Since moving to Monterey, I have been playing bridge a couple of days a week and the club has some people who love going on cruises and have done so multiple times. Then there are those (like me) who are mystified as to its appeal and would not do so even if the high cost were not a problem.

When I ask the cruisers what the appeal is, they talk of the good food that is constantly available and the variety of entertainment that is offered. But its seems to me that you could eat at good local restaurants and go to good entertainment events where you live at much lower cost and space them out for greater pleasure, rather than cram them all into one week. They also give as an appeal the fact that being on a cruise is like living in a floating hotel that takes you to different locations for sightseeing with you having to unpack only once in your cabin. I can see that constantly packing and unpacking as one goes from hotel to hotel while traveling could become tedious but hardly seems worth being stuck on a boat for a lengthy period where there is the constant risk of seasickness, not to mention epidemics of viruses. Who can forget the horror stories such as the Norovirus and Covid-19 outbreaks on cruise ships from a few years back?

I have been on long ship voyages (three in fact) but that was back in the days when I was a young boy, prior to jet planes, when this was the main mode of transport for long distances from point A to point. B, not for going on a round trip back to the starting point. My trips between Sri Lanka and England were on big ships but they were not luxury liners though they did have things to entertain people so that they did not go bonkers by being constrained for two weeks in a small space. So maybe any desire that I might have had for a long sea voyage has been satiated. Anyway, to each his own, and I figured that if these cruises satisfied the needs of others, that was fine even if I could not fathom their appeal.

But then I came across this essay by David Foster Wallace on luxury cruises that appeared in the January 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Titled Shipping Out, it had two features. It described in acute detail what life on a luxury cruise is like and it also gave me a clue as to what their real appeal might be.

It is a very long essay, around 25,000 words, making it more like a novella. Oddly enough, I stumbled upon it as the answer to a clue in a crossword puzzle. I had heard of the writer David Foster Wallace with his book Infinite Jest appearing in many people’s lists of their favorite books. But I never got around to reading it or any other thing written by him. With that book, I was a little discouraged by its length of over 1,000 pages.

At the time of writing the essay, Wallace was a contributing editor to that magazine and was sent on an assignment to explore what life on a luxury Caribbean cruise is like and the people who are so attracted to it that some of them go on the same cruise year after year, sometimes with the same group of people. Wallace was clearly underwhelmed by his experience as can be seen from the fact that this essay was later reprinted in a collection of essays titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and that he immediately rechristened the vessel from its given name the Zenith to the Nadir.

Wallace writes that what these cruises offer to those who can afford them is the experience of constantly having your every need and want met. Perhaps that is what their main appeal is, that for one week you can experience what it is like to be a very wealthy person with people at your beck and call who seem to exist simply to cater to your every need, and even try to anticipate them. He recounts how the cruise line goes to extreme lengths to ‘pamper’ its customers. (‘Pamper’ is a word that is used a lot in the promotional literature of Celebrity cruise lines.) Here is one passage.

This. grim determination to indulge the passenger in ways that go far beyond any halfway-sane passenger’s own expectations is everywhere on the Nadir. Some wholly random examples: My cabin bathroom has plenty of thick fluffy towels, but when I go up to lie in the sun I don’t have to take any of my cabin’s towels, because the two upper decks’ sun areas have big carts loaded with even thicker and fluffier towels. These carts are stationed at convenient intervals along endless rows of gymnastically adjustable deck chairs that are themselves phenomenally fine deck chairs, sturdy enough for even the portliest sunbather but also narcoleptically comfortable, with heavy-alloy frames over which is stretched some mysterious material that combines canvas’s quick-drying durability with cotton’s absorbency and comfort – certainly a welcome step up from public pools’ deck-chair material of Kmartish plastic that sticks to your skin and produces farty suction-noises whenever you shift your sweaty weight on it. And each of the sun decks is manned by a special squad of full-time Towel Guys, so that when you’re well-done on both sides and ready to quit and you spring easily out of the deck chair you don’t have to pick up your towel and take it with you’ or even bus it into the cart’s Used Towel slot, because a Towel Guy materializes the minute your fanny leaves the chair and removes your towel for you and deposits it in the slot. (Actually, the Towel Guys are such overachievers that even if you get up for just a second to reapply zinc oxide or gaze contemplatively out over the railing at the sea, when you turn back around your towel’s often gone and your deck chair has been refolded to its uniform 45-degree at-rest angle, and you have to readjust your chair all over again and go to the cart to get a fresh fluffy towel, of which there is admittedly not a short supply.)

Down in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant, the waiter will not only bring you a lobster – as well as a second and even a third lobster – with methamphetaminic speed but will also incline over you with gleaming claw-cracker and surgical fork and dismantle it for you, sparing you the green goopy work that’s the only remotely rigorous thing about lobster. And at the Windsurf Cafe, up on Deck 11 by the pools, where there’s always an informal buffet lunch, there’s never that bovine line that makes most cafeterias such a downer, and there are about seventy-three varieties of entree alone, and the sort of coffee you marry somebody for being able to make; and if you have too many things on your tray, a waiter will materialize as you peel away from the buffet and will carry your tray (even though it’s a cafeteria, there are all these waiters standing around with Nehru jackets and white towels draped over left arms watching you, not quite making eye contact but scanning for any little way to be of service, plus plum-jacketed sommeliers walking around to see if you need a non-buffet libation, plus a whole other crew of maitre d’s and supervisors watching the waiters and sommeliers and tall-hatted buffet servers to make sure you don’t do something for yourself that could be done for you).

Mind you, this was back in 1996. I suspect that cruise ships today are much larger and even more luxurious.

In another passage, he describes watching from a top deck as his fellow cruisers disembark for an excursion in the Mexican town of Cozumel.

I cannot convey to you the sheer and surreal scale of everything: the towering ship, the ropes, the anchor, the pier, the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky, Looking down from a great height at your countrymen waddling into poverty-stricken ports in expensive sandals is not one of the funner moments of a 7NC Luxury Cruise, however. There is something inescapably bovine about a herd of American tourists in motion, a certain greedy placidity, I feel guilty by perceived association. I’ve barely been out of the U.S.A. before, and never as part of a high-income herd, and in port – even up here above it all on Deck 12, watching – I’m newly and unpleasantly conscious of being an American, the same way I’m always suddenly conscious of being white every time I’m around a lot of non-white people. I cannot help imagining us as we appear to them, the bored Jamaicans and Mexicans, or especially to the non-Aryan and hard-driven crew of the Nadir. All week I’ve found myself doing everything I can to distance myself in the crew’s eyes from the bovine herd I’m part of: I eschew cameras and sunglasses and pastel Caribbean wear; I make a big deal of carrying my own luggage and my own cafeteria tray and am effusive in my thanks for the slightest service. Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor. But, of course, part of the overall despair of this Luxury Cruise is that whatever I do I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, greedy, ashamed, and despairing.

But here’s the thing: even all this pampering doesn’t remove all the feelings of entitlement and neediness, that pretty soon you are back to whining about petty things.

Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we’re maybe now in a position to appreciate the falsehood at the dark heart of Celebrity’s brochure. For this – the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS – is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that this promise will be kept but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. And of course I want to believe it; I want to believe that maybe this ultimate fantasy vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered, that my infantile part will be sated at last. But 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. And sure enough, after a few days of delight and then adjustment on the Nadir, the Pamper-swaddled part of me that WANTS is now back, and with a vengeance. By Wednesday, I’m acutely conscious of the fact that the A.C. vent in my cabin hisses (loudly), and that although I can turn off the reggae Muzak coming out of the speaker in the cabin I cannot turn off the even louder ceiling-speaker out in the 10-Port hall. Now I notice that when Table 64’s towering busboy uses his crumb-scoop to clear off the tablecloth between courses he never seems to get quite all the crumbs. When Petra makes my bed, not all the hospital corners are at exactly the same angle. Most of the nightly stage entertainment in the Celebrity Show Lounge is so bad it’s embarrassing, and the ice sculptures at theMidnight Buffet often look hurriedly carved, and the vegetable that comes with my entree is continually overcooked, and it’s impossible to get really numbingly cold water out of1009’s bathroom tap.

I’m standing here on Deck 12 looking at the Dreamward [another luxury cruise ship that pulled up at a port alongside the Nadir – MS], which I bet has cold water that’d turn your knuckles blue, and, like Frank Conroy, part of me realizes that I haven’t washed a dish or tapped my foot in line behind somebody with multiple coupons at a supermarket checkout in a week; and yet instead of feeling refreshed and renewed I’m anticipating how totally stressful and demanding and unpleasurable a return to regular landlocked adult life is going to be now that even just the premature removal of a towel by a sepulchral crewman seems like an assault on my basic rights, and the sluggishness of the Aft elevator is an outrage. And as I’m getting ready to go down to lunch I’m mentally drafting a really mordant footnote on my single biggest peeve about the Nadir: they don’t even have Mr. Pibb; they foist Dr. Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic shrug when any fool knows that Dr. Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it’s an absolute goddamned travesty, or – at best- extremely dissatisfying indeed.

The essay is hilarious and once started hard to stop reading, despite its length. It made me want to seek out his other writings, and perhaps even take a crack at Infinite Jest.