UP IN THE AIR
by Walter Kirn

Ryan Bingham is approaching his millionth frequent flier mile in Walter Kirn's Up In The Air.  Bingham is a mid-level management consultant who mostly works counseling employees who are being laid off by downsizing corporations.  Bingham has given notice at his job, but Up In The Air takes place during a final whirlwind week of air travel, hotels, and chain restaurants, as the protagonist attempts to approach Mythtech, a secretive marketing group, about a job.

There's a lot to like about Up in the Air.  Kirn enters into Bingham's mind with curiosity and sympathy, and seemingly at least a modicum of research into the milieu of business-thinking, that mass of text and practice that I have long been aware of, but have always avoided.  What Ryan does is an extension of sales-- although there's no product.  The world Kirn describes is one in which marketers market marketing itself.

Bingham is a sympathetic character, endowed with a modest sense of self-awareness and a genuine fondness for other people, although he's generously and genuinely flawed as well.  He actually likes airports.  As he travels toward his millionth mile he juggles several selves.

Up In The Air is a good performance, and feels like it's building to a climax.  Unfortunately the various plots sputter out at various points, and it fails to achieve critical mass.  At the end, Kirn cheapens all the insight he's found into his character by giving the whole thing a biologically-deterministic twist.  Many of you out there may be sold on the whole mind-as-epiphenomenon of organic brain matter, and it seems Kirn is trying to sell this point.  Atheism can occasionally be inspired, but I have yet to see any evidence that reductive materialism can produce a great work of art.

 --C. B. Coble