Kate Christensen

Warning: Do not, I repeat, do not read this book on a cruise.

However if you’re not planning to be on a cruise, this is a great read.

The story takes place on the final voyage of the Queen Isabella, a 1950s ocean liner, from Long Beach to Hawaii and back. It’s meant to be a return to luxury cruising - no internet, no one under the age of 16, and instead fine dining, cocktails, and a string quartet.

The story unfolds from three perspectives.

Christine, a former journalist now farmer, is show more on board with her friend Valerie, who’s writing an expose about hidden workers like the crew members of the ship.

Miriam is a member of the Sabra Quartet, who are from Israel and who have been performing together since 1975. The owners of the cruise line are their friends and benefactors.

Mick is the sous chef, a last minute substitute, working in the galley as things get tense among the crew, whose contracts are being canceled after the cruise ends. And so they’re going on strike.

I loved how the author brought us into the lives of these different characters. And she cleverly takes away the internet and their access to the outside world to bring the focus on to this microcosm on board.

An entertaining thoughtful read. One that makes me think twice about going on a cruise. show less

Rachel last saw her hometown, Portland, Maine, a decade ago, but now that her mother has died, she's back. Now fifty, she hopes menopause means that the hormones that helped her make some regrettable choices are no longer in play, giving her (she hopes) a new, hard-fought-for clarity.
She plans to do what needs to be done and then return to Washington DC and her journalism career with her sanity and dignity intact. Of course that doesn't happen.

This novel is about the pleasures and show more impossibility of going home in middle age, especially when your adult life has been defined in being as far from that place as possible. Rachel and her sister had a difficult childhood, their widowed mother hard at work staying young and wild, money always being short. And her relationship with her sister fractured for reasons Rachel doesn't know. Returning is hard, and when it turns out that she may be staying awhile, her ability to justify her own decisions and actions become less tenable by the day.

Christensen writes well and it's unusual to find menopause handled as more than a complaint or a punchline. Rachel may be fifty, but she's a Pulitzer-winning journalist and her high school boyfriend keeps turning up like a recurring heat rash. She's an aging woman who is still an active participant in her own life. She manages to hide her own responsibility behind the language of therapy and her judgements of others change depending on her last encounter with them. She's far too complex to be an entirely sympathetic character, but the way she keeps trying to figure things out is always interesting. show less

I'd grown up without being exposed to many actual men besides teachers, who didn't really count. I had cobbled together a composite picture for myself out of the limited source material at hand. My mother had naturally weighed in heavily with the opinion that the male sex was a lower order without common sense or the capacity to behave responsibly, but Gothic novels and fairy tales had inculcated in me the equally strong but contrary expectation that either a prince of some kind would carry show more me off to his castle or Mr. Rochester would eventually marry me if I waited for him to go blind. By the time I was eight years old, I'd absorbed the idea that courtship and marriage happened when the perfect man came along and chose you from the lineup.

Claudia's not doing great. Almost thirty and her fabulous New York life means living in a terrible studio apartment she can't even afford, ghost-writing for a confused and abusive socialite while also working as her personal assistant, in love with her best friend, who has never given her the slightest encouragement and drinking far more than would be a good idea for a stevedore. This is Kate Christensen's first novel. It was published in 1999 and is very much a snapshot of a specific time, and it's also witty and funny in a we're-all-drowning-so-let's-have-a-laugh kind of way.

I really love this kind of novel, where a woman gets herself into a mess of her own making and her attempts to right things either works or goes disastrously wrong. Claudia was a wreck, but she was so funny in a Dorothy Parker kind of way and the author has taken the time to give her and the secondary characters real depth. I highly recommend this book for readers who like this kind of thing. show less

I wanted to love The Last Cruise so much. With its three very different narrators providing distinctly independent viewpoints of the cruise, its guests, and its employees, I wanted a harmless adventure story with a bit more gravitas than normal. What I got was a rather depressing glimpse into cruise ship life and an even bleaker impression of current society. By the time the ending came, with its open-ended, anything-can-happen structure, I was ready to finish it because it left me feeling show more hopeless.

The thing is though that each of the three narrators enters the novel discontent and restless but finds him- and herself at peace and happy by the end. This should be cause for celebration and should make the novel a happy one. The problem is that while the three narrators’ individual stories are important, they take a back seat to what is happening on board the ship, and what is happening is chaotic and depressing. Between the brutal hours and almost slave-like work required by the crew to the sickening hedonism of the guests, Ms. Christensen portrays a disgusting image of corporate and personal greed as well as individual ignorance rounded out by a misplaced sense of self-importance. I was so repulsed by what I saw between the pages of The Last Cruise that I am uncertain whether I could ever stomach a cruise vacation.

My rather violent reaction to the novel is, I believe, Ms. Christensen’s intent, and I feel rather duped by it. I started the novel hoping and expecting some sort of adventure/crisis that tests the characters of the three narrators. This is what the synopsis promises, after all. While Ms. Christensen does provide a crisis that does test the narrators’ characters, the novel reads more like a very pointed critique of our consumerism culture. Everything that happens, including the nebulous ending, is a criticism of something related to corporate profits or shipboard gluttony. Our three narrators find themselves reveling in the simpler things, whether that is simpler recipes, a simpler lifestyle, or simpler health issues. This is in direct opposition to the rest of their fellow shipmates, who want all the food and alcohol or higher wages or more profits. I understand the message and can appreciate it as we watch the nation being torn asunder by a man who is the epitome of greed. However, it is not the type of novel I wanted to read.

I finished The Last Cruise hoping that the story would redeem itself and that the crisis would resolve like it does in all adventure novels – that the bad guys would get their just desserts and there would be a modicum of a happy ending. Instead, the story ends at the climax, leaving you hanging with a sense of dread and lack of hope for the ship and its passengers. Because the novel is such an obvious critique of modern, Western society, it then stands to reason that Ms. Christensen does not hold modern society in high regard and she has no faith that we can survive on our current course. Again, this is not what I wanted or expected by reading this novel.

We all have our miscues when it comes to selecting novels we think we want to read, but rarely have I been so wrong about a story. I want to blame the synopsis because while I see the explicit mentions of cynicism and malfunction, I do not see where we are supposed to know that Ms. Christensen applies those descriptors to society as well as the ship. Nor do I see anything that would lead me to believe that the ship is a metaphor for society. In fact, it specifically says “high-seas adventure,” so I clearly did not misinterpret anything. Had I been better prepared for what I would find among its pages, I suspect my appreciation for The Last Cruise would be different because I cannot fault Ms. Christensen for her observations or criticisms. However, because I was not expecting a social commentary, I was not in the right frame of mind to accept what I was reading and that is the greatest sadness of this whole experience. show less