Spinning on that dizzy edge

A modern take on La Ronde: a novel in the form of twelve short stories linked by airplane trips. Each has a main character who meets the main character of the next story. A pilot has a brief fling with a journalist in Brazil; the journalist flies to Toronto to interview a writer; the writer flies to Seattle where she meets two of her fans; one of the fans flies to Hong Kong, and so forth.

The blurb says each meeting causes a ripple effect as they change each other's lives, but that's not actually what happens in many of them. Some are minor chance encounters, some are present at a crucial moment in someone else's life but don't directly affect it, and some are important encounters but those are the ones where the people have pre-existing relationships. Most of the characters are disconnected, discontented, and lonely, despite the literal connections they have in a six degrees of separation way; the only character who seems happy and is focused on the people they love is about to get hit with a terrible tragedy that's someone else's traffic delay.

As we go from person to person, we get to see the characters from different angles, and understand things about them that others don't. The pilot, who in his story was wondering what would have happened if his younger sister hadn't died in a childhood accent, asks his one night stand how old she is. She says 33, which is the age his sister would have been. But she has no idea of any of this, and when he doesn't reply she thinks he's fallen asleep.

There's an impressively diverse set of locales and characters, sketched-in but real-feeling; I knew we were in Delhi before it was stated just from the description of the air. The emotional tenor is a bit distanced and chilly. Overall it reminded me of Raymond Carver, but with less striking prose.

Szalay won last year's Booker Prize for Flesh, a novel which sounds really unappealing.