Up In The Air

This post first published July 7, 2012.

Author: Walter Kirn
First Published: 2001
Publisher: Anchor
303 pages (paperback)
 
Yeah, I got the book with the movie poster cover :( Not a big fan of movie poster covers, but it was what was available (I bought this from a thrift store). Anyway.

I hadn’t seen the movie before reading the book, though I did watch it after reading the book. They’re really quite different as they focus on different themes and have different plots and that character Anna Kendrick plays isn’t even in the novel, so there’s hardly a point in comparing the two. However, it was from seeing the trailer of the movie that got me interested in the book in the first place.

Up In The Air is about Ryan Bingham, who works for CTC — Career Transition Counselling. He helps people who have been laid off reassess their strengths and weaknesses and find new hope in their unemployment. Or, in other words, Ryan fires people for a living and tries to get the ex-employees to not do anything crazy like sue the company. Ryan doesn’t really like his job, but he does like collecting frequent flyer miles points. In fact, his goal is to collect one million points, and he’s really close. He plans to quit his job, work for his dream company in a dream job and write a book after it’s all said and done. But his last week of flying is somehow really stressing him out — he’s not sure what his dream company even really does or how to contact them, his potential publisher won’t stay in one spot and his flighty sister who is about to get married soon is driving him up the wall.

First things first, I loved the writing style of this book. It’s present tense, first person narrator, and Ryan speaks to you like he’s holding a conversation with you. Which does include the occasional tangent, but they’re interesting and more often than not, rather funny. I really loved the way the author wrote and spoke to his reader, even within the witty remarks and black humor, it was seriously fun writing.

The book starts off great, I was really into it. However, somewhere near the last third of the book, the story got kind of … weird. I was following along fine, and then all of a sudden, I became really confused, like I wasn’t sure if I was reading anything correctly. I think Ryan was on drugs at one point and, as he was the narrator, it messed up what he was experiencing so as the reader, I was also getting really confused. I think everything started going wrong for him so he started taking some drugs, or started admitting to the reader he was taking drugs … ? But I’m not really sure if he was on drugs, maybe he was just going insane. He seemed to be losing his marbles. I just had no idea what was happening anymore, and I can’t really tell you how the book ended because, well, I don’t know. I read it, but I don’t know what I read.

Despite the ending kind of falling apart on me there, I did enjoy this book a lot, especially the writing.

My Rating: 3/5