AuntShecky
08-14-2010, 05:58 PM
Up in the Air by Walter Kirn. New York: Anchor Books, a Division of Random House, 2001, 303 pp.
To the casual observer, the first rule of any career plan, weight loss program, or self-help project is always the same: “Set a goal.” Ryan Bingham, the thirty-something protagonist of Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air, has a goal all right – his raison d'etre is to accumulate one million frequent flyer miles, and as the book opens he’s close to achieving that milestone. In the space of five days, Ryan’s itinerary includes San Antonio, Kansas City, Denver, Reno, Seattle, Los Vegas, and Omaha, before finishing up the trip–on Friday the 13th, yet!– in his home town in Minneapolis. “Just five more days. Just nine thousand eight hundred more miles. . .That’s the magic leg. I've worked it out. The math was complex, and it’s subject to adjustments, but Omaha-Minneapolis is the leg.” (P. 17.)
Racking up free airline miles is one of the few perks of Ryan’s job. As a management consultant for a corporation called ISM, his speciality is in the area of CTC “Career Transition Training,” a euphemism for firing employees. As Ryan describes it in the conversation with a hypothetical seat-mate on a flight, CTC is “a fancy term for coaching people to understand job loss as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth.” This program stems not so much from altruism or sympathetic compassion on the part of ISM, but rather a stop-gap measure to avoid litigation. Understandingly enough, Ryan has had enough: “It’s a job I fell into because I wasn't strong, and grew to tolerate because I had to, then suddenly couldn't stand another hour of.” (P.4.) Despite his letter of resignation on the vacationing boss’s desk, Ryan suspects that ISM is poised to fire him anyway.
Ryan has a couple of back-up plans: one is securing a rebound job with a cryptic company called Mythtech; the other is hoping a business book publisher, Avanta, will buy his manuscript, an allegorical motivational fable. During free moments during flights and layovers, Ryan intermittently records onto a cassette thoughts for The Garage with a prose style propped up from business jargon gleaned from a business course called “VerbalEdge.” Through most of the book, Avanta’s head, Morris Dwight, and the mysterious MythTech are elusive and non-committal, leaving Ryan --if you will-- “up in the air.”
Yet flying itself is one aspect of the job which Ryan tolerates, for he has an affinity with what he calls “Airworld,” the ethereal place far above terra firma. “This is the place to see America, not down there,” he says, “where the show is almost over.” While recounting a cross-country auto trip from his college days, Ryan theorizes that the corporate system and consumer economy had already homogenized the country into the same familiar landscape. “The real America had left the ground and we'd spent the summer circling a ruin. Not even that. An imitation ruin.” (P. 42-43.) Later in the book, Ryan’s distressed to find changes in the physical layout of his motel room, one of a chain usually predictably the same from coast to coast, like a nationwide fast food restaurant. The almost-imperceptible differences, such as the location of the ice machine, disorient and upset him. Additionally, when a restaurateur, devastated by a poisoning scandal and his collapsed marriage, needs help reinventing himself, Ryan palms his case off to another consultant, a slightly shady one at that. Ryan’s two larger-than-life idols–the head of the airline (whose own personal goal is to become the Baseball Commissioner) and a cosmopolitan business guru–eventually reveal themselves to be all-too-human.
Frequent bursts of turbulence fuel Ryan’s ever-increasing stress, which has manifested itself through apparent bouts of memory loss. There is evidence that someone is charging up his credit card all over the globe, as well as putting the treasured miles in danger of being stolen. Not only that, Ryan has begun to fear that some unknown entity – MythTech? The airline’s marketers?--is spying on me and recording his every movement. It doesn't help that his older sister, Kara, is on his back, via phone, about locating Julie, his emotionally fragile younger sister, an apparent runaway bride, whom he’s expected to send safely home for her third wedding.
He also hears about the callously-treated death of an airline acquaintance, not quite a friend, but perhaps the closest of social connections a frequent flyer might have. Juggling his romantic interests is likewise precarious for Ryan, for these relations are transitory and superficial, like billiard balls bouncing off one another.
In a scene set in Reno with one of these women, a Public Relations consultant and event planner, is where we finally can see how the dreaded process of “CTC” really works. When she asks him if “terminating” someone depresses him, Ryan replies that what is depressing is “getting used to it.”(p. 102.) A surprising plot development occurs in a later scene, same woman, same state, different city – Las Vegas.
The reader doesn't fully see what “CTC” involves until Ryan describes the process to Julie, now-retrieved and headed home to Minnesota this time on the ground, in a rental car. It is a strength of Kirn’s writing that the specifics of the job description do not appear until late in the novel when Ryan describes them to his sister, and even then they are oblique. But we already know how terrible Ryan’s job by seeing what this soul-killing enterprise has done to him. The novel’s satisfying conclusion offers both triumph and sadness, while leaving room for the possibility of hope, a sliver of sunshine filtering through the shade of an airline window.
The author, educated in Princeton and Oxford, has established an equally- impressive writing track record with the New York Times Book Review, and other works including his most recent, a memoir called Lost in the Meritocracy. Walter Kirn’s six novels include he Unbinding, which first appeared online in Slate. Up in the Air provides details of a picture of America in the tradition of Nabokov’s Lolita. With Ryan Bingham, Kirn has created a stunning character, as memorable as a slightly older but similarly sensitive Holden Caulfield. The jet engines of this novel are not powered by cynicism but flashes of poignant and subtly rendered prose in the earnest voice of a farm-fresh Midwestern middle child.
Scores of reviewers have praised this book and rightly so, and many point out its “social satire” of corporate America. Since its first publication date of 2001, airline travel has changed dramatically with widespread mergers and bankruptcies , not to mention the security measures set up since 9/11, thus premiums and incentives such as “frequent flyer miles” are disappearing the way green stamps did decades ago. Even so, in the past nine years the economy, however, has certainly gotten worse with corporation outsourcing, downsizing, and an unemployment rate approaching double digits. Above all, even the most jaded observer of western culture can help noticing a certain unraveling in the Zeitgeist, an almost-palpable sense of paranoia ripping through the social fabric-- all reactions to unsettling certainty, the paranoia of a country suspended "up in the air." In that sense, Walter Kirn has shown himself not only to be a first-rate literary novelist but a prophet.
To the casual observer, the first rule of any career plan, weight loss program, or self-help project is always the same: “Set a goal.” Ryan Bingham, the thirty-something protagonist of Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air, has a goal all right – his raison d'etre is to accumulate one million frequent flyer miles, and as the book opens he’s close to achieving that milestone. In the space of five days, Ryan’s itinerary includes San Antonio, Kansas City, Denver, Reno, Seattle, Los Vegas, and Omaha, before finishing up the trip–on Friday the 13th, yet!– in his home town in Minneapolis. “Just five more days. Just nine thousand eight hundred more miles. . .That’s the magic leg. I've worked it out. The math was complex, and it’s subject to adjustments, but Omaha-Minneapolis is the leg.” (P. 17.)
Racking up free airline miles is one of the few perks of Ryan’s job. As a management consultant for a corporation called ISM, his speciality is in the area of CTC “Career Transition Training,” a euphemism for firing employees. As Ryan describes it in the conversation with a hypothetical seat-mate on a flight, CTC is “a fancy term for coaching people to understand job loss as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth.” This program stems not so much from altruism or sympathetic compassion on the part of ISM, but rather a stop-gap measure to avoid litigation. Understandingly enough, Ryan has had enough: “It’s a job I fell into because I wasn't strong, and grew to tolerate because I had to, then suddenly couldn't stand another hour of.” (P.4.) Despite his letter of resignation on the vacationing boss’s desk, Ryan suspects that ISM is poised to fire him anyway.
Ryan has a couple of back-up plans: one is securing a rebound job with a cryptic company called Mythtech; the other is hoping a business book publisher, Avanta, will buy his manuscript, an allegorical motivational fable. During free moments during flights and layovers, Ryan intermittently records onto a cassette thoughts for The Garage with a prose style propped up from business jargon gleaned from a business course called “VerbalEdge.” Through most of the book, Avanta’s head, Morris Dwight, and the mysterious MythTech are elusive and non-committal, leaving Ryan --if you will-- “up in the air.”
Yet flying itself is one aspect of the job which Ryan tolerates, for he has an affinity with what he calls “Airworld,” the ethereal place far above terra firma. “This is the place to see America, not down there,” he says, “where the show is almost over.” While recounting a cross-country auto trip from his college days, Ryan theorizes that the corporate system and consumer economy had already homogenized the country into the same familiar landscape. “The real America had left the ground and we'd spent the summer circling a ruin. Not even that. An imitation ruin.” (P. 42-43.) Later in the book, Ryan’s distressed to find changes in the physical layout of his motel room, one of a chain usually predictably the same from coast to coast, like a nationwide fast food restaurant. The almost-imperceptible differences, such as the location of the ice machine, disorient and upset him. Additionally, when a restaurateur, devastated by a poisoning scandal and his collapsed marriage, needs help reinventing himself, Ryan palms his case off to another consultant, a slightly shady one at that. Ryan’s two larger-than-life idols–the head of the airline (whose own personal goal is to become the Baseball Commissioner) and a cosmopolitan business guru–eventually reveal themselves to be all-too-human.
Frequent bursts of turbulence fuel Ryan’s ever-increasing stress, which has manifested itself through apparent bouts of memory loss. There is evidence that someone is charging up his credit card all over the globe, as well as putting the treasured miles in danger of being stolen. Not only that, Ryan has begun to fear that some unknown entity – MythTech? The airline’s marketers?--is spying on me and recording his every movement. It doesn't help that his older sister, Kara, is on his back, via phone, about locating Julie, his emotionally fragile younger sister, an apparent runaway bride, whom he’s expected to send safely home for her third wedding.
He also hears about the callously-treated death of an airline acquaintance, not quite a friend, but perhaps the closest of social connections a frequent flyer might have. Juggling his romantic interests is likewise precarious for Ryan, for these relations are transitory and superficial, like billiard balls bouncing off one another.
In a scene set in Reno with one of these women, a Public Relations consultant and event planner, is where we finally can see how the dreaded process of “CTC” really works. When she asks him if “terminating” someone depresses him, Ryan replies that what is depressing is “getting used to it.”(p. 102.) A surprising plot development occurs in a later scene, same woman, same state, different city – Las Vegas.
The reader doesn't fully see what “CTC” involves until Ryan describes the process to Julie, now-retrieved and headed home to Minnesota this time on the ground, in a rental car. It is a strength of Kirn’s writing that the specifics of the job description do not appear until late in the novel when Ryan describes them to his sister, and even then they are oblique. But we already know how terrible Ryan’s job by seeing what this soul-killing enterprise has done to him. The novel’s satisfying conclusion offers both triumph and sadness, while leaving room for the possibility of hope, a sliver of sunshine filtering through the shade of an airline window.
The author, educated in Princeton and Oxford, has established an equally- impressive writing track record with the New York Times Book Review, and other works including his most recent, a memoir called Lost in the Meritocracy. Walter Kirn’s six novels include he Unbinding, which first appeared online in Slate. Up in the Air provides details of a picture of America in the tradition of Nabokov’s Lolita. With Ryan Bingham, Kirn has created a stunning character, as memorable as a slightly older but similarly sensitive Holden Caulfield. The jet engines of this novel are not powered by cynicism but flashes of poignant and subtly rendered prose in the earnest voice of a farm-fresh Midwestern middle child.
Scores of reviewers have praised this book and rightly so, and many point out its “social satire” of corporate America. Since its first publication date of 2001, airline travel has changed dramatically with widespread mergers and bankruptcies , not to mention the security measures set up since 9/11, thus premiums and incentives such as “frequent flyer miles” are disappearing the way green stamps did decades ago. Even so, in the past nine years the economy, however, has certainly gotten worse with corporation outsourcing, downsizing, and an unemployment rate approaching double digits. Above all, even the most jaded observer of western culture can help noticing a certain unraveling in the Zeitgeist, an almost-palpable sense of paranoia ripping through the social fabric-- all reactions to unsettling certainty, the paranoia of a country suspended "up in the air." In that sense, Walter Kirn has shown himself not only to be a first-rate literary novelist but a prophet.