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Editor’s Note: Our book reviews can not be bought. We only review books that we and other tomatoes have read and think you’ll enjoy. And while this section may occasionally be sponsored by a publisher or author, it does not guarantee that the book will be reviewed here, unless it stands on its own merits.
“Love in Mid Air” is Not for the Faint of Heart“Love in Mid Air” is Not for the Faint of Heart
Reviewer: Betsy Cox
Author Kim Wright crafts a novel length narrative that depicts the disappointment, invisibility and discontentment of marriage - every marriage, on every street, in every city, suburb and rural country road, and the compromises women make or break in order to hang in, or bail out.
Wright’s main character, Elyse, begins her first person journey on a plane where she meets Gerry, a successful business man. Gerry sweeps her off her feet, but only because Elyse is prime to be swept. At the onset, the novel seems to be about their extra marital affair. Instead, this is one of a handful of themes that jog the novel forward. Wright also devotes meticulous effort to exposing the relationships between Elyse’s circle of friends. She offers profoundly accurate insight into the dynamics of a certain style of woman, one who is married and indulgently bitchy toward her mate because she will neither change him nor leave him. Wright’s female characters share a collective sigh over missed opportunities that now seem, closing in on 40, irretrievable.
Elyse’s husband Phil and the other male characters in the novel are the author’s weak spot. Like phoning from the subway, dead zones riddle Wright’s male characters. And while that may have been calculated, she imposes such strict emotional limits on her men, they appear on the page if not intellectually disabled, than obscenely, emotionally delayed. Wright never reveals more or less of her male characters and keeps them well restrained from reader likeability. One hopes that fractioned vantage point will not be persistent in her future work.
For a first novel the work is tightly crafted, well paced and consistent. Wright applies a formulaic “reveal” at each chapter’s end which begins to feel calculated (forgive the pun) and creates a pavlovian expectancy in the reader. The work is intelligent and intensely thoughtful. The author hones in on the placement and perspective of women at a point in time in their marriage, in their individual lives, and the degree of internal bleeding incurred after throwing the dreams of their youth under the bus.
This is a story about yearning for more, for something different, threaded into the minutia of suburban life. Wright brilliantly captures like a photograph the solitary, inevitable and nameless moment which passes, putting to rest our unforced, un-manipulated youth and with it, the belief that there’s still time to become an astronaut or the president. Wright does an admirable job at walking the reader through the stages of death and dying and offers an element of rebirth at novel’s end. I hope to read more of Kim Wright. I hope the minutia she uses as a nail to plant the reader into her work can eventually find some levity, taking her readers from mid air to full flight. Based on the merits of her first novel, I think Wright is more than capable of pulling it off.
Love In Mid Air is available at booksellers everywhere.
Betsy Cox is a freelance writer and editor. She is currently working on a collection of short stories. You can contact Betsy at: betsycox828@gmail.com.
