbean website, and in my more idle moments, have imagined I am commissioned to write “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” – esque essay. And I would like to say, Harper’s Magazine or whoever: I’m ready.

_________________________

Lara Williams’  The Odyssey  is available now from Zando.

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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David foster wallace on 'a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again'.

David Foster Wallace's essays have their own unique cult following. There’s one, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which is a hilarious diatribe about cruise ships.  It even inspired an episode of the Simpsons, “ A Totally Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again ,” Bart goes on a cruise with his family and loves it — which is of course the polar opposite of David’s experience.  In 1997, Steve Paulson spoke with David Foster Wallace about his essay, which convinced many of us we should never, ever go on a cruise.  

David Foster Wallace

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5 David Foster Wallace Essays You Should Read Before Seeing The End of the Tour

By Lauren Larson

The End of the Tour could have been terrible; Jason Segel plays David Foster Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg plays the douchey journalist charged with profiling him. But The End of the Tour is not terrible. It turns out Jason Segel is great at acting, and Jesse Eisenberg is great at being a douchebag.

So you’re really excited to see Segel put How I Met Your Mother behind him at last, but you’re harboring a dark secret: You’ve never read anything by David Foster Wallace. You lie and say you "found Infinite Jest and The Pale King positively resplendent." You say things like, “I admire Wallace’s fiction, but I much prefer his essays.” It’s alright. Everyone does it. Lying about having read David Foster Wallace is an American tradition. Like making up words to describe wine.

You'll like The End of the Tour whether you're a Wallace disciple or a flailing literary newborn, but a little primer never hurts. Here are five nuggets of Wallace brilliance that you can read before The End of the Tour comes out on July 31. Go forth, young man, and ooze pretension.

Ticket to the Fair

In 1993, a year before Infinite Jest was published, Wallace headed back to his native Illinois on assignment from Harper’s , to write about the Illinois State Fair. Ticket to the Fair is Wallace at his most readable. He’s just wandering around describing the height of Americana, like so:

The horses' faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and show horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed, and more or less odorless: the acrid smell in here is just the horses' pee: All their muscles are beautiful; the hides enhance them. They make farty noises when they sigh, heads hanging over the short doors. They're not for petting, though.

Read it here.

Consider the Lobster

The titular essay of Wallace’s collection Consider the Lobster began as a story for Gourmet . Following the tradition of sending Wallace to a mega-American event (see above) Gourmet sent Wallace to the Maine Lobster Festival. Every sentence of the essay is solid gold, and you will learn more about lobsters and life than you ever thought possible. As with all of Wallace’s writing, one must never skip the footnotes. Case in point, this tiny drama in note 11:

The short version regarding why we were back at the airport after already arriving the previous night involves lost luggage and a miscommunication about where and what the local National Car Rental franchise was—Dick came out personally to the airport and got us, out of no evident motive but kindness. (He also talked nonstop the entire way, with a very distinctive speaking style that can be described only as manically laconic; the truth is that I now know more about this man than I do about some members of my own family.)

9/11: The View From the Midwest

With the totally unnecessary caveat that this 2001 essay in Rolling Stone was “written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock,” Wallace really, really effectively describes how most of the country experienced 9/11, or the Horror. A somber, great read, with little moments like this:

Mrs. T. has coffee on, but another sign of Crisis is that if you want some you have to get it yourself – usually it just sort of appears.

Roger Federer as Religious Experience

In 2008, when Roger Federer as Religious Experience ran in the Times , Federer mania was at its peak and Wallace was on the scene to explain it. Further proof that Wallace could write about literally anything in a nuanced way:

Nadal and Federer now warm each other up for precisely five minutes; the umpire keeps time. There’s a very definite order and etiquette to these pro warm-ups, which is something that television has decided you’re not interested in seeing.

Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise

Shipping Out , originally published in Harper’s in 1996, is the cornerstone of Wallace’s collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again . Many writers have tried and failed to describe the misery of luxury cruises as well as Wallace does. (Though an honorable mention goes to Tina Fey’s honeymoon in Bossypants .) Enjoy this tour of every neurotic man’s personal hell:

For the first two nights, who’s feeling seasick and who’s not and who’s not now but was a little while ago or isn’t feeling it yet but thinks it’s maybe coming on, etc. is a big topic of conversation at Table 64 in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant. Discussing nausea and vomiting while eating intricately prepared gourmet foods doesn’t seem to bother anybody.

Oh, to be blessed with a seat at Table 64. Read more here.

Related: John Jeremiah Sullivan Reviews The Pale King

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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments Paperback – February 2, 1998

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• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Back Bay Books
• Publication date February 2, 1998
• Dimensions 5.95 x 1 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0316925284
• ISBN-13 978-0316925280
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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again, back bay books.

1990 Continues... Excerpted from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Copyright © 1998 by David Foster Wallace. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (February 2, 1998)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316925284
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316925280
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.95 x 1 x 9.25 inches
• #45 in Essays (Books)
• #47 in Humor Essays (Books)
• #55 in Author Biographies

About the author

David foster wallace.

David Foster Wallace wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl With Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and the full-length work Everything and More.  He died in 2008.

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Lauren Oyler tries a fun thing David Foster Wallace never did again

Oyler’s new travelogue for harper’s about a goop-branded cruise directly addresses wallace’s famous essay for the same magazine.

When David Foster Wallace first published “Shipping Out” in Harper’s Magazine in 1996, it changed readers’ ideas about what magazine journalism could say and sound like. Arriving just a month before “Infinite Jest,” the chronicle of his experience on a seven-night cruise helped announce him as a leading literary voice of his generation. The essay launched a microgenre of “cruise lit,” sending journalists on voyages dedicated to everything from cryptocurrency to the Backstreet Boys .

Critic and novelist Lauren Oyler is the latest to embark on this assignment. Her account of a cruise associated with Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s company, has docked on the cover of Harper’s 27 years after Wallace’s essay. I talked with Oyler about “I Really Didn’t Want to Go” over video chat on Tuesday. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Q : The beginning of your story goes into some detail about how your editor first pitched you. You write: “The email sat smiling, evil, in my inbox, certain of its power.” Did you feel trepidation about the assignment, and why?

A: I’m not super interested in wellness. (I have a lot of received knowledge about wellness, which I realized while I was writing the piece. Why do I know so much about exercise? Why do I know so much about astrology?) And one of the big problems starting out with the piece was I felt like Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop were not over, but they’re sort of, as I say, totally integrated, and there’s not necessarily a story there. Also, there is, of course, the looming David Foster Wallace of it — which my editor didn’t mention.

Obviously, I was always going to do it. There was no question about whether I was going to do it.

Q: Going in, what was your sense of Wallace’s work and what he stands for in the culture in 2023?

A: I love him. My editor was trying to get me to make a direct statement that I loved him, and I resisted saying too much directly. I think it’s really clear, if you read my other writing as well, that he’s hugely influential. But he’s one of these writers that if you go back and read the stuff, you think, “Oh, it has flaws, it’s not totally perfect.” And the cruise piece was certainly like that for me. I don’t love the beginning.

Q: What don’t you love about the beginning?

A: Because of his sort of sincerity shtick, or philosophy, a lot of time he’ll be performing sincerity that — it’s quite obvious in retrospect — is inauthentic.

Obviously [the essay] is fantastic. But I tried to see it as useful for me as opposed to something I was going to never live up to. Because most readers are going to know about it, even if they haven’t read it. And it is so comprehensive. Cruises haven’t changed that much in the last, what, almost 30 years? So it was good to be able to gesture toward that and say, DFW covered this — and also to riff on the fact that, yes it’s an amazing assignment, but it’s a girl assignment.

There are all these women’s writing areas that, far from being ghettoized, are where a lot of the money is if you’re a freelance journalist — and where a lot of the audience is, frankly. To be clear, I don’t feel like I was forced to do it. If you’re going to be really staunch — I’m only writing about Don DeLillo and, like, war — then you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. But I had all these joking thoughts beforehand, and then, because of the way the cruise turned out, I was able to just write them directly.

Q : Do you remember what it was like to first read that cruise piece, and what your reaction was at the time? It’s hard for us to reinhabit that — because I think by the time you and I read it, it was anthologized, canonized, just fully digested, maybe even a cliche. But at the time it made such a huge impression on the reading public and on the genre.

A: I’m 32, so I was a freshman in college when David Foster Wallace died. I remember that day — I was at the college newspaper office. I don’t know if I had read any David Foster Wallace at that point; I came to most literary writing kind of late. But I remember being taught [the essay] “A Day at the Fair” when I was 20, and I just immediately thought, “That’s the kind of writing I want to do.”

I read a lot of David Foster Wallace when I was in my early twenties. I found it quite useful to have an idea of David Foster Wallace in my head that I did not double-check, because your projections of your favorite authors then create your own style.

Q: What surprised you most about the whole experience?

A: It was really surprising how little effort Goop put in. It was very clear that the Goop employees were phoning it in. Gwyneth Paltrow was there for like an hour, and you didn’t even know if she was going to come. And the astrologer was so … I worked for a women’s website, we had a professional astrologer, and I was like, “You’re not doing serious astrology! You need to put some effort in here!” It wasn’t surprising, but it was shocking. It was offensive.

Q: One thing that you say in the piece, about getting around Wallace’s influence is, “All I’d have to do was avoid footnotes, which would be too obvious, and getting sensitive about the evils of advertising, a moment that has long passed.” Was that difficult, since you describe the cruise as being mostly people who are in the media and perception business in some way?

A: I talk about branding and marketing, but the kind of thing Goop is doing, that basically any successful company, empire, is doing, is much more insidious — they’re selling this philosophy that is invading your whole life. We’re so overwhelmed by messaging all the time now that in a piece like this it would just be totally pointless to pick random parts of marketing, the brochure — [Wallace is] always talking about the brochures — to analyze.

The thing that was interesting to me is the way they all — all the practitioners and the Goop people — would speak to us. The way that they spoke to me in our email interviews was incredibly patronizing, incredibly slick, using this therapy language, just gross, falsely spiritual — and also so dumb. But lots of people buy it, and that was what was shocking, when people start crying about what is to me such obvious messaging , which is much creepier.

Q: Another one of your reference points in this piece, though it comes out less explicitly than Wallace, is something you call “the sexist genre of wellness writing.” You reference this desire, maybe fleeting, to conquer it. What’s been your experience with that genre and its cliches, either as a writer or as a reader?

A: I worked at Vice, at Broadly, the women’s website, at the tail end of what they call the personal essay boom or the first-person industrial complex. That was happening as the wellness trend was growing. And so this genre grew out of both of those things, a kind of lady gonzo journalism: “I’m going to go do some weird wellness thing and write about it.” When I was researching this piece, what I found shocking was that everybody would perform a bit of skepticism about it, but then they would do it and sort of enjoy it. And sometimes they would cry or share really personal things about their lives.

And I think if you’re a woman writer you are expected to be personal, but in a very specific way, which is that you need to be “vulnerable.” You need to be emotional. People like it if you’re messy. For all of the ways that feminists and popular feminists have criticized the pressures of confessional writing and exploitative first-person essays, there’s still that expectation. And I find it contemptible. So I wanted to critique the genre by doing it but subverting it. My goal was to always seem in control. I was interested in seeing if I could both do a resentful performance of the sexist wellness writing, and reveal how ridiculous it is.

Q: You have a line in there about wanting to “unite irony and sincerity once and for all,” which helped underline for me how that’s such a central negotiation in Wallace’s work, but also made me curious about how you think about your fiction and nonfiction. How would you describe your relationship to sincerity? And irony?

A: Well, I think it’s a completely false opposition, and it irritates me. And it irritates me that this essay of Wallace’s, “E Unibus Pluram,” which is about TV and fiction writers, has this paragraph in it that has been this rallying cry for American fiction ever since — this idea that irony is poisoning everyone. And I’m like, “I never read anything that’s ironic at all! I’m not being represented by American fiction writers at all!” I feel like there’s really a huge problem with sentimentality. There’s really a resistance to not even irony, but humor, that I find really dispiriting.

I really love, I’m most comfortable writing in, this ironic tone. And that doesn’t mean, always, sarcasm. Irony allows you to express multiple things at once, and that are in tension at the same time, in a way that I think is really entertaining. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t have serious ideas or be emotional — or that your irony is a defense mechanism.

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30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

in e-books , Literature | February 22nd, 2012 10 Comments

Image by Steve Rhodes, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We start­ed the week expect­ing to pub­lish one David Fos­ter Wal­lace post . Then, because of the 50th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion, it turned into two . And now three. We spent some time track­ing down free DFW sto­ries and essays avail­able on the web, and they’re all now list­ed in our col­lec­tion,  800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices . But we did­n’t want them to escape your atten­tion. So here they are — 23 pieces pub­lished by David Fos­ter Wal­lace between 1989 and 2011, most­ly in major U.S. pub­li­ca­tions like The New York­er , Harper’s , The Atlantic , and The Paris Review . Enjoy, and don’t miss our oth­er col­lec­tions of free writ­ings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman .

• “9/11: The View From the Mid­west” (Rolling Stone, Octo­ber 25, 2001)
• “All That” (New York­er, Decem­ber 14, 2009)
• “An Inter­val” (New York­er, Jan­u­ary 30, 1995)
• “Asset” (New York­er, Jan­u­ary 30, 1995)
• “Back­bone” An Excerpt from The Pale King (New York­er, March 7, 2011)
• “Big Red Son” from Con­sid­er the Lob­ster & Oth­er Essays
• “Brief Inter­views with Hideous Men” (The Paris Review, Fall 1997)
• “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster” (Gourmet, August 2004)
• “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Pre­miere, 1996)
• “Every­thing is Green” (Harpers, Sep­tem­ber 1989)
• “E Unibus Plu­ram: Tele­vi­sion and U.S. Fic­tion” (The Review of Con­tem­po­rary Fic­tion, June 22, 1993)
• “Fed­er­er as Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence” (New York Times, August 20, 2006)
• “Good Peo­ple” (New York­er, Feb­ru­ary 5, 2007)
• “Host” (The Atlantic, April 2005)
• “Incar­na­tions of Burned Chil­dren” (Esquire, April 21, 2009)
• “Laugh­ing with Kaf­ka” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1998)
• “Lit­tle Expres­sion­less Ani­mals” (The Paris Review, Spring 1988)
• “On Life and Work” (Keny­on Col­lege Com­mence­ment address, 2005)
• “Order and Flux in Northamp­ton”   (Con­junc­tions, 1991)
• “Rab­bit Res­ur­rect­ed” (Harper’s, August 1992)
• “ Sev­er­al Birds” (New York­er, June 17, 1994)
• “Ship­ping Out: On the (near­ly lethal) com­forts of a lux­u­ry cruise” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1996)
• “Ten­nis, trigonom­e­try, tor­na­does A Mid­west­ern boy­hood”   (Harper’s, Decem­ber 1991)
• “Tense Present: Democ­ra­cy, Eng­lish, and the wars over usage” (Harper’s, April 2001)
• “The Awak­en­ing of My Inter­est in Annu­lar Sys­tems” (Harper’s, Sep­tem­ber 1993)
• “The Com­pli­ance Branch” (Harper’s, Feb­ru­ary 2008)
• “The Depressed Per­son” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1998)
• “The String The­o­ry” (Esquire, July 1996)
• “The Weasel, Twelve Mon­keys And The Shrub” (Rolling Stone, April 2000)
• “Tick­et to the Fair” (Harper’s, July 1994)
• “Wig­gle Room” (New York­er, March 9, 2009)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Philip K. Dick: Down­load 13 Great Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Sto­ries

Read 17 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

by OC | Permalink | Comments (10) |

Related posts:

Comments (10), 10 comments so far.

I got anoth­er free DFW essay for you: Big Red Son http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/books_9780316156110_ChapterExcerpt(1) .htm

Thanks very much. I added it to the list.

Appre­ci­ate it, Dan

Thanks very much for this infor­ma­tion regard­ing essays and sto­ries

Hi Dan. It’s a bit late for this, but I just remem­bered anoth­er link you might want to add. You can hear DFW giv­ing the full unabridged Keny­on com­mence­ment speech (which you link to in your list) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8 (it’s in 2 parts). Or down­load the full audio from http://www.mediafire.com/?file41t3kfml6q6 Thanks for all your hard work!

This is excel­lent, thanks so much. Will these links be up per­ma­nent­ly? I want to avoid the trou­ble of down­load­ing the stuff I don’t have time to get to now.

Just thought I’d men­tion that ‘Lit­tle Expres­sion­less Ani­mals” cuts off about 2/3rds of the way through, requir­ing you to pur­chase the issue ($40) for the chance to read the rest.

Kind of a bum­mer.

Don’t for­get “Tra­cy Austin Serves Up a Bub­bly Life Sto­ry” (review of Tra­cy Austin’s Beyond Cen­ter Court: My Sto­ry): http://www.mendeley.com/research/tracy-austin-serves-up-bubbly-life-story-review-tracy-austins-beyond-center-court-story

Also, just to let you know, the link to “Big Red Son” is bro­ken.

There’s also a ton of oth­er here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace_bibliography

You can add “Good Old Neon” to your list if you like:

http://kalamazoo.coop/sites/default/files/Good%20Old%20Neon.pdf

There’s a bunch of arti­cles with bro­ken links, notably those from Harper’s Mag­a­zine. Has any­body saved them and would be so kind to share them?

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Pamela Paul

Completely at Sea

By Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

I am not excited to go on a cruise. I am not a “cruise person.” I don’t boat. I’ve read my Geoff Dyer and my David Foster Wallace . I’ve watched “The Perfect Storm” a weird number of times. And as much as I love Conrad and Melville, it is not lost on me that stories that take place at sea often end in disaster. Remember, the last word in Wallace’s seminal essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is “fear.”

There it is: I’m scared of my cruise.

For David Foster Wallace, the fear was doing Absolutely Nothing on a cruise, whereas my fear is doing absolutely anything on a cruise. His concerns were sociological and existential in nature: Who are these American cruise-goers, and who am I, and why are we here? My fear is on more of a baby level: What if I want to get off?

This was to be a literary cruise, and a month before it was to depart, I ran into a future shipmate at a party. She was a fellow author, likewise booked to participate in a series of onboard lectures and panels.

“I’m scared of the cruise,” I confessed.

“Ah, yes, because of storms?” she responded with a nod. “The seas can apparently be quite rough this time of year.”

I hadn’t thought to fear the rough seas. I’d been too busy worrying about the calm seas — the endless expanse of nothing but water — to consider that there might be waves in December in the North Atlantic. Lurching away from the conversation, I tapped “storms,” “transatlantic crossings” and “winter” into my phone and then quickly X’ed out the window out of self-preservation.

A couple of weeks later, not having learned that this wasn’t happy party conversation, I brought up the cruise again. Once more, I confessed my fear.

“Oh, because of seasickness?” a partygoer responded. I hadn’t thought to fear the seasickness. I also hadn’t thought about coronavirus or norovirus outbreaks or other threats grounded in the world of probability or rationality. This led to a discussion of Dramamine and psi bands, anti-anxiety medication and the intriguing off-label use of antihistamines to treat panic attacks.

It could turn out I have a phobia. Thalassophobia is a fear of large bodies of water, and naviphobia is a fear of boats and cruise ships. But my likeliest phobia on board boiled down to one of two possibilities. Above deck: agoraphobia, the fear of wide-open spaces and of situations where escape may be difficult. Or below deck: claustrophobia, the fear of small, enclosed spaces.

These aren’t especially popular fears. According to YouGov , open spaces, confinement and the ocean are not among Americans’ top three fears, which are, in descending order, snakes, heights and spiders. More people are scared of public speaking than are afraid of large bodies of water. (The survey didn’t ask about cruises.)

Fears come in various forms, according to Mohammed Milad, a professor of psychiatry at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine. There is innate fear, which we and other animals are born with to ensure that we do our job here and procreate. It’s what causes a rat to freeze upon seeing a cat in a lab, even if it has never seen one before. Then there are acquired fears, which we often learn from an early age. These kinds of fears are irrational and often associative. We don’t know why we fear something, but we often come up with a story. Say, a doctor smiles beatifically before stabbing your finger with a needle; you learn to jump out of a window when faced with a medical professional or sharp object. Milad says, “We create narratives to help explain and justify negative emotions like fear.”

The child’s view of fears is that as you get older, you naturally outgrow them, as you might with an allergy. It’s not until adulthood that you realize that even as you shed some fears — of the dark and monsters under the bed — you acquire an entire new repertoire. For many, this comes with parenthood. You didn’t previously know you were afraid of dropping a newborn on its soft spot or of cars flattening strollers on West 86th Street, but here you are. As we get older and more vulnerable, even ancient fears can bear new meaning.

And for some people (hey), new fears develop of their own accord, when you’re least expecting them. Back in my single days, when bad karma tended to pair me with boyfriends whose dream it was to sail the world, making a mutual future seem wobbly, I wound up with one boyfriend who not only liked to cross water but also liked to go underneath it. To trick him into thinking me intrepid, I got my scuba-diving certification and dove in.

But once I was submerged beneath 70 feet of ocean, despite the fish and the canyons and the generalized magic of the experience, a thread would unspool in my mind along the lines of “Imagine if I got a little bit of seawater under my contact lens right now.” I’d visualize myself swimming off in a fog of nitrogen narcosis to join the sharks, never to be seen again. I’d imagine a mental red alert propelling me to the surface, though rising too quickly can result in the bends, which I pictured as me, a drunk Gumby, bobbing and weaving along a boardwalk, never to recover full mental capacity.

I didn’t know I was afraid of being trapped underwater until I was, in fact, underwater. What if, on my cruise, “I want to get out of the water” becomes “I want to get off the water”? But unlike David Foster Wallace, I haven’t always associated the ocean “with dread and death.” I like the ocean fine, from the shore. The truth is, I don’t know whether I will be afraid of the open sea. I’ve never been there.

So I’m not actually afraid of my cruise. I’m afraid I will be afraid of the cruise.

This means it’s not precisely a fear, which is an acute and specific response to a stimulus (there’s a bear!), but rather a form of anxiety, Milad tells me. This should be comforting. I don’t have a fear, just a pre-emptive fear of a fear — what is, at its fanciest, an anxiety and, at its dullest, plain old worry. It is true that mild hypochondria; wild imagination; the conviction that the moment I let down my guard, the worst will happen; and a fine-tuned sense that the ridiculous is always lurking round the corner are all essential functions of my operating system.

For all I know, I will get out on the open ocean and find myself awash in peace and equilibrium. Maybe I will find my sea legs. Maybe I will stare at the vast expanse of water and achieve a meditative state heretofore unavailable to me on land. Maybe I will actually love going on a cruise. And that scares me.

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Pamela Paul became an Opinion columnist for The Times in 2022. She was the editor of The New York Times Book Review for nine years and is the author of eight books, including “100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet.”