Up In the Air - Hardcover

Kirn, Walter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385497105 ISBN 13: 9780385497107

Publisher: Doubleday, 2001

Synopsis

Meet Ryan Bingham, thirty-five, corporate consultant, very frequent flier, citizen of the transient realm he calls "Airworld." With his cell phone, his handheld computer, and his wardrobe of wrinkle-free slacks and jackets, he's part of a new species: the commercial airborne commando who travels light and depends on no one. A career transition counselor for a Denver-based management firm - he helps fire people for a living, a job he's come to loathe - Ryan has a complicated past, an uncertain present, and a very simple goal: to accumulate one million air miles in his cherished frequent flier account. And once he gets there, along with bragging rights among his peers, revenge for years of humiliations at the hands of airlines, and a sense of completion, he'll quit his job and achieve a long-desired (but ambiguous) freedom.
Now Ryan's on his final push: a fiendishly difficult itinerary of eight cities and countless meetings in just six days mixing business, pleasure, and family duties. He's convinced he can pull things off, conditions permitting - and there, of course, is the catch. Almost from the moment he takes off, they deteriorate. Weather problems. Maintenance foul-ups. Needy seatmates. Mysterious credit card glitches. Deepening guilt for his professional sins. The persistent sense that someone is paging him over the airport loud speakers. Through it all, though, Ryan Bingham points his compass at true north: one million miles. Six zeroes and a one.

About this title

Review

The hero of Walter Kirn's novel Up in the Air inhabits an entirely new state: Airworld, where the hometown paper is USA Today, the indigenous cuisine wilts under heat lamps, and the citizenry speaks a Byzantine dialect of upgrades, expense accounts, and market share. Airworld even has its own nontaxable, inflation-free currency in the shape of bonus miles, which Ryan Bingham calls "private property in its purest form." Officially, Bingham is a management consultant, specializing in the lugubrious field of career transition counseling (i.e., he fires people for a living). But what Kirn's airborne protagonist is really doing is pursuing his own private passion, his great white whale: accumulating one million miles in his frequent-flyer account. As Up in the Air opens, Bingham has set out on a final, epic traveling jag. He intends to visit eight cities in six days, thereby achieving his own vision of Nirvana somewhere over Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Mocking the euphemisms of business speak is as easy as shooting fish in a designer barrel. But Kirn also takes on the corporate world's weirdly mystical and paranoid side, its rhetoric of personal empowerment and its messianic devotion to gurus. "Business is folk wisdom, cave-born, dark, Masonic, and the best consultants are outright shamans who sprinkle on the science like so much fairy dust," declares Bingham. (This doesn't stop him from working on his own book about "the transformational journey of one mind wholly at peace with its core competencies.") Meanwhile, his junket becomes progressively more surreal, complete with an evil nemesis as well as a mysteriously powerful firm called MythTech that's working behind the scenes. And what's worse, someone seems to have stolen his identity, assuming control of his credit cards and his all-important miles.

Is this model consumer being tracked as he makes his purchasing decisions, like an elk tagged by wildlife biologists? Or is he merely losing his mind? The ending answers these questions perhaps a little too neatly, but Kirn's disturbing satire packs a mighty wallop nonetheless. The writing is as sharp as a tack, punctuated by character sketches as brilliant as they are quick. Bingham and his ilk are modern nomads, dispossessed of physicality but not quite of their bodies. His simulated environment is not mimicking an actual place but replacing it--and that, to the author, is the scariest part of Airworld: "This is the place to see America, not down there, where the show is almost over." --Mary Park

Up in the Air is now a major motion picture starring George Clooney, Jason Bateman, and Anna Kendrick, and directed by Jason Reitman. Enjoy these images from the film, and click the thumbnails to see larger images.

From the Inside Flap

’s job as a Career Transition Counselor–he fires people–has kept him airborne for years. Although he has come to despise his line of work, he has come to love the culture of what he calls “Airworld,” finding contentment within pressurized cabins, anonymous hotel rooms, and a wardrobe of wrinkle-free slacks. With a letter of resignation sitting on his boss’s desk, and the hope of a job with a mysterious consulting firm, Ryan Bingham is agonizingly close to his ultimate goal, his Holy Grail: one million frequent flier miles. But before he achieves this long-desired freedom, conditions begin to deteriorate.

With perception, wit, and wisdom, Up in the Air combines brilliant social observation with an acute sense of the psychic costs of our rootless existence, and confirms Walter Kirn as one of the most savvy chroniclers of American life.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0385497105
• ISBN 13: 9780385497107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320