Friday's Forgotten Book: Up in the Air

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks, Patti.


I thought Up in the Air by Walter Kirn would make a good Forgotten Book. I read the hardcover after reading the NYT review and before the book, still new, disappeared from the front table of bookstores on 9/11 (or days afterward), due to this jacket art:



A quick Internet search for the above image, however, yields the news that the book is being adapted into a film by Jason Reitman, director of the recent Juno and, previously, of a (middling, I thought) adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking.

Anyway, there’s still time for a crack at the book, before the story hits the big screen.

Here is what I remember: our narrator, employed by some mega-corp, circles the globe, firing people for a living. He is, by his own testimony, both contented participant in and delighted observer of this seemingly-numbing hamster-wheel of airport lounges, hotel rooms, USA Today and glass office towers. (His discursions on the beauty of different facets of this world are like a comedic antidote to Don DeLillo.)

This façade begins to show some cracks, though. Why is our man so distant with his family? Why is he interviewing with another firm? And where are his air miles disappearing to?

Kirn makes a lot of comedy out of the character’s insistence that homogenization creates kinship – and makes the guy such good-natured company that you might catch yourself nodding along, right up until Kirn pulls the rug out.

Currently Available in paperback, with this cover: