UP the book

So I’m continuing my project of reading the books on which the still lingering Holiday movies are based. Walter Kirn’s UP IN THE AIR is very different from and much funnier than the movie. The book’s narrator (the Clooney character in the movie) gives a rather urbane and quite sustained semi-Porcherist commentary on the sad and ridiculous excesses of our techno-virtual displaced society.

For example: In truth, I just don’t care much about money. We always had enough when I grew up, and then one day, when my father went bust, we didn’t. Not a lot changed. The house and car were paid for, we never ate out, and we always shopped garage sales for everything but major appliances, which my father knew how to repair. We threw a few more garage sales. It’s like that in Minnesota., outside the cities. A town finds a certain level in its spending and almost everyone clusters around the mean so that no one has to feel bad if bad luck comes. (So that’s the more egalitarian—rural but not usually agrarian—America for which Dr. Pat Deneen and others want us, with some very good reasons, to have nostalgia.)

And on his failed attempt to impress a girl with Route 66 America: I failed. Nothing there. That America was finished. Too many movies had turned the deserts to sets. The all-night coffee shops served Egg Beaters. And everywhere, from dustiest Nebrask to swampiest Louisiana, folks were expecting us, the road-trip pilgrims . . . .The real America had left the ground and we’d spent the summer circling a ruin. Not even that. An imitation ruin. (So it seems to me that a real new Tocqueville from France [and not Bernard-Henri] would have noticed stuff like that. This is not Porcherism, of course; today’s sophisticated agrarians don’t focus their nostalgia on finding oneself through a road trip. I myself am more about nostalgia for diner America—displayed, for example, in Levinson’s great movie DINER.)

Finallly, a genuinely unfashionable confession: “The radio is turned to Christian rock. Christian rock is a private vice of mine; it’s as well-produced as the real thing, but more melodic, with audible, rhymed lyrics. The artists have real talent, and they’re devoted.” (This, of course, contradicts what Hank tells Bobby [who ran away with a Christian rock band] on KING OF THE HILL: “Son, you’re not making Christianity better, you’re making rock-and-roll worse.” But I’m up for anyone—especially someone living the virtual life—who sees real talent and devotion in the best efforts of our evangelicals to share their faith.)