BOOK REVIEW: Up in the Air by Walter Kirn

Up in the Air by Walter Kirn
Genres: Fiction

“Hilarious… Whip-smart… entertaining enough to rival anything by John Grisham.”  -Times Out New York

Truly said. The chemistry of smart and funny is quite good in this book. There is a movie by the same title starring George Clooney, which I saw two wholesome years back, and it was the first time I ever saw Clooney on the screen. But I was not fascinated by him. In fact,  I was fascinated by Ryan Bingham’s (played by Clooney) job profile– the one who can fire other people from their jobs.

Walter Kirn’s UP IN THE AIR is a unique book and one of it’s kind. Kirn’s quite witty with his words and knows how to use them and is quite practical about them. The plot is quite simple. Ryan Bingham, as a consultant constantly flies around the country. He’s a modern day nomad. 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.

Though the book do have the OCDish feeling in the main character, the movie is quite clean. The book also lose a reader sometimes, due to not so good characterization, may be because there were too many of them (or may be I am becoming a dull reader *laughs*). Throughout the novel I felt like a fellow passenger on one of Ryan’s flights, as he intimately shared his goals, his fears and his realizations which was quite a proficient feeling as it binds a reader with the book but the book itself gets a bit confusing in the end and the hold I maintained from the start was gone.

Still it’s readable if you are in the right mood or really want to read something different. It looks like a light-read but it’s not. Walter Kirn does have peculiar style in which he does not only describe a scene to a reader in words but literally tries to show him a fragment of his own imagination. I am quite happy I got to read it. You, do watch the movie though.

3 out of 5!