LOVE IN MID AIR

by Kim Wright

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KIRKUS REVIEW

Unhappily married woman jumps into a life-changing affair with a man she meets on a plane.

With a successful dentist husband, adorable young daughter and close-knit group of female friends, Elyse, like so many heroines who have it all, could not be more miserable. She’s stifled by her suburban life, and she cannot communicate with her taciturn hubby, Phil. She fortunately happens to have a creative outlet (she’s a talented potter) and it is during a flight for work that she finds herself seated next to Gerry, an attractive Boston-based investment banker who, like her, has a spouse at home. The two strangers have an instant rapport, and back at home in Charlotte, N.C., she calls him. That leads to an erotically charged encounter in New York, followed by brief monthly meetings that help to convince her that marrying Phil was a mistake. But while Gerry certainly seems besotted with Elyse, he offers her no promises. Phil, unaware of her infidelity but sensing her growing unease with their life, agrees to marriage counseling, as long as they use his best friend Jeff, their minister, as mediator. Big mistake. Elyse goes along with it while mentally making plans to leave him. Meanwhile, her affluent inner circle senses something is amiss, with her best friend Kelly, herself in a less-than-ideal marriage, feeling threatened by Elyse’s risky behavior. Knowing full well how her actions will impact her entire community, Elyse bides her time, until a shocking act of violence forces a decision. So will she choose her husband, her lover or neither? Sharply written and emotionally accessible, Wright’s debut offers a clear-eyed taste of hope without letting anyone, especially Elyse, off the hook.

A modern take on adultery that does not shy away from the costs—and benefits—of a post-marriage life.


           Review

        Love in Mid Air

          by Kim Wright



Elyse Bearden is flying back from a pottery show in Phoenix when fate seats her next to Gerry Kincaid.

He’s an investment banker who climbs mountains on weekends. He’s married to a woman he met “in the drop-add line freshman year at UMass.” He has three kids. Oh, and he’s hubba-hubba handsome.

Elyse is also married. Nine years. One child.

How happy is her marriage?

Well, she opens her copy of Redbook to an article called “48 Things to Do to a Man in Bed”, and when Gerry suggests they each write down three things they’d like to try, she’s game.

And then she confesses: “Marriage is the only thing in my whole life I’ve ever failed at.”

Dallas. A two-hour layover. In the Traveler’s Chapel, they kiss --- “one of those kisses that gives you the feeling that you’re falling, that the elevator floor has dropped out from beneath you.” And then…. separate planes.

Chapter two: Charlotte, North Carolina. The morning routine. How grim? Elyse's husband Phil, a dentist, likes to communicate via Post-It notes. Not that he’s much duller than the husbands of her friends. Elyse and her pals have a running joke: “Some Sunday we should all go home from church with the wrong husbands.” How long will it take for the men to notice?

Better question: How long will it take for Elyse and Gerry to start meeting for wild nights in cities other than their own?

Shocked? I understand. Sorry you’re going to miss out on a highly amusing, provocative, hatchet job of a novel.

Hatchet job?

Kim Wright has spent two decades writing about food, wine and travel, and she has --- for 18 years --- written the annual Fodor's Walt Disney World with Kids, and she has even tapped out some erotica, but the most important preparation she did for LOVE IN MID AIR (there is also aKindle edition) was to get divorced.

And she learned: Once you’re wearing the Scarlet D in a small town, people talk. About their marriages. Their sex lives. Their lost dreams. If you take notes --- and Kim Wright did --- you get a remarkable survey of the state of marriage in your zip code. And, if you’re Kim Wright, you come to a few conclusions. Here’s one:

There were very few books that dealt with the subject of divorce in a realistic manner. Most of the books were about men leaving women, even though it’s more statistically likely for a woman to initiate divorce, especially after the age of 40. And there was often some sort of quick fix --- the deserted woman ended up falling in love with her attorney or some hunky handyman who showed up to help at her new house. I resented this whole idea that divorce is about swapping one man for another --- ideally as fast as possible --- with little exploration of the affect a woman’s divorce has on her friends and the whole social web.

Here’s another, which isn’t stated directly, but which informs most of this novel:

Most men are assholes. Which doesn’t mean they’re cruel, sexist jerks who use their economic power to turn their suburban castles into detention centers with their spouses as inmates --- Ibsen’s “Doll’s House”, updated. It’s mostly that they’re anxious to settle. They take a woman’s silence for happiness. Their idea of bliss is boredom. And --- but if you’re a woman with kids and a suburban life and church and a book group and, once a week, white wine-filled lunches with friends, you don’t need me to go on. (And if you’re a man reading this, congratulations --- you know you’re no oppressor.)

Is LOVE IN MID AIR a latter day feminist screed? Not at all. It’s fun. It’s stupid --- I mean, on the male side, like having your husband agree to marriage therapy as long as it’s with the minister of your church, who happens to be one of hubby’s best friends. And it’s hot sex --- did I mention that Wright has written erotica? --- with a man who will never leave his wife.

This home run of a first novel succeeds because it plays fair. Here’s a world, here are the people, here is the misery they call life. And then here are the Unintended Consequences, which are the real point of the novel. And here is a very wise writer, seeing Elyse’s reach for happiness with deadly clarity.

“The price for enjoying anything is using it up,” she has Elyse say. “Every pleasure eventually slips through our hands, and perhaps that is the greatest pleasure of all, the feeling of something slipping through your hands.”

Now aren’t you glad you didn’t run away before Elyse and Gerry started to commit --- yes, I guess it is --- adultery?

© Copyright 2010, Head Butler, Inc. All rights reserved.

Reviewed by Jesse Kornbluth on July 14, 2011



    About Love in Mid Air

Elyse Bearden's marriage is already in trouble when she meets a handsome stranger on her flight home from Arizona. Her husband, a doting father to their young daughter but an inattentive husband, has been communicating with her via post-it note for far too long and seems content with having sex in the kiss-less "X" position once a week.

So it's not surprising when she starts a torrid affair with the man she met in row 29 to try to recapture the excitement she feels is sorely missing from her marriage and her life in general.

As some of her closest friends begin to realize that their seemingly harmless weekly banter about unhappy marriages has gone to a whole new level for Elyse, it stirs up emotions in each one of them that they'd rather not deal with. Because it's one thing to be unhappy, but it's a whole other thing to actually do something about it.

Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright: Book Review

               Elyse Bearden is normal. She leads a simple life as a housewife, mother, and potter. She has luncheons and her book club with ‘the girls,’ and lives everyday almost exactly the same. She could be any American woman picked at random except for one thing, a chance encounter.

                As she is flying home, Elyse meets Gerry, a married man, who shares her burden of normalcy. They quickly strike up a conversation that soon takes on a flirtatious nature. Elyse’s life changes there on that plane. Her seemingly normal life has suddenly taken on a dangerous and exciting edge. Somewhere above the roofs of all the other American housewives, she breaks free from the mold. Elyse and Gerry share an airplane aisle and a treacherous kiss. She is left standing dumbfounded in the airport with nothing but Gerry’s phone number and a dangerous kiss on her lips. Elyse must decide if she wants to keep her ‘holly housewife’ life or make a phone call that could change everything.

  As the story unfolds Elyse and Gerry begin a torrid affair that slowly begins to set Elyse free from her bonds of normalcy. As she comes into her own as a woman, people in her life attempt to pull her back to the rule of Southern suburbia. In some ways, her husband, longtime friend Kelly, and the other ladies in the book club must keep Elyse’s existence the same, in order to maintain the semblance of normalcy in their own lives. Elyse must make the decision to risk everything for freedom or go back to her regular life in order to stick to the status quo.

Love in Mid Air weaves a fascinating character study of women in suburbia, some willing to stick to their regular lives, if only for appearance sakes, and others willing to risk everything for love and independence. The story is a constant page turner that I couldn’t manage to put down. In a way the book is like watching a train wreck: something bad is inevitably going to happen, but we must watch the fascinating process leading up to it. I usually have a problem with book endings but I think the conclusion of ‘Love in Mid Air’ is spot-on. The last chapter is absolutely brilliant in the way it jumps between past, present and future all in the same sentence. The only advice I would give to Ms. Wright is to develop her minor characters a bit more, to give us more background. I believe this book will appeal to every woman wondering if their lives will ever change. It just goes to show that all it takes is the right seat on an airplane.