Up in the Air
by Walter Kirn
Doubleday

Between Heaven and Hell lies Limbo, a place perhaps best represented to us living souls by airports. "Non-places" is how French anthropologist Marc Augé describes these spaces, succinctly conveying the emptiness and transience of a landscape dominated by fluorescent-lit corridors, theme bars and duty-free shops, a landscape peopled by travelers in a state of suspended existence waiting in cheerless gate areas to be transported from one point to the next.

Unlike most people, Ryan Bingham, the hero of Walter Kirn's new novel, "Up in the Air," adores airports. A management consultant specializing in "Career Transition Counseling" (firing people, really), Bingham is a frequent flyer, a man who spends so much time in airports and airplanes that he thinks of them as a parallel country. "Airworld," as he dubs it, is a "nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency — the token economy of airline bonus miles."

Bingham is on a quest to accumulate one million of those bonus miles. As the book opens, he's just eight cities in six days away from his goal. Like all good quests, this one includes a deadline (Bingham's final day of work is also the last day of his trip), a nemesis (a malicious colleague), obstacles (weather, past clients, family obligations) and an omniscient presence (Mythtech, a marketing research firm Bingham believes is trying to recruit him).

Surreal at times — as when bizarre credit-card charges appear or when Bingham seems to have a memory lapse — and occasionally paranoid, "Up in the Air" is a quirky examination of consumerism and American business, sending up the gurus and inspirational books and tchotchkes corporate leaders revere and collect. Observations — "Sure, today, we live in a democracy, and yes, for the most part, it leaves us to ourselves, but there are ambitious people who'd like to change this, and some who boast that they've already succeeded" — illuminate something of the insidious marketing and corporate culture that surrounds and employs us.

Despite its landscape of airports and homogeneous hotel suites, its relationships defined by phone calls and fleeting visits, Bingham's world is surprisingly not a cold or impersonal place. Kirn manages to imbue Bingham and all that surrounds him with warmth and depth, successfully writing the main character as a man who dislikes his job for the pain it causes others, who cares for his family and who wants to do something good with his life, even if he's not sure what that is. Bingham is a sympathetic man, as are most of the people he encounters, damaged as they all may be. In Airworld, everyone's a potential friend or soulmate to Bingham, and he treats each soul he meets accordingly.

Of all the many novels that have attempted to describe contemporary America, from the masterful "White Noise" by Don DeLillo to the painful "Mall" by Eric Bogosian, few allow for expressions of compassion or humanity. The people who live in the surburban wastelands and college towns of those books are cynical and isolated. How ironic, then, that a novel set in the most arid and alienating of locations should give us a character so earnestly human.

— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)