It’s possible to say something about someone’s economic and class status—their privilege, to lay down a more woke signifier—by their familiarity with international airport codes. Yes, you know LAX and JFK. But what about GRU (São Paulo) and YYZ (Toronto) and SGN (Ho Chi Minh City) and DOH (Doha, Qatar)?
The stories in Turbulence, David Szalay’s new novel, move between many of these cities and others. His chapters have terse, abbreviated titles: “LGW-MAD,” “DSS-GRU,” “SEA-HKG.” There are takeoffs and landings. Cocktails are stirred with little plastic straws, like the drink in the indelible William Eggleston photograph.Once upon a time, airplane novels tended to be hairy-chested blockbusters like Arthur Hailey’s Airport(1968). Men with names like Mel Bakersfield struggled to keep the runways open, and their women satisfied, during major snowstorms. These baggy monsters left big flatulent exhaust trails in their wake. Szalay’s trim new book instead puts one in mind of what Eastern Airlines used to (fraudulently) call a Whisperjet. Turbulence is a sleek machine with a cool tone. Each chapter picks up from the last, but presents a new protagonist, as if a moral baton were being passed. The chapters come full circle. In the end, the book resembles a snake that’s begun to consume its own tail. Szalay (pronounced SOL-loy) is a gifted writer. Born in Canada, he grew up in England and now lives in Budapest. He is the author of four previous novels, including All That Man Is, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. I admired that novel a great deal. Turbulence, flying higher, occupies thinner air. It’s a consistently interesting novel, but its 12 chapters—they were originally commissioned by the BBC as radio pieces—race past so quickly (each is around 10 pages) that you’re back on the ground, your ears fizzing, before you’ve had a chance to finish your little bag of pretzels.
Szalay has a lot of things on his mind in Turbulence. He’s interested in some of the same concerns Diane Johnson expressed in Natural Opium, her classic collection of travel writing. Johnson wrote that she’s often tearful while flying because “there’s something about the neutral solitude, and the feeling of being in mortal peril, suspended outside the world, that introduces some dramatic process of catharsis.” In one chapter, a woman flies from London, where she visits a grown son with prostate cancer, back home to Madrid. On the way, she falls ill while sitting next to a wealthy man from Senegal. He will board a flight home only to learn his son has been hit and perhaps killed by a taxi. In the succeeding chapter, a man who was a passenger in that doomed taxi, a German pilot, will fly to São Paulo and have a brief sexual encounter with a Brazilian journalist. That journalist will fly to Toronto to interview a famous writer. And so on. One woman, in her first-class pod on a Delta plane, watches a televised map of her flight’s progress and senses not merely her own loneliness but her own insignificance. “On the map the plane was marked by a plane-shaped symbol that would be, if it were to scale, about a thousand kilometers long. In fact it was hard to understand quite what an insignificant speck this airplane was, in terms of the size of the ocean it was flying over, in terms of the quantity of emptiness that surrounded it on all sides.” The early stories in Turbulence tend to be about cosmopolitan people with resources. In the later stories, that begins to change. People travel for more desperate reasons. You sense that the first half of this novel is about the world as seen from above a well-appointed dinner table. In the second half, we see that same table from below. This view is not as pleasing. The underside of the world’s table is where people have placed their dried snot and chewed gum. In one chapter, a day nurse in Delhi is accused by a wealthy man of a small act of thievery. She must fly to the Indian state of Kerala to visit her sister, who has been badly beaten by her husband. Her entire life dwindles to a seat in steerage. In the following chapter, we meet her husband, a gardener to a wealthy woman in Qatar, who has secrets of his own. About the wealthy woman, we read: “Mrs. Ursula was his ‘sponsor,’ as they said here—which meant, more or less, his owner. She kept his passport and his work permit, and he was unable to travel anywhere or do anything without her express permission.” After years of service, he has never been inside her house.
Szalay interrogates cultural certainties and insecurities. Two of the final stories are about a young woman, born in London, who now lives in Budapest. She tells her parents she’s going to marry a man, a veterinarian, who is an asylum-seeking Syrian and a Muslim. The woman’s mother had been “cautiously proud” to know they were dating; it bolstered her own “liberal bona fides.” But marriage? The man is from a country so troubled that commercial flights cannot pass over it. Her father puts it most baldly, asking her if he isn’t “some Islamic nutter.” Jack London used to pay Sinclair Lewis to come up with plot ideas for him. There are enough plot fragments in Turbulence to suggest many novels. Szalay could set up shop on eBay. I wish he’d carried some of them a bit further. These melancholy flights have a lot to say about human impermanence. We may never, as Seals & Crofts sang, pass this way again.
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