May 20, 2019
In Szalay’s latest, after the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted All That Man Is, two air travelers’ lives briefly intersect in the opening chapter on a flight from London to Madrid. A diabetic English woman returning to her home in Madrid from London, where she was visiting her son, who was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, faints in her seat during a bout of turbulence, and the Ghanaian businessman next to her finds help. This encounter stays with Cheikh, the businessman, as he arrives home in Dakar to news of a tragic car accident in his family. The book continues with a collection of 12 such fleeting encounters, each, relay-like, linked to the previous by a tangential point of intersection, and each driven and inspired by the liminality of air travel. A witness to the accident in Dakar lands in São Paulo, where he sleeps with a journalist who must catch a flight to Toronto the next morning to interview a writer. The writer flies to Seattle for her grandchild’s birth, where by chance she meets a woman from Hong Kong who is caught at a marital crossroads. Szalay is a pithy writer, capable of startling insights into the nature of loneliness and the human desire for companionship, though there is something thin and underdeveloped to the conceit of this novel. This is a somewhat disappointing effort from a talented writer.