‘The Last Resort’ Interrogates the Beach While Enjoying It

THE LAST RESORT
A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach
By Sarah Stodola
Illustrated. 341 pages. Ecco. $27.99.

Publishing a e-book about seashores in the season of the “beach read” is a daring and meta transfer, like when Kramer made a coffee-table book about coffee tables on “Seinfeld.”

The standard knowledge is that readers need one thing gentle and unchallenging for his or her summer season holidays, one thing they don’t thoughts smudging with Coppertone and abandoning at the rental home. Sarah Stodola’s “The Last Resort,” its title echoing Cleveland Amory’s classic about high-society playgrounds, is unquestionably not that type of e-book. Indeed it goals, in well-intentioned, broadly researched and considerably scattershot trend, to make you profoundly uneasy about the very act of visiting the seashore.

Why are you even going, anyway? For a lot of human historical past, Stodola reminds us, the seaside was thought-about a deeply uncomfortable and threatening place. In the 18th century, doubtful seawater “cures” — like flushing the eyes or repeated dunking — had been promoted in the West. But seashores had been lengthy tolerated quite than loved, resorts there a lower-altitude parallel to the type of sanitarium in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” They additionally function in literature and films, in all probability greater than mountains do: Mann’s “Death in Venice” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” flash instantly earlier than the eyes. “Splash.” “Jaws.”

The seashore, rebranded by Hollywood and actual property builders as an grownup playground — it makes a terrific set, in artwork and life — nonetheless nonetheless carries a imprecise sense of impending hazard. The sharks is perhaps circling. The cruel solar beats down. The massive wave might hit. And even earlier than Covid, the tourism commerce was susceptible to outbreaks of illness and violence. “It’s one of the few industries,” Stodola writes, that requires its shoppers “to show up in person to the place of manufacture.” And these shoppers are fickle; their concept of “paradise,” denoted by palm timber and cocktail paper umbrellas, all too moveable.

The greatest hazard, Stodola darkly intones, throwing down loads of statistics, is people themselves. They overdevelop, recklessly dump plastic and commit nice violence to delicate marine ecosystems. The earth is warming; sea ranges are rising and established shorelines are being reshaped once they’re not disappearing totally. And but many vacationers persist in pouting solely about the fast 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 numerous borrowing in “The Last Resort,” and the bibliography could divert you rapidly to the extra targeted histories Stodola consulted, like Mark Braude’s “Making Monte Carlo.” Her glancing forays into race relations dropped at thoughts Russ Rymer’s extra substantive “American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory.”

Stodola, whose earlier e-book was “Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors,” and whose personal writing life contains some quantity of luxurious journey (she based and edits a web-based journal known as Flung), does fruitfully dig up a 1980 essay by a geographer named R.W. Butler. In “The Concept of a Tourist Area Cycle Evolution: Implications for Management of Resources,” Butler recognized half a dozen phases, Kübler-Ross-like, in a resort’s life cycle, together with Stagnation, Decline and presumably Rejuvenation. (“Tulum today is textbook Consolidation Stage,” Stodola writes of the Mexico municipality, which has change into clogged with sargassum and hipsters.) She does a great back-and-forth evaluation of why Bali, Indonesia, has change into a serious vacation spot whereas close by Nias has struggled.

Still, it’s a must to chuckle when a bit woman amongst a bunch of village youngsters solicits {a photograph} from Stodola’s associate, Scott, after which one in every of the youngsters holds up a center finger simply as he’s taking the shot. This critic didn’t really feel fairly that stage of hostility, however the disorienting variety of locations Stodola alights, the variety of vegan dishes and drinks she reviews ordering, some at swim-up bars — an old school on the terrace of the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc in Antibes, France; Absolut and juice at the Naviti Resort in Fiji; “a totally decent glass of wine in Cancun” (which she deems in Stagnation Stage) — does make one scratch the head about what this e-book proposes to be, precisely; it tends to look extra final hurrah than final resort. “A nuanced understanding of the beach resort industry where none currently exists,” is what Stodola is making an attempt, whereas acknowledging that the carbon offsets she purchased for all her long-haul flights “is not enough to rationalize the emissions.”

Mea Acapulco! (Where she loved a melting frozen margarita at the El Mirador.)

Anyway, it’s time to retire the time period seashore learn. We can do it right here, now. “Read” (like “invite”) is healthier as a verb, and summer season is exactly the season when readers must be “digging deep,” constructing castles in the air in addition to the sand.