Full Review: "Airplane Rides"

The unreliable narrator is a cornerstone of fiction - the storyteller who lies, fails to fully understand, or misrepresents (perhaps unwittingly) the story he tells. The author of Airplane Rides (Jake Alexander - a pseudonym) insists his ten stories from airplane trips are true, but even so it seems early on that he doesn't fully understand either them or himself.

The prologue begins with a dinner table conversation that leads to a one night stand with a potentially underage model, introducing the lonely and appetite-driven life he leads as a road warrior.  In the first story, a mediation on his Catholic upbringing morphs into a plane conversation with an Orthodox Jew who calmly insists that disowning a daughter who married out of the faith (she would be dead to me, he says) was just as appropriate as insisting on monogamy in any couples relationship. Alexander has no meaningful response to this nonsense, and actually seems to buy the argument. In the second story he gives a hand job - under a blanket, right on the plane - to a professional woman who is unhappily married but newly excited by a couple of recent extramarital affairs. The dialogue could have come from a movie.

In the third chapter, however, he starts to glimpse outcomes of this behavior, as he chats with a famous defense lawyer who ruined a good marriage with too much high-paying work of questionable moral value. And then in the fourth chapter he plays therapist to a serially adulterous younger woman who had been sexually manipulated as a teenager, trying to convince her to not let the same thing happen to her own daughters.

Alcohol, religious guilt, transient relationships, a couple interludes of self-loathing, and a description of a neighbor (female!) who delighted in seducing naive women into his bed. Is this any way to live? Brief recollections of people who really meant something to him leak into these conversations, but in the initial stories we think that there are no roots or traditions for him to lean on, no meaning or ultimate goal.

But slowly, still interwoven with chess moves, suspicion and casual sex, his behavior starts to change. He keeps in touch with a minister he met who was having a crisis of faith. He insists that a young runaway return home. He comforts a woman who had recently escaped an abusive marriage.

I'm astonished people talked to him so candidly on plane flights, so I'm still not sure these stories are true, but the writing is skillful, evocative, eloquent at showing what a life like this must be like, and also what a transition like this must be like. (Come to think of it, would an investment banker really write so well? Hmmm...) The narrator, in short, remains unreliable, but he's beginning to wake up, and whether or not these stories are "true," they are certainly thought-provoking.

Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.