In-Flight Entertainment

Starred review from December 5, 2011
If there’s a flaw to be found in Simpson’s latest collection of stories (after In the Driver’s Seat, from 2007), it’s that they’re so clever they can distract readers from the characters as they admire the author’s technique. Simpson’s prose is crisp, her insights unsparing, and her passions transparent. The title story introduces a theme that runs throughout: humankind’s heedless destruction of our environment, especially from air travel. Related themes are intergenerational blame and tension between activists and the apathetic. Characters grapple with the awareness that they and those they love are falling toward death, which makes for quiet, sorrowful stories like “Scan” and “Charm for a Friend with a Lump”; and hurtling toward annihilation, as in the terrifying postapocalyptic “Diary of an Interesting Year.” There’s also caustic humor, as shown by “I’m Sorry but I’ll have to Let You Go,” told from the POV of a self-centered jerk breaking up with his girlfriend. And as the young couple attempting to accommodate their differences in “Geography Boy” shows, there’s also love and hope. Simpson nonchalantly scrutinizes the often strained relationships between parents, and veers into adultery in the delightful “Squirrel.” These 13 new stories showcase the work of one of the finest contemporary writers in the form. Agent: The Joy Harris Literary Agency.

January 1, 2012
Short and sharp, the latest stories from the award-winning British author are as pointed as ever, with many of them pointed toward imminent ecological disaster. After establishing her reputation with domestic vignettes, Simpson (In the Driver's Seat, 2007, etc.) has more of a global scope with this collection (first published in England in 2010). She tips her hand with the opening title story, which concerns a politically complacent man who has been upgraded to first class, where the pampering temporarily soothes the disturbance he's felt from the delays of his flight. Yet he finds himself engaged in a debate over global warming (and the role air travel plays in this) and confronting his own mortality, through another, older passenger's revelation of "the other Mile High Club." That sense of mortality permeates these stories, as if the "flight" in the title were the passage from birth to death, the "entertainment" the diversions that occupy our lives, distracting us from the fact that "the world is melting and you don't care." In "The Tipping Point," an academic loses his lover to her environmental concerns, to what he dismisses as her "quasi-mystical accusatory ecospeak about the planet." "Geography Boy" is a classic Eros vs. Thanatos update, as the ardent romanticism of a fellow student can't shake a young woman's sense of environmental, apocalyptic doom. "Diary of an Interesting Year" takes the reader past that apocalypse, to the year 2040, when the diarist turns 30 (and thus would have been born when the story was written), and a prophetic scold's warning—"The earth has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed"—has presaged a future of rats, cholera and the collapse of the Internet. On the lighter side, there's "Ahead of the Pack," in which a self-proclaimed "zeitgeisty sort of person" makes a corporate pitch for investors to capitalize on global warming. Not every story has an environmental undercurrent, but it's hard to miss the warning in the collection as a whole.

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January 1, 2012

British author Simpson has published a novel, Flesh and Grass, but her four story collections (Getting a Life; Four Bare Legs in a Bed; Dear George; In the Driver's Seat) show her to be a master of the short form, winning her comparison with the likes of Flannery O'Connor and Alice Munro. The 13 quirky cautionary tales in this latest collection deal with intimate aspects of contemporary living, such as friendship, marriage, parenting, and infidelity, as well as global issues like war, climate change, and the extinction of the species. Funny, wry, wicked, painful, and written with an economy that sometimes borders on parsimony, Simpson's stories are the work of an agile artist. VERDICT Some of the stories here are akin to essays rather than fiction, others are as enigmatic and unsettling as fugues in a minor key. Best suited for readers who prefer the short story to more extensive works.--Joyce J. Townsend, Pittsburg, CA

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2011
Throughout five collections of short stories, Simpson, whose work frequently appears in the New Yorker, has proven her mastery of a difficult form. The principle of short story writing is, of course, to get in, get at it, and get out, if not with exceptional speed, at least with economy of gesture. Simpson's power in concentration is obviously instinctive, with no forced and, thus, brittle brevity leaving the reader unsated. In her latest collection, she explores moments of ordinary people's lives within airtight scenarios that quicklyand effortlessly, given her steady command of techniquepenetrate the nature of personal relationships. Squirrel sees a bored, married woman's sense of entrapment as parallel to that of the varmint her husband has captured in the garden. In three parts, Channel 17 visits a sequence of adjoining rooms in a Paris hotel to sample different stages of marital evolution. The title storyperhaps a little too longpits two men, side-by-side passengers on an overseas flight, in a dispute over global warming in the face of the death of a fellow passenger; the total experience ultimately robs the main character of his usual postflight elation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)