San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Enjoying the beach while warning against the beach
Publishing a book about beaches in the season of the “beach read” is a bold and meta move, like when Kramer made a coffee table book about coffee tables on “Seinfeld.”
The conventional wisdom is that readers want something light and unchallenging for their summer vacations, something they don’t mind smudging with Coppertone and leaving behind at the rental house. Sarah Stodola’s “The Last Resort,” its title echoing Cleveland Amory’s classic about high-society playgrounds, is not that kind of book. Indeed it aims, in wellintentioned, widely researched and somewhat scattershot fashion, to make you profoundly uneasy about the very act of visiting the beach.
Why are you even going, anyway? For much of human history, Stodola reminds us, the seaside was considered a deeply uncomfortable and perilous place. In the 18th century, dubious seawater “cures” — like flushing the eyes or repeated dunking — were promoted in the West.
Beaches were long tolerated rather than enjoyed, resorts there a lower-altitude parallel to the kind of sanitarium in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” They also feature in literature and movies: Mann’s “Death in Venice” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” flash immediately before the eyes. “Splash.” “Jaws.”
The beach, rebranded by Hollywood and real estate developers as an adult playground nonetheless still carries a vague sense of danger.
The sharks might be circling. The merciless sun beats down. The big wave could hit. And even before COVID, the tourism trade was vulnerable to outbreaks of disease and violence.
“It’s one of the few industries,” Stodola writes, that requires its consumers “to show up in person to the place of manufacture.” And those consumers are fickle; their idea of “paradise,” denoted by palm trees and paper cocktail umbrellas, all too portable.
The biggest danger, Stodola darkly intones, throwing down plenty of statistics, is humans themselves. They overdevelop, dump plastic and commit great violence to delicate marine ecosystems. The Earth is warming, sea levels are rising, and established shorelines are being reshaped when they’re not disappearing entirely. And yet many travelers persist in pouting only about the immediate forecast.
“There’s a thing about any extreme weather event being dismissible as a freak occurrence,” Stodola writes, “and then there’s our current deluge of extreme weather events that makes it harder to ignore that the center is not holding, to borrow a phrase from Didion, who borrowed it from Yeats.”
There’s a lot of borrowing in “The Last Resort,” and the bibliography may divert you to the more focused histories Stodola consulted, like Mark Braude’s “Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle.” Her glancing forays into race relations brought to mind Russ Rymer’s more substantive “American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory.”
Still, you have to chuckle when a little girl among a group of village children solicits a photograph from Stodola’s partner, Scott, and then one of the children holds up a middle finger just as he’s taking the shot. This critic didn’t feel quite that level of hostility, but the number of places Stodola alights, the number of vegan dishes and drinks she reports ordering, some at swim-up bars, does make one scratch the head about what this book proposes to be, exactly; it tends to seem more last hurrah than last resort. “A nuanced understanding of the beach resort industry where none currently exists,” is what Stodola is attempting, while acknowledging that the carbon offsets she bought for all her flights “is not enough to rationalize the emissions.”
Mea Acapulco! (Where she enjoyed a melting frozen margarita at the El Mirador.)
Anyway, it’s time to retire the term “beach read.” We can do it now. “Read” is better as a verb, and summer is the season when readers should be “digging deep,” building castles in the air as well as the sand.