Candy Kirn

...What I hadn't counted on," Justin relates, "was the novelty of a religion whose sacred places—the farm in upstate New York where God and Jesus had appeared to Joseph Smith, the trail of exile across Nebraska's plains, the promised land of the Utah desert—were located in America, close by, where a person could actually see them for himself...

...He is, instead, a resident of a place he calls Airworld...

...At eleven, hands...

...And second, that the church would very much like it if this boy, who can still barely keep his thumb out of his mouth, were married by his eighteenth birthday...

...One could say the same of Walter Kirn's three fascinating and promising novels, which presage a distinguished and endlessly surprising career...

...Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own cur-rency—the token economy of airline bonus miles I've come to value more than dollars...

...What really matters to Ryan are those miles, and he begins to grow paranoid...

...His encounter with the young woman leads him to go hunting for her one night without shoes on his feet: I called out Kim's name as I circled the block...

...With his newly released third novel, Kirn spins off into yet another unexpected direction...

...Kirn follows Ryan through a week in his life...

...Now they hate their kids," he wrote of a poll about American attitudes toward teenagers...

...Thumbsucker is as sour as She Needed Me is sweet, an acrid portrait of a boy growing up confused in the morning-in-America America of the early 1980s...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Thirty-nine-year-old Walter Kirn is an uncommon writer—the only American novelist of his generation who has also done serious work as a book critic...

...There is something authentic about it, if only because it's an entirely new phenomenon...

...Kirn's characters are middle-class, middle-American strivers and their children, all hungry to believe in a gospel—whether the faith is based in Baptist or Mormon theology, or twelve-stepping, or motivational speakers, or obscure management theories...

...young novelists...

...The native Minnesotan was born to parents who became Mormons when Kirn was very young...

...And in a breathtaking though overly rushed conclusion, Kirn reveals that there's a very real reason Ryan Bing-ham feels more at home up in the air than on solid ground...

...The narrator, Justin Cobb, is the son of a sporting-goods salesman who worships Ronald Reagan and a nurse who tries to scrape the Reagan bumper sticker off the family car...

...My hometown papers are USA Today and the Wall Street Journal," Ryan tells us...

...Ryan Bingham is a thirty-five-year-old consultant who spends so much time on planes and in hotel rooms, in fact, that he no longer even has a home on the ground...

...He writes about Reagan voters, the world of Bush Red...

...But the novel is more than a parodic portrait of corporate flapdoodle, and Ryan Bingham is more than a stick-figure Bobo...

...Up in the Air is a sensational caricature of a moment in time—a moment that may already have passed between the day Kirn finished his manuscript and the book's publication, given the current atmosphere of economic gloom...

...Once he reaches that landmark, Ryan intends to quit his job helping other companies fire their midlevel employees while dazzling the newly unemployed with noxious pep talks about the glorious future: "Our role is to make limbo tolerable, to ferry wounded souls across the river of dread and humiliation and self-doubt to the point at which hope's bright shore is dimly visible, and then to stop the boat and make them swim while we row back to the palace...

...Please...

...The all-night coffee shops served Egg Beaters...

...The entire Cobb family—father Mike, mother Audrey, Justin and his younger brother Joel—finds itself entranced by the promise of domestic peace offered by two elders of the Mormon church...

...Bitter, funny, cool-eyed, and unsettling, Thumb-sucker is a memorable novel but not at all a likable one—and the always honest Kirn does nothing to make his annoying characters any more ingratiating than one imagines their real-life models must be...

...Kirn absolutely will not stand for earnest Big Think about the Nature of America at the Turn of the Century...

...After quoting a particularly ominous passage from Susan Faludi's Stiffed about how the post-industrial economy had literally led to impotence, Kirn memorably snapped: "Oh, knock it off, Nurse Ratched...

...This is the place to see America," Ryan says of Airworld...

...If I were fifteen now and thus charged with moral corruption, I'd take a long, hard look at my prosecutors, beginning with, but not limited to, their Role-Model-in-Chief...

...It was crucial...

...Ryan is onto something when he celebrates Airworld...

...They sold us Route 66 T-shirts, and they took credit cards...

...His family is trying to drag him back to earth to involve him in his emotionally fragile sister's wedding, but he's frantically trying to stay airborne because he is just about to become only the tenth passenger in the history of Great West Airlines to deposit one million miles into his frequent-flyer account...

...Up in the Air is a satirical portrait of a turn-of-the-millennium Corporate Man...

...Pulled this way and that—by a father who wants to hunt and fish with his boy like in the old days and a mother full of postmodern homilies learned at the drug-treatment center where she works— Justin can't stop sucking his thumb even into his teens and eventually finds relief only in Ritalin...

...Why has someone in India been issued tickets using his frequent-flyer account...

...Justin hopes his new creed will give him the strength to get off Ritalin...

...Kirn, again mining territory untouched by other novelists of his age, offers a careful and attentive portrait of the Cobb family's conversion...

...Bill Clinton's America may be prosperous, but morally exemplary it's not...

...He has offered careful and nuanced criticism of such efforts at serious and ambitious fiction as David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter, but has always taken on the sacred cows of New York publishing when he feels he has to...

...The generation that gave us instant divorce, pot, speed and insider trading is worried about the moral failings of the young...

...The hitchhikers didn't tell us stories, they just slept, and the gas stations were self-service, no toothless grease monkeys...

...I could feel pieces of glass and sidewalk grit nicking the soles of my feet, but I kept going...

...Is the buccaneering head of Great West Airlines doing everything he can to hinder and delay Ryan's achievement...

...Along the way he visits with a Peter Drucker-like consultant whose gnomic utterances he wishes to market as part of an overall office-design "environment"—but must excuse himself when the old man wants Ryan to join him and his wife in a threesome...

...He comes at things from a perspective markedly different from most John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...In Airworld, people become immediately intimate, like travelers on board the ocean liners of old...

...They have no reason to lie to each other because they expect nothing of one another and want nothing from one another...

...I walked for half an hour, trying to ignore the pain and thinking that if I absorbed enough of it God would help me find her...

...Anyone who read that book and then picked up Kirn's second, Thumbsucker, upon its publication in 1999 was bound to be shocked...

...At seven weeks the fetus forms eyelids...

...He contrasts it with a disillusioning trip he took with a girlfriend after college where they tried to play On the Road to disastrous effect: Too many movies had turned the deserts to sets...

...His first novel, the 1992 She Needed Me, is about a desperate young pro-lifer who makes eye contact during a protest at an abortion clinic with a desperate young pregnant woman and grows determined to save her unborn baby...

...Weaver's struggle for belief and his attempt to live a genuinely Christian life make him one of the most touching characters in contemporary fiction...

...In an astonishing oped published in the New York Times in 1997, Kirn offered a definitive criticism of what he called the Crybaby Boomers...

...Who ordered a remote-control lawnmower with Ryan's American Express miles card, forcing Ryan to cancel the card just when he needs more miles...

...And though his writing is shot through with disaffection for the Latter-day Saints and their cosmology, Kirn's upbringing has given him a powerful sense of an America seldom seen in present-day fiction...

...She Needed Me is nearly unique in attempting a sympathetic and fully imagined portrait of a born-again Christian...

...For we learn that solid ground once proved far less solid and far more dangerous to Ryan than even a plane caught in severe turbulence...

...First the members of the 60s generation hated their parents...

...But on a trip with other Mormon youth he discovers two troublesome things: First, that faith alone cannot actually alleviate the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder...

...And everywhere, from dustiest Nebraska to swampiest Louisiana, folks were expecting us, the road-trip pilgrims...

...My literature . . . is the bestseller or the near-bestseller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance, and the goodness of common people in small towns...

...He's so good at it that he is booked to speak about his experiences at GoalQuest, a mammoth motivational convention in Las Vegas whose starring attraction is Norman Schwarzkopf...