Officially, Ryan Bingham, the philosophizing antihero of Walter Kirn's witty and deftly excoriating satire Up In The Air, resides in Denver, where he works as a "career transition counselor" (in other words, he fires people) for a business-management company. But, like many American businessmen, his true residency is the first-class cabin of an airplane—a hermetic and cozily predictable environment in which cities like Denver are merely faceless hubs with suite hotels and chain restaurants. In this "nation within a nation," which Bingham christens "Airworld," the hometown newspapers are USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, the climate is always temperate, and the currency is frequent-flier miles, which are dangled like a carrot on a stick. Bingham's free thoughts invariably turn toward an impending triumph: At the tail end of his ambitious itinerary (eight cities in six days), he will reach the magical million-mile plateau. And what then? Bingham plans to get out of the firing business and work for MythTech, a secretive Omaha-based marketing company that engenders the sort of paranoia reserved for covert government agencies in post-Watergate thrillers. He also wants to publish The Garage, a book of abstract strategies he hopes will attract the New Agey cults that rally behind popular business manuals. Bingham's pursuit of the millionth mile drives the novel forward, but as he zigzags across North America, Kirn litters his path with mounting inconveniences and major catastrophes, including a stolen credit card that keeps his precious miles hanging in the balance. Up In The Air grows increasingly surreal as it progresses, ruthlessly chipping away at the controlled, uniform surroundings that support Bingham's tenuous grip on his sanity. Kirn's loping plot mechanics are difficult to navigate at times, but his wry and incisive voice never falters as he delves deep inside the character's mind, using second-person narration to place readers in the plane seat next to Bingham. In many ways, Bingham seems like a natural extension of the travel writer in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, but instead of making an airplane seem more like home, he finds that its uniform comforts are home, far preferable to the relative chaos on the ground. An advanced, self-aware citizen of the skies, Bingham shows little interest in his real family, but he's perfected relationships at 30,000 feet, relishing their compact proportions like he relishes a sealed airline snack box. With only slight exaggeration, Up In The Air reveals a transient culture of frequent fliers who live like nomads with no use for the natural world.