his week Wall Street executives faced the music at the first public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in Washington. Bad news for the bankers, but good news for Up in the Air: the film inspired by my 2001 novel has touched down just in time. As a “recession-era” drama, it is striking a chord with audiences and prize committees alike.
Ten years ago, when I started writing my novel, the landscape couldn’t have been more different. The economy was riding high, fuelled by a mood of giddy optimism related to the high-tech revolution and the prospects it raised for a magical transformation of individual and social wellbeing.
The seemingly unstoppable ascent of stock prices, real estate values, and corporate salaries appeared to be linked to a general acceleration of the pace of life itself. Suddenly, everything was moving faster and becoming more mobile and efficient. Computer processing speeds were doubling. Cellphones were growing thinner and more powerful. Internet sites were proliferating wildly, the time it took to access them was shrinking, and ordinary tasks that in the past had required a certain level of effort, from reserving hotel rooms to booking theatre tickets, could now be accomplished with no more than a few keystrokes.
This heady sense of progress and momentum was palpable throughout society but especially on the job, at work. The highly profitable business of making the world move faster by the day relied on mounting expenditures of energy by managers and their employees, many of whom were rapidly approaching the limits of their abilities to handle their new duties and some of whom were reorganising their lives, often in profoundly unnatural ways, so as to hold on to their positions and stay in the hastening commercial game. This challenge raised a fundamental question: could human beings, creatures of flesh and blood, change and evolve as swiftly as the devices, processes, systems and markets that supported their livelihoods?
For me, the answer came during a flight to California when I turned to the middle-aged businessman sitting next to me and asked him, casually, where he was from. “Here,” he responded bluntly. “Right here. This seat.” He informed me that his job (as a salesman of some sort of complicated software whose specialised function I couldn’t grasp) kept him flying around the country for almost 300 days a year. He’d had an apartment in Atlanta once, but had recently terminated the lease, moved his few belongings into a storage unit, and embraced a permanent transience by staying in a succession of hotel rooms equipped with miniature sitting rooms and kitchens designed to accommodate commercial travellers.
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I told him that it sounded like a dreary existence, but he insisted that it suited him — in fact, he said, he preferred it to his old life as a conventional terrestrial creature. Now, he had no power bills to pay, no neighbours that he was obliged to waste time chatting to, no toilet, sink or bathtub to keep clean. He felt free in a way he never previously had — and, no, he did not feel lonely, sad or isolated. On the contrary, he told me, in the brave new realm of aircraft, airports, franchise restaurants and conglomerate-owned lodgings that he now called home, he had fashioned a sort of family for himself from the flight attendants, desk clerks, rental car agents and similar types with whom he often dealt. He knew their names and, in some cases, their children’s names. And they, having served him repeatedly, knew his.
My seatmate, who had adapted to his profession by abandoning a fixed abode for a series of cramped aircraft seats and identical hotel rooms, assured me that he was a very happy man.
After the flight, I forgot this fellow’s name (or perhaps I neglected to ask for it), but what I couldn’t forget was his solution to the increasingly common problem of finding peace in a rushing, restless, rootless world of high-speed modems, overnight document deliveries and distant business meetings mandated by our new economy. As I reflected on the man’s life, the saner and more realistic it appeared. I felt like a zoologist who had found a new species in a new environment — a species bound to reproduce and multiply as its environment spread across the globe.
Up in the Air was my attempt to turn a chance encounter with a strange being into a coherent story of how and why he had assumed the form he had by reacting to forces, trends and pressures that confront an increasing number of us. I also wanted to explore my hunch that the struggle to deal with these forces wouldn’t end well, neither for my character nor for society. Ryan Bingham, the footloose, cool, detached inhabitant of the bright, artificial wasteland that I called Airworld was, I strongly suspected, doomed, as was the zooming economic system that Airworld had been built to serve. What had gone up so swiftly and spectacularly would come down in the same way, I felt. Thus the particular job I chose for Ryan: firing people, nursing them through layoffs, escorting them into the limbo of redundancy and then jetting off so he couldn’t hear their wails.
The fable I created ten years ago was part warning, part prediction, part tragedy and part celebration of people’s uncanny capacity to survive — temporarily, at least — in even the most disorienting, taxing, initially unnerving circumstances. The book sold fairly well at first, but then, two months after it hit the stores, the disastrous events of September 11, 2001, caused it to vanish from the shelves. The crash I had allegorically foreshadowed — a social, spiritual calamity bred from an economic frenzy — materialised as a literal catastrophe I couldn’t possibly have dreamt of, spawned by a cultural conflict I hadn’t considered. My story seemed suddenly puny and archaic, a cautionary tale about a system, a way of living, working and behaving that was gone and wouldn’t come again.
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But I was wrong. And the doomsayers were wrong. Modern Western industrial society, like Ryan Bingham, its fictional stand-in, can adjust to almost anything, it seems, and within a few years of what countless commentators deemed a fatal blow to business as usual, the airports were more congested than before, the shops more lavish, the cellphone traffic heavier, and the financial markets just as manic. Not only had Airworld reconstituted itself, it had expanded, sped up, and augmented itself with wireless internet zones and advanced in-flight entertainment systems. What’s more, my nearly forgotten novel about its people and customs was purchased by Hollywood, adapted for the screen by Jason Reitman — a hot young director moved by its concerns with the perils of electronic communication and corporate heedlessness — and its main role was offered to George Clooney, the handsomest everyman in showbiz.
And then, within days of the movie coming together, the world it depicted fell apart in almost precisely the manner its author had thought it would. Stock exchanges across the world collapsed, millions of jobs disappeared, and the frantic pursuit of vain, symbolic wealth was exposed as the empty delusion that the novel proposed it was (symbolised in the story as the pursuit of airline frequent-flyer miles).
None of this came as good news to a public that had regained its cockeyed optimism in perpetual growth achieved through ceaseless hustling, but neither did it come as a surprise. Text-messaging our way to riches isn’t going to yield durable benefits. Thinner laptop computers at lower prices won’t usher in Utopia. Obtaining upgrades to seats in business class through loyal patronage to particular airlines doesn’t elevate the soul. The project of building a stronger society, a more nourishing culture and a healthier economy is still — as it has been for quite some time, and seems likely to go on being — up in the air.
Up in the Air by Walter Kirn is published by John Murray. The film is on general release.