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."
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