There’s a funny, revealing moment in Alain de Botton’s new book, “A Week at the Airport,” when he discovers that the largest bookstore at Heathrow Airport, in London, does not stock his books. He decides to have a conversation with Manishankar, the shop’s manager, about what else might be available.
I explained,” Mr. de Botton writes, “that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”
Manishankar, confused, wonders if Mr. de Botton might want a magazine instead.
Mr. de Botton, of course, has just delivered a not bad description of his own oeuvre. From “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” the book that put him on the map in 1997, to last year’s “Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” he has consistently issued books that are intimate, fastidious and shyly geeky, books that tinker with the profound. He’s what you’d get if Linus, from “Peanuts,” grew up to read philosophy at Oxford.
That quotation is telling, too, because it underscores what’s off-putting about Mr. de Botton’s work. It can be precious, humorless and perceptively self-satisfied. His coolly inquisitive voice sometimes feels laid-on, as if its placidity were covering up more roiling emotions.
(How roiling? When the excellent critic Caleb Crain reviewed “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” negatively in The New York Times Book Review, Mr. de Botton caused a stir when he replied online: “I will hate you till the day you die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.”)
If you haven’t read Mr. de Botton’s work, “A Week in the Airport” is a good place to start. It’s a slim book, as intense as a volume of poems, and among the best things he’s done. The accompanying photographs, by Richard Baker, are haunting in their suggestiveness. This pair is a James Agee and Walker Evans for the Radiohead era.
“A Week at the Airport” details the time Mr. de Botton recently spent as a sort of writer in residence at Heathrow, at the invitation of BAA, the airport’s corporate owner. Heathrow, historically, has not been an oft celebrated place. The dramatist Dennis Potter said of it in the 1970s, “I did not fully understand the dread term ‘terminal illness’ until I saw Heathrow for myself.”
But Heathrow in 2008 opened a gleaming new passenger hub, Terminal 5, and Mr. de Botton, — though determined not to flack for BAA — cannot help being awestruck by it. He ignores the flight cancellations and lost-baggage nightmares that plagued Terminal 5 upon its opening, settling instead on the place’s physical beauty.
“The undulating glass-and-steel structure was the largest building in the land, 40 meters tall and 400 long, the size of four football pitches, and yet the whole conveyed a sense of continuous lightness and ease, like an intelligent mind engaging effortlessly with complexity,” he writes. “The blinking of its ruby lights could be seen at dusk from Windsor Castle, the terminal’s forms giving shape to the promises of modernity.”
The best bits in “A Week at the Airport” are stray meditations on other things: airport food, hotels, security lines, luggage carousels, the proximity we feel in these places to our own deaths. These topics have been trampled, again and again, by novelists, comics, poets and hip-hop lyricists. But Mr. de Botton carves out a space that feels his own.
He catches the “hesitant kiss" that the rubber mouth of the motorized walkway makes with an incoming plane. Those who complain about lively, gaudy shopping malls in airports (Mr. de Botton likes them) are overly concerned with “the desire to maintain dignity in the face of death.” The wealthy carry the least luggage, he notes, and he generally writes absurdly well about class.
“A Week at the Airport” is a thoroughly tender book. Considering divorced parents and their children, who are forced to shuttle by plane back and forth between one another, he writes: “We may spend the better part of our professional lives projecting strength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vulnerability.”
Tony Hiss’s new book, “In Motion: The Experience of Travel,” is macro where Mr. de Botton’s is micro, and hopelessly gauzy where Mr. de Botton’s is exacting. In the absence of Lunesta, or a different type of sleeping pill, it will do for your next flight.
“In Motion” is a meditation on what Mr. Hiss, who was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker, calls “Deep Travel”: his term for those moments when we’re most fully awake and observant and appreciative, struck by what he calls “inner lightning.” Deep Travel, he writes, “has some of the qualities of sunlight after rain — details stand out.”
It’s possible to understand what Mr. Hiss is talking about without feeling an urge to read 300 pages that hector us to, as Ram Dass put it more succinctly, be here now. By the end, a self-help tone swallows the book whole. Mr. Hiss prints charts he suggests we take along with us when we travel, “for making notes about the comings and goings of Deep Travel during a trip.” Carrying these charts will squelch any possible chance of actual Deep Travel, I suspect, as effectively as toting a 3-D camcorder, a squealing toddler and a pet monkey.
Mr. Hiss’s sentences are stem-winders, long, country roads that lead into bogs instead of clearings. When he suggests that Deep Travel is possible anywhere and anytime, his examples are painful. Observing a bagel shop awning in his neighborhood, he ponders, “When had it first occurred to people that they could move shadows around without the use of clouds or hills or trees, and could extend shade beyond the edge of a building and out over part of a street?”
Mr. Hiss’s book — a dead thing about being alive — moves on to ideas like creating “longer nows” in our lives, which sounds like tantric sex without the good bits. Reading “In Motion” is among the longest nows you’ll experience this year.
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