Turbulence

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.

Starred review from May 15, 2019
The slender new novel from Szalay--whose most recent book, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016--is a (world) tour de force, an exploration in fiction of the concept of six degrees of separation. The novel's most direct literary model is probably Arthur Schnitzler's fin-de-siècle Vienna play La Ronde, an erotic round made up of 10 dialogues between lovers whose liaisons cross boundaries of marriage and status, with the daisy chain making its way back around to where it started. Szalay's book consists of a dozen brief, plainspoken, deceptively simple sketches, glimpses. He begins with a flight from London to Madrid, with an elderly woman on the way home from tending her cancer-stricken middle-aged son. After an incident of turbulence, she confides in a small way to her seatmate, who has spilled a soft drink on himself. He continues on from Madrid to his home in Dakar, where tragic news awaits. And so on--flight by flight, chapter by chapter, character by character, the novel circumnavigates the globe: Sao Paulo, Toronto, Saigon, Doha, Budapest...until, inevitably, we link back to London and the cancer patient with whom we began. Along the way, Szalay grants brief, poignant glimpses into a wide variety of people and circumstances: a freight pilot whose taxicab to the airport hits a pedestrian, an expatriate gardener with a secret, a melancholy oncologist and his brother the chancer, a globe-trotting journalist, an Indian city-dweller and her abused rural sister. The chapters are tiny cross sections of lives, lovingly examined under the writer's microscope. The result is a book that is high concept but--thanks to Szalay's gift for compression and the same empathetic imagination that was on display in All That Man Is--never gimmicky. Szalay has devised an ingenious way to accommodate enormous range in a miniature form. Subtle, smart--a triumph.

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June 1, 2019
It starts with some turbulence on a flight to Madrid. Two strangers, a woman returning from a visit to her ill, fiftysomething son and a proud father on his way home to his two boys, end up making a brief human connection after they are forced to confront fear. It's these connections that pull together separate lives in this powerful novel. From Dakar to S�o Paulo, Seattle to Hong Kong, Doha to Budapest, Szalay circumnavigates the world in 12 trips with different travelers, ending where he began. Although the travelers would seem to have little in common, their stories?a pilot who seems lost; a journalist without an interview; a wife considering leaving her husband; a mother who fails her daughter?share the common fate of the consequences that bedevil human connections. Szalay's spare writing packs an emotional punch, his impressionistic sketches capturing in just a few pages the pivotal moments of entire lives. Turbulence is an inventive examination of the ties that bind us together and the ease with which they can be broken.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)