Ryan Bingham has a simple goal: to accumulate one million miles in his frequent flyer account. This story follows his life in the transient realm he calls "Airworld" as he wings his way to his goal. Soon to be a major motion picture from Dreamworks and Paramount Pictures, starring George Clooney and directed by Jason Reitman ("Juno").

Reviews

The message of Kirn's new novel is that the "dark Satanic mills" that power the capitalist system no longer run on the sweat of the laboring masses they are now fueled by the hot air of the therapeutic-industrial complex, that weird construct made of a thousand management strategy companies and their attendant conferences. In this world, being fired has been euphemized into "career transition." Ryan Bingham is a career transition counselor for a firm based in Denver. His ultimate goal is accumulating one million frequent flier miles, but he has a few other projects he hasn't told headquarters about. He's written a business allegory, for one thing, which he hopes to place with a management science publisher. He also wants to market Sandor Pinter, a Peter Drucker-like management guru, through posters, coffee cups and the usual familiar detritus of pop culture. His most important and hush-hush project is to jump ship to MythTech, a mysterious Omaha company renowned for its esoteric management consulting. On the periphery of Ryan's consciousness is his sister Julie's upcoming wedding, but his disconnection from his family is evident. Kirn is trying to create the New Economy Babbitt, the perpetual haunter of first class and airport bars. Unfortunately, Ryan is not only an uninteresting character, bloated, shallow and incorrigibly explicative tell (and tell and tell...), not show, seems to be his motto but is uninterested in others. Crowding the page, he smothers Kirn's bursts of astringent humor and obscures any broader perspective on 21st-century corporate culture. (July) Forecast: Much will be expected of this novel by the literary editor of GQ and the author of the New York Times Notable novel Thumbsucker. Media world curiosity and the appeal of the book's subject matter to corporate management masses may generate respectable sales, but no more this is not one of Kirn's better efforts. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

In this quirky and unsettling novel (his third after Thumbsucker), Kirn manages to capture on paper much of what is worst about our present age. Ryan Bingham, a business flyer, is six days from attaining his personal goal of one million miles on his frequent-flyer account. He's in the air so much that he has no actual real-world address, having become, instead, a resident of "Airworld," where "my hometown papers are USA Today and the Wall Street Journal." Bingham's job is CTC (Career Transition Counseling) helping large companies fire their executives with minimal legal risk. The job is wearing him down, but he's determined to reach his mileage goal, and this determination, amazingly, provides sufficient suspense to carry the reader along from airport to airport. Kirn has a gift for exploiting telling details about our consumption-mad culture, hinting at dark marketing conspiracies that will have us all buying strange items within the month, as though we were simply puppets of the marketing companies, one of which Bingham aspires to: MythTech. Harrowing reading, but worth the turbulence. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/01.] David Dodd, Marin Cty. Free Lib., San Rafael, CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

"A dead-on, wry portrait of the life of the road warrior." --"The Washington Post"

"Up in the Air deliciously lambastes corporate America. Kirn's satire ranges deftly over our contemporary landscape." --"The Wall Street Journal"

"Terrifically funny and poignant.... Beneath its glittering, comic surface, Up in the Air asks if, in pursuing what we think we want, we might lose ourselves completely." --"Minneapolis Star-Tribune
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"[A] hilarious, often ingenious ode to America.... Whip smart yet entertaining enough to rival anything from John Grisham." --"Time Out New York
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"From the Trade Paperback edition."