Luminous Airplanes: A Novel

By Paul La Farge

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A decade after the publication of Haussmann, or the Distinction, his acclaimed novel about nineteenth-century Paris, Paul La Farge turns his imagination to America at the dawn of the twenty-first century in Luminous Airplanes.

In September 2000, a young computer programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died. He must return to Thebes, a town so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language, and clean out the house where his family has lived for five generations. While he's there, he remembers San Francisco in the wild years of the Internet boom, and begins an ill-advised romance in which past and present are dangerously confused.

La Farge's Luminous Airplanes is an expansive, hugely imaginative, and very funny novel about history, love, memory, family, flying machines, dance music, and the end of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781429949910

Paul La Farge

Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York.

Book preview

ONE

CONTACT WITH OTHER WORLDS

I had just come home from a festival in Nevada, the theme of which was Contact with Other Worlds, when my mother, or, I should say, one of my mothers, called to tell me that my grandfather had died.

I’ve been trying to reach you for days, she said. Where were you?

I told her I’d been camping. I didn’t tell her I was at a pagan celebration where people danced around bonfires, a kind of dress rehearsal for the end of the world. I didn’t mention the huge glowing fish or the women with wings.

Celeste told me that my grandfather had died on Thursday morning, around the time when I was leaving San Francisco in my friends’ big white RV. My uncle Charles found him collapsed at his desk. He’d had a heart attack, the doctor said. His death was quick and probably not painful.

That’s good, I said, still dazed from the drugs I’d taken at the festival and the nights I’d gone without sleep. When is the funeral?

"It was this morning."

You had it without me?

We couldn’t wait, Celeste said in the tone of voice she uses when eliding facts that might put her in the wrong. Marie is closing an issue and she has to go back to work. Marie is Celeste’s twin sister: by birth Marie Celeste, as Celeste was by birth Celeste Marie: another story. She works for S, a women’s magazine.

But, I began to protest, but Celeste wasn’t finished catching me up on what I’d missed. We’re going to sell the house, she said. Do you want any of your grandparents’ things? It would mean going back to upstate New York, she said, because the house was full from attic to basement with junk, and my mothers had no intention of sorting through it. They never got along with my grandfather, and my grandmother, with whom, to be honest, they also didn’t get along, had given them the few items they wanted before she died. Celeste said that unless I wanted to clean out the house myself, they would be happy to turn it over to one of the people who specialized in estate sales. Probably the antiques dealers would take a few pieces my grandfather had inherited from his parents, and the rest would be thrown away or given to orphans.

Which orphans? I asked.

Whichever ones they have up there, Celeste said. Then, as if she realized that she’d overplayed her frustration at not having been able to reach me, she asked, Since when do you like camping?

I always liked camping.

You did?

Since I was a kid.

Celeste hesitated. Think it over, she said, but don’t take too long. The real-estate agent says our best chance of selling is before the ski season starts.

Our conversation ended awkwardly, and I stood in my kitchen, not sure what to do next. Eight hours ago, I’d been sitting in the middle of a desert, eating instant oatmeal from a plastic cup and watching the remains of a giant wooden structure called the Exosphere smolder. Now my grandfather was dead, and Celeste wanted me to return to Thebes, where I hadn’t been for ten years. It was as if my life had cut abruptly from one record to another, and my thoughts were still dancing to the wrong beat: that was the image that occurred to me after three days of watching DJs perform at the festival. I tried to feel grief at my grandfather’s death. I tried to imagine him dying, to see him being buried, but all I could see was Nevada, the long line of the horizon with sharp brown mountains rising up in the distance. A silver pinwheel turned slowly in the wind. I wondered if I was all right, if there was something wrong with me. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently, and the answer I keep coming up with is, yes, something is wrong.

SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS

I had been living in San Francisco at that point for seven years, an amount of time that has always seemed to me to have magical properties. Tannhäuser lives in the Venusberg for seven years and Hans Castorp spends seven years on the magic mountain; there are the seven fat years and the seven lean years of Pharaoh’s dream, not to mention the seven-year itch and the seven-year ache. As the seven-year mark approached I found myself thinking about leaving the city. I thought about going back to the East Coast, and even considered living in New York again, although the forbidding presence of my mothers on the Upper West Side acted as a repelling magnet and sent my thoughts farther afield, to Europe, where we had almost moved, once, or to Canada, where I’d heard it was possible to live well for not very much money, and where the politics weren’t so frightening. In the end I made no plans to go anywhere, and the only result of all my thinking was that I ceased to do many of the things I had once enjoyed. I didn’t go to the Blue Study on Thursday nights; I didn’t assume the pose of a dog, a tree, a monkey or a corpse at the Yoga Tree on Valencia Street; I didn’t take my bicycle and ride out to the ocean, the way I had almost every week when I first moved to the city. Overall, my life in San Francisco was so greatly reduced that it felt like an afterlife, as though I were a ghost condemned to remain in the city until I accomplished a particular task, or got someone to accomplish it for me. I wondered how long I could go on living like that. Quite long, probably. San Francisco is a good city to be a ghost in. My upstairs neighbor, Robert, had lived in his apartment for many years before I moved in. He saw no one and never went out; on Saturday nights he snorted cocaine and listened to Dylan at top volume until one of the people downstairs complained. He worked at home, proofreading legal documents that appeared on his doorstep and were taken away by messengers whom neither of us ever saw. Once a month his ex-wife brought a little girl to visit him, I think it was his daughter. Sometimes I saw the three of them in the park, the daughter holding the mother’s hand and Robert walking beside her, stiff and serious, like a decrepit hippie bodyguard. The ex-wife and the girl were gone by nightfall; on those nights Dylan was always singing, and no one had the heart to ask Robert to turn the music down. I worried that I might become like him if I stayed in San Francisco too long. Or that I might be like that already. More than once, when I ran into a neighbor, I found myself cringing, as though the fact that I used to have a life was somehow visible—although if that was how ghosts really felt then they would never show themselves. They would wait in their attics, work their ghost jobs, and wait for their real after-lives to begin.

I came home from the festival on Sunday night. The next day was a holiday, and because I still didn’t know what to do, I went for a walk. The air was hot, and the sky was the bright, uninterrupted blue you get in San Francisco in the late summer, a sky so blue it looks opaque, as though it were just a shell hung over the city, hiding the real weather. It was the end of Labor Day weekend and the Mission was quiet. It made me think of when I first came to the city, before the boom of the nineties, when this had been a savage neighborhood, where crazy people and heroin addicts sat at the mouths of alleys, looking up at you with flat, hurtful eyes. Then money came and swept those people away; it replaced them with stores specializing in a single brand of shoe, and restaurants named with a compound of the word fire. Now, in September 2000, the restaurants were in trouble. Signs in their windows offered seven-dollar lunch specials and still no one came to fill their chrome-edged tables, their cushioned nooks. I walked up to Dolores Park, which was empty, apart from some children swinging in the playground and a handful of dogs wearied by the hot weather, walking around with their heads down, like people looking for change in the grass. From the top of the park I could see downtown San Francisco, the gray towers of the Bay Bridge, the brownish line of Berkeley beyond. And beyond that was all of California, Nevada, Utah, et cetera, all the way to New York State, to Thebes. But my ambivalence about San Francisco had vanished as I climbed the hill; the city was beautiful and I wanted to live there forever. I sat on a bench, relieved that I had come home from the festival when I did—if I’d returned a day earlier I would have had to bundle myself onto a plane for the funeral. My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Alice, my ex-girlfriend, calling to see if I was back yet.

I’m back, I said, but my grandfather died.

What?

I told her what had happened, and how my mothers had the funeral without me because of Marie’s job at S.

God, how vile, Alice said. Do you want to come over?

Alice and I had broken up months before, but we still saw each other more often than we saw anyone else, or at least, I saw her more often than I saw anyone except my coworkers. Our conversations were frequently difficult, but Alice was the only person who made me feel solid. If we threw ourselves together at least a collision would happen.

I’m tired, I said, I want to stay in my neighborhood. Do you want to come here?

You’re so far away, Alice said.

I lived twenty minutes from her by foot, or half an hour on the bus. Finally we agreed to meet at the Doghouse, a bar halfway between her apartment and mine. It looked like bikers went there, so no one else went, though in fact the bikers didn’t go there either.

LOST THINGS

For a long time, from when I was very little and don’t remember years or stories, until I was thirteen, I spent every summer with my grandparents in Thebes. My mothers would have preferred to send me somewhere else, but they didn’t have the money for summer camp, and the free day programs in New York were frightening: this was the scary seventies, when the city was almost bankrupt and you could get attacked with a knife on the Upper West Side in the daytime. But I couldn’t just stay at home, because there was nothing for me to do, and my mothers wanted a vacation from being parents, a job neither of them had ever wanted to turn into a career. The summer was their time to make art, which was what they really did: Celeste was a sculptor and Marie took photographs. So, Thebes. I looked forward to it every year as soon as the trees began to blossom in Riverside Park. They produced flowers and I produced memories: of the man-made lake with the sandy beach, of the green mountains that rose up on either side of town, the stream, or kill, that ran through the middle of it, the old wooden bridge that crossed the stream, and the cool hollow under the bridge. I remembered the Regenzeit children who lived next door to my grandparents, Kerem and Yesim, pronounced YAY-shum, which were Turkish names because their parents were Turkish although they, the children, had grown up in the U. S. of A. The first days of spring tortured me; the future tied my thought in knots. By the time June came around, I watched my mothers as a hungry dog watches its humans, waiting for the sign that it was time for me to go. But my mothers were proud. They ran away from Thebes when they were seventeen, and had vowed never to go back; sending me to stay with my grandparents wasn’t breaking their promise, exactly, but it was close, and their way of keeping themselves aloof from this difficult fact was to pretend that it wouldn’t happen.

I hear they cleaned up the Y, Marie said one year. It has a new swimming pool. Maybe you’d like to give it a try? I told her the story I’d heard at school about a kid who went into that pool and didn’t come out again. Hm, Marie said, and the Y took its place again at the end of the alphabet. School ended and the real hot weather came. The windows were always open; our living room became a big, dusty receiver for the dramas broadcast from the street. The Celestes sprawled in side-by-side chairs in front of the electric fan, waiting for it to be night. They talked about the opening they’d gone to in SoHo, the artist who’d got the show by sleeping with the dealer, the writer who’d written about the show but didn’t know what the word lacuna meant. Just when I thought they had forgotten about me completely, suddenly they turned to each other, their mirror-faces wrinkled by mirror-frowns, and one said to the other, Don’t you think it’s time to send him to Thebes?

SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS

The Doghouse was crowded with Labor Day drinkers trying noisily to give substance to the illusion that San Francisco had had a summer. There was a back patio with a phenomenal view of the underside of Highway 101; as traffic whooshed by overhead, I told Alice how my mothers wanted me to pack up my grandparents’ house.

Don’t they live in New York? Alice asked. Let them do it.

They don’t like the house. They hate going there.

Too bad for them.

Alice had never met my mothers, but over the years she had acquired a kind of sympathetic dislike for them, which I sometimes felt guilty about instilling in her. She would have told me to stand up to them even if she liked them better, though: Alice was in favor of standing up to people. She stood up to her professors at Berkeley, who thought that a nobody girl from the Central Valley couldn’t know anything about American lit; she stood up to her college boyfriend, who was just a version, she realized afterward, of her Christ-nut father; and she stood up to me.

Don’t worry, I said, I’m not going.

We got drinks and alit on a free table out back. How was the festival? Alice asked.

Windy, I said. There were dust storms. Alice hated dirt; she was the only person I knew in San Francisco with white wall-to-wall carpet in her apartment.

That must have been tricky when you were tripping your brains out.

Ha. We didn’t do drugs, just some pot. I had, in fact, taken a mescaline derivative, synthesized by a friend of Star’s, which made everything give off blue sparks, as if the landscape were effervescing in the cold night air, but I didn’t want Alice to be jealous.

I see. Wary of learning more than she wanted to know, she changed the subject. Were you close to your grandfather?

"I wouldn’t say close. I spent the summers with him when I was a kid, but he wasn’t easy to know. I told Alice about the basement workshop where my grandfather restored old tables and chairs, or rather, given that nothing he touched ever returned to anything like the life it once had, it might be more accurate to say that he reincarnated them. When confronted with an old table, unsteady on its feet, topped with warped boards that had begun to detach from one another, his ordinarily serious face would soften, and as he stroked the table’s uneven surface he’d murmur, Good grain. Good wood. I knew what was going to happen: the table would come home with us; we’d carry it into the garage, where it would linger until my grandfather tried to correct its irregularities or it fell apart of its own accord, which amounted to more or less the same thing. Even then he would save the timbers that hadn’t rotted or been planed down to nothing. Might patch something with these, he’d say. It’s good wood."

He sounds sweet, Alice said.

He wasn’t. Kind, sure. But not sweet. Every year, he had sent me the same card on my birthday, with a picture of a Japanese fisherman in a little boat caught in the crook of an enormous wave, and each year the message inside the card was shorter. The last of the cards came just a month before he died. Happy birthday to my great grandson, it read, which confused me, because I was only his grandson. Finally I’d decided that he must have preferred the pun to the reality of the situation, but still, as a grandson, it made me feel less than great.

There was nothing to say about that, though, so I asked Alice how she was doing with her LSAT review class and she told me the class was for idiots, and I said yes, the point is they make an idiot out of you, and she scowled at me and said she knew some lawyers who were very intelligent. Until earlier that year, Alice had been an editor for a company in Mountain View that made Web browsers, but she’d been laid off along with half the people who worked there, so for the last three or four months she’d been freelancing, which meant spending her severance pay while she decided what to do next. She wasn’t certain she’d apply to law school; other prospects beckoned with lovely phantom hands. She might become a massage therapist, or teach English to businessmen in Japan.

The wind picked up, chilling the patio, driving the summer drinkers indoors. Alice said she ought to go home, she had to get up early the next morning.

Have dinner with me, I suggested.

Where?

We argued for a little while, but it really was getting cold out, and Alice agreed to a Thai place next to my apartment. I put my arm around her and we walked back to the Mission as the fog came in over our heads, white rags of mist flying past like foam in a fast stream, covering up the empty sky.

After dinner we went to my apartment and sat in the kitchen drinking whiskey. I don’t want to get drunk, Alice said, I’ve got yoga in the morning.

I don’t either. I poured myself another drink and Alice motioned for me to pour her another also.

Tell me about the music, she said. Who was there?

I mentioned people we’d heard at the Sno-Drop, at the Red Room. That was again an omission. Pearl Fabula had played at the festival, but I hoped Alice didn’t know. We’d gone to hear Pearl too many times together before he became famous and left San Francisco.

Ugh, Lorin, Alice said. That guy’s too ironic for me.

We talked about how it had been all the way back in 1998, when we saw Hope Sandoval dancing next to us at Liquid, and the DJ from Portishead spun a set at the Blue Study, and how we’d gone to see Pearl when he played the impossible sample from Lady Di in the car. Dodi … Dodi … But we couldn’t stay in those memories for long. Soon we were talking about the signs that our music was in decline: the burly fraternity types we had seen dancing the pogo at an Underworld show, the long line of high school kids outside Community on Wednesday nights, the various laws that Congress was preparing to close the dance clubs down, Junior Vasquez selling CD players and Moby selling cars, the tendency of money to ruin everything.

I feel like DJ culture is played out, Alice said. Which I thought was her way of saying, I wish I had gone to Nevada.

You may be right, I said, but what’s next?

I don’t know. There’s got to be something.

Our faces touched. We kissed, we dug our fingers into each other’s backs. We made love and it was just the way I remembered it, not from the last, grudging months, nor from the beginning, when our sex was wild and tentative, like a dream you don’t want to write down for fear of losing track of its form, but from the middle of the relationship, however long that lasted, a year, a month. It was a solid thing, like putting two puzzle pieces together the right way, that gave us a glimpse of a larger picture, as yet unfinished. Then we fell asleep. I woke up at one-thirty in the morning with a headache. Alice’s back was to me, her kinky blond hair spread out on the comforter. I thought of the foam on the crest of the wave on my grandfather’s cards. For years the fisherman had been waiting for that wave to break, and it never had. I used to want it to break, not because I wanted the fisherman to drown, but so that he wouldn’t have to wait any longer. I closed my eyes and imagined it breaking, a dark-blue wave with streaks of black in it, edged with white foam, crashing over the stern of the little boat, and afterward, when there was nothing to look at but blue water and wreckage, a timber, an oar. I opened my eyes. Alice was still there. The wave hadn’t broken yet and maybe it never would.

LOST THINGS

Thebes was never what my memories made it. My grandmother was a good cook but she loved her garden too well, and served us vegetables that only a mother could love, worm-holed lettuces, cracked tomatoes, small starchy beans. My grandfather was frequently in a bad mood and spent whole days in his workshop, sawing and pounding some hapless antique into submission. I played with Kerem and Yesim, the children next door, but this too had its perils. There was bad blood between the Rowlands and the Regenzeits: my grandfather had sued Joe Regenzeit before I was born, and lost. Regenzeit owned the Snowbird ski resort, a couple of bald stripes shaved into the side of a mountain just past the west end of town, and the lawsuit was in some way connected to the resort, but I couldn’t guess how. My grandparents didn’t even own skis. It was bad enough that the Regenzeits lived next door, that my grandmother had to watch Mrs. Regenzeit gardening when she was in her garden, that my grandfather had to speak to Joe Regenzeit at town meetings, but when I went over to play with the Regenzeit children, it was too much, it was Montague cozying up to Capulet. If only there had been anyone else for me to play with, my grandparents would have forbidden me to see Kerem and Yesim, but there wasn’t anyone else, apart from a few strange children who haunted the steps of the public library, children no one knew and no one wanted me to know. Although I would know them, later

Reviews for Luminous Airplanes

[walterqchocobo · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'm sure there was a plot somewhere in this book but it was hard to find. The basic premise: At the end of the 20th century, a 30 year old computer programmer living in San Francisco finds out that his grandfather passed away. He travels back to Thebes, NY (in Norman Mailer's car apparently) to clean out the house because the rest of the family doesn't want to deal with it. Thebes is a tiny town where he spent his summers growing up. In Thebes, he runs into the brother and sister who lived next door to his grandparents and starts a relationship with the girl. This sounds okay but the book bounces all over the place--the narrator trying to find out about his long lost father, a homeless guy named Snow back in San Francisco and some historical research he did on the Millerites, a religious sect from the late 1800s who believed the end of the world was coming. I didn't really care for any of the characters but stuck it out to see how the book would end, hoping for a big finish. I should have known better. Not a terrible book but I find it difficult to determine who I would recommend it to.

[pghdragonman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For me, the big attraction for this book was the location. While it is a fictionalized New York State, the local seems based on the ski areas of Belaire, Hunter Mountain and High Mount, place that were popular when, in the 1960’s, I lived not far from those areas.The story itself moves right along with a forceful flow. It is a tory of not being able to recapture the past and is a very character drive story. I enjoyed the characterizations and the scenery, but the story was not that fulfilling and the ending disappointing. My four star rating is primarily based on the entertainment value. This was a CD Audiobook and the narration served to boost my overall rating, so deduct a half star from my evaluation of just the story.

[grist_9 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book starts off engagingly enough but becomes hard to follow and, eventually, kind of dull. The narrator does a good job, neither hindering the text nor trying to make it better than it is. Ultimately, though, the characters are not very interesting and the storytelling is choppy.

[jgoto_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Listening to the audio version on my car CD player during my commute to and from work was the ideal way to enjoy Paul Lafarge’s Luminous Airplanes. The story is told in spurts, which completely lends itself to short sessions with periodic interruptions. The novel begins with the death of a thirty-year-old computer programmer’s grandfather, and his decision to leave his unsatisfactory life in San Francisco and go back to Thebes, N.Y., to clean out his grandparents’ house. About halfway through the story I realized that there would be no major linear plot, and I was therefore free to just sit back and enjoy the little snapshots of the quirky life presented. The novel meanders through musings about the narrator’s Hippy father whom he never met, worries about Swan, a mentally ill street person he knew in San Francisco, memories of childhood summers spent with his grandparents and their Turkish-American neighbors, his renewed relationship with his first love (said Turkish-American neighbor ), his dissertation topic (The Millerites , a mid-19th century Christian sect who were preparing for the end of the world) and, above all, decisions about the direction and meaning of his own life. The reader, Charles Carroll, has a pleasant voice, and most importantly, in my opinion, does absolutely nothing to make himself stand out and detract from the text. In other words, he is a good narrator. The story kept me entertained and made my 20-minute spurts of driving go by quickly. I enjoyed the recording, although I’m not sure I would have liked it as much if I had sat down and just read the book.

[melydia_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

(unabridged audiobook read by Charles Carroll; 8.25 hrs on 7 discs): A 30-year-old man returns from what sounds a little like the Burning Man festival to learn that his grandfather has died and he missed the funeral. It’s the end of the 20th century and the internet bubble has burst. Facing dwindling employment in San Francisco, he journeys to the tiny town of Thebes, NY, to clean out his late grandfather’s house, where he spent his summers growing up. While he’s there he runs into childhood friends, reminisces about San Francisco of the mid-1990s, goes on about a strange homeless man named Swan, obsessively tries to dig up every scrap of information about the father who died before he was born, and generally lazes about. And that’s about it.Alas, this book is pretty tremendously boring. For a while I was blaming the reader, whose repetitive cadence was awkward and unnatural, but I really think that’s only part of the problem. The bigger issue is that I simply could not sympathize with any of the characters. I don’t have daddy issues; I’ve never abandoned my family; I’m not a nymphomaniac; I think going through somebody else’s things is great fun; I don’t do drugs; I am not in a doomsday cult. In short, I did not care. I listened to the whole thing anyway, hoping that the plot would show up in the end. It didn’t.

[nyiper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I started off just fine with this audio but somehow, by about disk 5 I just lost interest in what was happening and although I listened through to the end I wasn't pulled into the story or the characters so that I really wanted to know or even cared about what happened next--I just wanted to get to the end. Am I missing something? I did like my rather quick look at the website where pictures/illustrations are included along with the book.

[wdwilson3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This story of a thirtyish man trying to understand his father (whom he never knew) and himself, was a disappointment. Its prose is excellent, with many phrases that seem like gems. It characters are well drawn and believable. Yet it left me feeling rather empty and unfulfilled. The protagonist is believable without being likeable. Although obviously intelligent, his nerd/hipster character is weak. He runs away from relationships like his father before him, and seems to wander through life irresponsibly. If he ever does find himself, it isn’t revealed on these pages. Actually, there isn’t a character in the book that I’d ever care to meet. Each seems to be a personification of a major character flaw. At a certain point, the reader wants them to actually deal with their issues instead of wearing them for all to see.