Touching down, taking off: ‘Turbulence’ is masterful, compelling

Soon after beginning David Szalay’s slender new novel “Turbulence,” I was reminded of Salman Rushdie’s characterization of the air as a “defining location” of the late 20th century, a “place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic,” because, as Rushdie famously said, “when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.”