Missed connections
“Air travel,” writes Don DeLillo, reminds us “who we are”. It also reminds us that we’re pretty awful. David Szalay’s latest collection perfectly captures the terminal ache of those vast hangars, the airless sheen of duty-free.
Set in or around airports, each story follows a character from one international destination to another. The mother of a man with prostate cancer drinks Bloody Marys on her way to Barajas. A writer lands in Seattle to meet her new grandson, born blind. An oncologist plays golf in Vietnam. A woman arrives in Kerala to rescue her sister from an abusive marriage. These are dark stories, and Szalay’s focus is a serious one — in terms of his ambition and his content.
If the 2016 Booker-shortlisted All that Man Is (2016) was an attempt “to evoke the fluidity and complexity of contemporary Europe, its feel and texture”, Turbulence takes a global canvas — and in a peculiarly frightening way.
The stories focus on defining moments in characters’ lives — birth, death, loss, infidelity — but without sentiment. Szalay is good at hurt. But there is wry humour, too, partly caused by the stories’ titles. The defamiliarised capitals of HKG-SEN, YYZ-SEA and LGW to the felicitously named MAD feel like a code to crack — and the playfulness continues in the collection’s cliffhanger construction.
Each story takes its cue from a character one has encountered in the last one, but abandons the previous storyline, making the whole thing feel like a series of mid-flight altitude drops. Indeed, one of this collection’s standout qualities is how it conjures the experience of travel itself in all its banality. A woman turns to the aeroplane window only to find “her own face in the dark plastic, deeply shadowed like a landscape at sundown”.
Back on earth, we are late for a different plane. A journalist sits in an Uber after a one-night stand. She views the “rainy, grey cityscape”, leaning “pointlessly forward in her seat to look out through the windscreen at the mass of tail lights ahead”, watching the plane she wants to catch rise into the air. Missed connections haunt this writing — a fact that is central to its structure.
Turbulence is the second of Szalay’s works that resists continuous narrative. All that Man Is tried to explore “what kind of meaning could be achieved by the relation of one story to another”. Turbulence uses a similar formal arrangement to explore what “kinds of feeling” can be achieved by such relations — and sets this against a background of globalisation.
As Szalay consistently uproots his reader, proliferating characters and locations, the collection could be seen as an experiment in the limits of sympathy. There are “not that many people in the world who actually care about you all that much”, muses one character. As the narrative shifts from one space to another, the book becomes a practical test case for the way in which we feel (or fail to feel) for others. Such calculated neutrality is the perfect foil to some heartstoppingly beautiful prose. Things in this elegant, frightening, politically charged book fall apart. They also lift off.
Telegraph Media Group