“Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilization—from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticizing of travel—then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (SEP 22, 2010)

Okay, maybe Ryan Bingham might have qualified. But considering that George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air was entirely fictional, the authorities at Heathrow airport settled on another huge fan of airports—writer Alain de Botton. They couldn’t have guessed just how big a fan de Botton is, when they contacted him to be a “writer-in-residence” for a week and write about the new and glitzy Terminal 5 at Heathrow.

While many of us love travel not many love airports—as in really love them. de Botton is different. He admits to wishing on occasion “for a delay so severe that I would be offered a meal voucher or, more dramatically, a night at an airline’s expense in a giant concrete Kleenex box with unopenable windows, corridors decorated with nostalgic images of propeller planes and foam pillows infused with the distant smells of kerosene.” So it didn’t take much for de Botton to accept the assignment and in the process, craft this absolutely delightful meditation on airports.

A Week at the Airport is filled with astute observations about the daily goings on at these hubs. de Botton systematically looks at all parts of the arrival and departure process—the arrivals zone, the goodbyes, the security lines, airline food and more. What’s more these observations are cloaked in language that is full of wry British humor. But the best part about is that it’s more than just a collection of funny and quirky observations. The genius in the book is that de Botton connects the dots with insight and wisdom and shows us the larger picture in the most routine of interactions. He finds poetry in the strangest of places—as in the restaurant menu at the local Sofitel branch.

de Botton’s ability to find meaning in the simplest of circumstances and situations is incredible. For example, he wonderfully points out class differences by using the example of a business class travelers’ lounge. While most of us might not think twice about such a thing, de Botton encourages us to think about what wildly varied set of circumstances would lead to “a tracksuited twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur reading the Wall Street Journal by a stone-effect fireplace while waiting to board his flight to Seattle,” and contrast this situation to “that of a Filipina cleaner whose job it is to tour the bathrooms of an airline’s first-class lounge, swabbing the shower cubicles of their diverse and ever-changing colonies of international bacteria.”

In another very touching observation in the book, de Botton comes across a Ghanian family trying to extract a huge television set (a Samsung PS50) from the trunk of a taxicab. “It had been acquired the day before at a branch of Comet in Harlow and was eagerly awaited in the Kissehman quarter of Accra, where its existence would stand as evidence of the extraordinary status of its importer, a thirty-eight year-old dispatch driver from Epping,” de Botton writes. As he wonderfully points out, the purchaser of this television set is quite poor. But by bringing home this one prized treasure, he will be worshipped as the one who returned from England with goods that speak to his now outsized status—especially when contrasted against his poorer family members.

The one quibble I had about the project is that while de Botton does indeed spend a week at the airport, he gets there by train with no travel planned. Nor does he get there by plane from some place far away. You wonder how different or colored your perspective would be if you were to view all this unfolding after a 12-hour flight back from the far reaches of the world.

But A Week at the Airport is just fantastic reading—it’s a slim book that will earn its spot in your carry-on luggage. The beautiful photographs by Richard Baker, also complement the volume well.

There are insights in here for non-travelers too but for those of us who love to take to the sky and visit faraway places, this book captures some the romance and beauty of airports beautifully.

“When you get back, home all at once seems the strangest of destinations, its every detail relativised by the other lands one has visited,” de Botton points out. After mulling over the observations in A Week at the Airport, the reader will come away with a similar experience—things at arrivals and departures will never look quite the same again. Even if, when you cut into the suspicious looking salmon in your foil-covered dinner entrée thousands of miles up in the air, it might be of dubious consolation to know that 80,000 similar meals, “all intended for ingestion within the following fifteen hours somewhere in the troposphere” were prepared in a “windowless refrigerated factory” a mile from the terminal. Bon voyage!

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AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Original edition (September 21, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alain De Botton
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More airport stories:Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles Next by James Hynes

Bibliography:

• How Proust Can Change Your Life (1998)
• The Consolations of Philosophy (2001)
• The Art of Travel (2003)
• Status Anxiety (2005)
• The Architecture of Happiness (2006)
• The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
• A Week at the Airport (2009; 2010 in US)
• The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2010)
• Art as Therapy (October 2013)
• The News: A User’s Manual (February 2014)

“It’s not his fault that sorrow overwhelms him, that’s just middle age, buddy, everybody regrets something. He and Beth were together for thirteen years, and that’s a lot of emotional momentum, a runaway freight train rolling downhill, nothing but tanker cars full of toxic waste and high explosives, and sometimes he feels like he’s tied to the fucking track. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JUL 3, 2010)

A few weeks ago on NPR, there was a discussion: “What Does it Take For You to Give up on a Book?” Reading the novel Next reminds me of that discussion because while most of the novel is good, it is the last 50 or so pages that is especially gripping reading. If, as some readers on that NPR show admitted, you put down the book prematurely you’d miss it. So it’s best to work this one through.

As Next opens, 50-year-old Kevin Quinn is on board a plane to Austin, Texas. He has a run-of-the-mill job at the Publications Program for the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His personal life is also on unsure footing. After a break-up with Beth who he was with for 13 years, Kevin is in a tentative relationship with a younger woman, Stella. But midlife angst begs him to leave it all behind, to reboot. So it is that he follows a job listing all the way to Austin. Stella, who is herself working in Chicago, doesn’t know any of this yet.

As Kevin boards the plane, he is plagued by anxiety—there has been a terrorist attack somewhere in the world and he assumes it is only a matter of time before the terrorists hit again, this time on American soil.

Once on ground in Austin, these general anxieties about terror take a backseat to his general laments about where life is headed. While he has had many sexual encounters, he is unhappy and rootless. Significant sections of the novel involve Kevin recounting his past relationships and their subsequent disintegration. One particular stinging indictment was rendered by a woman known as the Philosopher’s Daughter. She told Kevin that he lacked tenderness and passion—a statement that seems to have left a deep scar on his psyche. “Even if it wasn’t true when she told me, it’s been true ever since because she told me,” Kevin says.

On the plane from Ann Arbor, Kevin runs into an Asian woman whom he is immediately attracted to. As luck would have it, while Kevin is whiling away his time at a coffee shop, waiting for the interview, he spots the same woman on the street. Guided by some sort of sexual attraction, he follows “Joy Luck” (he names her that after the book she reads on the plane) all around the city, at a safe distance. This meaningless pursuit forms the backdrop against which Kevin lays bare his life’s narrative.

Tucked into this narrative are some wonderful descriptions and funny send-ups. Hynes describes an airport as “only an island in an archipelago nation of glassed-in atolls where everybody speaks a sort of English and lives off warm cinnamon buns and day-old turkey sandwiches.” There is even a spot-on description of a food store called Gaia, which sounds very much like Whole Foods.

Next is set over the course of a single day—from the time that Kevin boards the airplane to the day’s end when he shows up for his interview. Digressions and flashbacks aside, to create a novel out of just one day’s events, is difficult. Unfortunately Next suffers from the problem of cataloging too much detail from the smallest of events. Here is an example: “Kevin pauses to slug down the rest of his tea in one long, wobbling gulp. By now it’s as warm as his sweating palm, it’s like drinking some bodily fluid of his own, and as Joy Luck sways downhill toward the river, he tosses the empty cup in a trash can and plods after her.”

As for that famous ending, it’s extremely well done and hits home precisely because its tone and urgency is so different from what has come before.

The problem with the novel is that Kevin is a character who can start to grate on one’s nerves. He refuses to grow up, to confront his anxieties, to make something meaningful out of his life. He is 50 and if indeed, as some have suggested, he is supposed to be Everyman at 50, it’s a very depressing thought. Endless self-absorption is tiring especially when presented in a novel.

The best part about Next is that it is one of the few novels that truly reflects what it is like to live our lives in this, our American landscape. The silent vein of terror that infects everything, the dullness that permeates lives—the subtlest of these observations are brilliantly captured by Hynes.

When Kevin boards the plane and likens the aircraft to “A Pringles can with wings packed full of defenseless Pringles,” you can totally see the analogy working. Kevin’s fears may be extreme but given our generalized anxieties and collective malaise it isn’t too much of a stretch to see where he’s coming from.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 59 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books; 1 edition (March 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	James Hynes
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Speaking of airports: Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles And another book on the times we live in: The Unknown Knowns by Jeffrey Rotter

Bibliography:

• The Wild Colonial Boy (1990)
• Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Terror and Tenure (1997)
• The Lecturer’s Tale (2001)
• Kings of Infinite Space (2004)
• Next (March 2010)