(Note: I originally wrote this in August 2022, hoping to publish elsewhere. No one did so here we go.)
“Every year a hundred people or so fell over the side of cruise ships,” the narrator Hugo reminds us throughout Garth Miró’s debut novel The Vacation. It’s worth keeping this fact in mind, before we explore the choppy waters of dissecting vacation and wellness and bliss. Before the mystery of missing persons. Before we discover why everything smells like chicory.
In the beginning, Hugo and his pregnant wife CC stand in line to enter a cruise ship. Ostensibly they’re married, although CC seems like she would have attended Fyre Festival and Hugo would have mocked her on social media. Although Hugo might be solipsistic enough that a festival like that wouldn’t have even been on his radar. As they board the ship, he reveals that he is thirteen days off heroin. Hugo is doing his best Mark Renton to appease his wife. But instead of “Choose a life, choose a job, choose a career,” it’s choose “All for Fun / Fun for all” (as the Carnival Cruise epigram reminds us).
The couple is surrounded by “subnormals” – Hugo’s kind of people. “Softheads cut in two by overpriced blue light and glare light and UV and remorse and all bad vibe-blocking sunglasses. Flabby bodies cased in gas station sandals and parrot-colored Bermudas.” The ship plays an endless Serge Gainsbourg soundtrack. Hugo has deliberately chosen a particularly terrible cruise to upset his partner because he knows she’s cheating on him with his boss. In fact, Hugo only even found this ship in a pamphlet for this cruise in a Cracker Barrel bathroom where he and his own mistress fooled around after nose-diving into a bag of heroin.
Hugo’s misanthropic outlook is complete and total. “I didn’t trust people that claimed to be free of hate,” he says at one point. “It was the lovers, the utopians who created the hells.” He pictures fellow passengers going down a waterslide that is actually a woodchipper. Sneering at the busty divorcee oiling herself near old guys playing shuffleboard. But there is solace in the bar. Solace in getting drunk and not finding your way to your room. It’s not heroin but it will do. A fellow drunk in the elevator curses Bob Bentham, allegedly from the same family as panopticon-architect Jeremy Bentham. “The ship was built this labyrinthian way on purpose, designed like this for something.” Hugo’s drunk. He doesn’t care. He just agrees “with everything just to get him and his dogshit breath and blue wine teeth to back away.” He just wants to get to his cabin. To pass out in the glow of the ship’s informercials where the Cruise Director shares his theories on paranoia. “Yes, it is good to be paranoid,” he says. “It’s the only way we weed out the ones who seek to disturb our placid waters.”
Hungover and irritable, Hugo wanders through the ship, trying (and failing) to avoid self-reflection. He feels rotten: “Rotten was normal.” He feels pain: “Pain is your buddy. Your Keith Richards. Your Sancho. Like Igor with his little hunchback, bring you the tubes and toenail clippers.” Thinking about work, about his relationship with CC. She, the richoid; he, of poor mongrel blood. While lost in thought, he finds CC and her brother Vincent. “Somewhat like me, Vincent’s main goal was to ruin his life.” Yet Vincent turns out to be a drinking buddy with a proposition – get off the boat, explore an island, and hunt lizards that can be used to make male enhancement drugs.
And that’s when, perhaps we can say, the waves get choppy.
It starts with rails of cocaine.
Vincent and Hugo with two others, descend into the jungle listening to Max Roach. Jazz reminds Hugo of being kidnapped by a woman when he was a teenager.
“All our thinking and philosophizing had ever done was prolong our suffering,” Hugo thinks. “No one just simply ate each other anymore. Because that was bad and wrong to do….We didn’t eat and the whole earth was jam-packed with cretins in not-Jeep junkers, zipping this way and that. Trying to stay alive. Doing any and every shameful act to keep alive.”
They are looking for lizards. In drug cartel territory. But what they find are cops. The cops start shooting. They run back to the Jeep. One of them gets his head obliterated by the peeling away tire. Eventually, out of the jungle, they run into the Cruise Director, Ernest Juglum. Their saving grace. It seems. Back on the ship, he takes them to a completely leather room with masseuses wearing gimp suits. The Cruise Director “smiled like he could hear my thoughts,” Hugo notes. He also notes the chicory and aspirin smell – coming from a mysterious vent as the director talks. The nefarious Juglum mentions Hugo’s relationship with CC. Her pregnancy and the Director’s impotence. He wants Hugo to give up his wife and unborn child. The Director believes if that child is born on this ship, it could guide them to “a perfect place, The Placenta of Reality, the Infinite Black Vacation. Above Permanent. Absolute.”
The director’s reason for all of this: “What I believe, is simply that you continue down the path you are on. When you die, you do not switch tracks. I can say it like this: if when you die, in that final moment you are in total relaxation, have perfect peace, you will continue down that road forever into the infinity of death. But, if you perish in fear, or pain, or confusion, your road will only be more and more of that. This is why we strive for relaxation. Why I am desparate for it. We all die. When I do, I want my vacation to drip with sweetness.”
Hugo joins in his idea with the initial thought of taking down Ernest. His own ambition is mutiny; it’s almost contradictory to what we’ve gleaned of him previously (remember he says he was born lazy). Hugo becomes a good little servant to the director, cleaning up puke, wiping pus off of chaise lounges, doing dishes, making sandwiches, sweeping up pubes.
“I’d been built for cults, I was born in the halls of Corporate America.”
He eventually finds a great hall, byzantine architecture, massive frescos. The architecture of the ship seems impossible (remember Bentham). Guests go missing. Those who are still around are in secret rooms, hallways of room of everyone in blissed out relaxation; there are harems of women all for the Cruise Director.
This ship, really seems quite impossible. Maybe it is? Hugo is a character withdrawing from heroin, he has a drinking problem, he has been snorting cocaine. And yet, this really all still seems to be happening. It’s a reality outside of what most of us are able to perceive. It’s the reality of Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind or William Burroughs Nova Express or a Cronenberg film. It’s a world of smells, of chicory and paranoia yes, but of a “whole reeking deck,” “the smell of sour human tang,” “decaying odors.” It is a ship of peace and of death.
Hugo’s plan of mutiny finally starts to go into action. But things spiral out of control in a chaotic, violent, and explosive ending. In the end, ultimate relaxation is impossible, just as it is in everyday life. Paranoia in the culture of America’s surveillance state is the norm. Scroll through social media at work and fear termination. Protest at the wrong rally and worry about ending up on a government list. Dare to question anything mainstream and risk public scorn or humiliation. Who wouldn’t want to get away from all that? Relaxation. Peace. A cruise. All synonyms for: a mirage. The violent extremes of the world will always be waiting for you.
The book is fast-paced, absurd, and vulgar. The humor is midnight dark. Miró himself shares a lot of traits with Hugo. In an interview, Miró shared his state of mind while writing this book: “I had a lot of hate. That’s what God gave me to work with, which was a blessing; my capacity to hate things, situations, and people, people most of all, is nothing short of miraculous.” Miró has mentioned many times his use of heroin. And his overall goal might be mutiny. Mutiny of American culture. “Our country has one of the worst, most horrifying mainstream monocultures, but I think that also creates an environment where the outsiders have to be that much more insane, brilliant, beautiful.” Miró’s short novel, ostensibly, is the menacing roar of a writer looking to throw American culture overboard. Watch out for the splash.