Up in the Air

Zusatztext “A dead-on! wry portrait of the life of the road warrior.” –Rudy Maxa! The Washington Post “[A] hilarious! often ingenious ode to America.. . . . Whip smart yet entertaining enough to rival anything from John Grisham.” –Julia Dahl! Time Out New York “Kirn’s style is as bright and metallic as the shiny skin of a jet airplane. But his underlying point is refreshingly down to earth.” –John Gallagher! Chicago Tribune Informationen zum Autor Walter Kirn is the fiction editor for GQ magazine, and the author of three previous novels. He lives near Livingston, Montana. Klappentext Ryan Bingham'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. Leseprobe one To know me you have to fly with me. Sit down. I'm the aisle, you're the window—trapped. You crack your paperback, last spring's big legal thriller, convinced that what you want is solitude, though I know otherwise: you need to talk. The jaunty male flight attendant brings our drinks: a two percent milk with one ice cube for me, a Wild Turkey for you. It's wet outside, the runways streaked and dark. Late afternoon. The first-class cabin fills with other businessmen who switch on their laptops and call up lengthy spreadsheets or use the last few moments before takeoff to punch in cell-phone calls to wives and clients. Their voices are bright but shallow, no diaphragms, their sentences kept short to save on tolls, and when they hang up they face the windows, sigh, and reset their watches from Central time to Mountain. For some of them this means a longer day, for others it means eating supper before they're hungry. One fellow lowers his plastic window shade and wedges his head between two skimpy pillows, while another unlatches his briefcase, looks inside, then shuts his eyes and rubs his jaw, exhausted. Your own work is done, though, temporarily. All week you've been out hustling, courting hot prospects in franchised seafood bars and steering a rented Intrepid along strange streets that didn't match the markings in your atlas. You gave it your all, and for once your all was good enough to placate a boss who fears for his own job. You've stashed your tie in your briefcase, freed your collar, and slackened your belt a notch or two. To breathe. Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes. "Is that the one about the tax-fraud murders? I'm hearing his plots aren't what they used to be." You stall before answering, trying to discourage me. To you, I'm a type. A motormouth. A pest. You're still getting over that last guy, LA to Portland, whose grandson was just admitted to Stanford Law. A brilliant kid, and a fine young athlete, too, he started his own business as a teen computerizing local diaper services—though what probably clinched his acceptance was his charity work; the kid has a soft spot for homeless immigrants, which pretty much describes all of us out west, though some are worse off than others. We're the lucky ones. "I'm on page eleven," you say. "The plot's still forming." "It hit number four on the Times list." "Don't read that paper." "You live...

Product details

• Authors: Walter Kirn
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 24.09.2002
• EAN: 9780385722377
• ISBN: 978-0-385-72237-7
• No. of pages: 303
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 204 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature