"After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one..."

"... the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. 'Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,' the husband said. 'I work with a lot of Cubans, so …' I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared...."

Writes Gary Shteyngart, in "Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever/Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas" (The Atlantic).

Shteyngart is well aware that David Foster Wallace already wrote “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — AKA "Shipping Out" — and much as I'd rather read a Gary Shteyngart novel than a David Foster Wallace novel, he has no hope of besting Wallace in what, after Wallace, became a genre — the author-on-first-cruise-ship-voyage genre:

[M]any admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre.... To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

Shteyngart pinpoints the problem with his essay, as he steers the unwieldy vessel into the nearest bridge pier. 

The referenced Adorno quote — which never appears in the article — is "There can be no poetry after Auschwitz." That's my link, not Shteyngart's. He credits the reader with already knowing the quote (or he tasks those of us who are ignorant of it with the task of finding it for ourselves or shrugging it off as not worth knowing).

My link goes to a philosophy subreddit, where someone writes:

Poetry, an art of hinting at something, allusion through metaphor etc. cannot adequately express the reality of the industrialization of the murder of millions of people. For Adorno, a type of sparse, realistic prose, almost like a listing of facts, might however be able to be a testimony to the extremely horrible reality of Auschwitz....

Shteyngart is analogizing — "badly"!! — essay writing to poetry, and a cruise ship to Auschwitz.

About Shteyngart, per Wikipedia:

Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart (Russian: Игорь Семёнович Штейнгарт) in the Soviet Union, he spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg". He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, and describes his family as typically Soviet.

The "Crying Myself to Sleep" essay is loaded with discussion of class politics — the class politics of a giant cruise ship. Comical, be assured.