No self-respecting writer would invite unfavorable comparisons with David Foster Wallace by writing on ocean cruises.1 And no sane tennis writer would invite further comparisons by writing about tennis2 and cruising IN THE SAME PIECE.
However that’s exactly what’s happening here. The Seabourn Venture—a 564-foot, 132-suite ship—was going to Monaco for the Monte Carlo Masters, and I was on it. This is not literary criticism of Wallace and Gary Shteyngart,3 because even I am not that audacious, but it is criticism of them both: Those two knuckleheads spent a lot of money and their precious time on deeply misguided voyages to unhappiness. They knew what they were doing; they chose the kinds of trips and vessels that would bring the worst out in people—including themselves. Wallace was at least somewhat thrifty; in 1997, he took a $3,000,4 seven-night Caribbean cruise on Celebrity’s MV Zenith for Harper’s. Secretly renaming it the MV Nadir—which I would have done too, to be fair—he proceeded to wallow in an existential crisis brought on, in some part, by stubbornly remaining on the 1,800-passenger boat for the entire week.
- Wallace (Foster Wallace?) famously wrote the definitive piece on cruising. I’m not going to tell you how to find it because this is humiliating enough as it is.
- Wallace also wrote incandescently about tennis.
- Shteyngart took up the mantle last year, writing a treatise on the abject misery of cruising with 5,000 of his fellow humans. You should definitely not look that one up either.
- Roughly $6,000 in today’s dollars. Could be worse.