No longer what I want A Contrary review by Cynthia Newberry Martin 
Love in Mid Air Kim Wright Grand Central Publishing 2010 Buy this book> As a plane heads down a runway, a stranger reaches for the narrator’s hand. “Here comes the dangerous part,” he says. Not terribly subtle, but such layering makes a story feel alive. Love in Mid Air, the debut novel by Kim Wright, is rich in “shadow truth,” as Charles Baxter refers to subtext. “What is displayed evokes what is not displayed.” Speaking of alive, the chicks still are, although they’re older. And smarter. They speak about sex without pausing or blushing. Love in Mid Air is chick-lit grown up—midlife lit. A girlfriends-kind-of-book where instead of shopping, the women walk and talk. Instead of trying to find a man, they’re trying to lose one. True to the nature of the age, this novel is also more than that and beginning to suspect it should take itself seriously. The superficial approach can only work for so long. These women are after all 39, not 29. They are zooming toward midlife. One of the characters asks whether things have to be sad to be realistic. Well, yes. In mid air, Elyse and Gerry play a game from an article in Redbook. Each will choose three things. As she does throughout the novel, Wright disarms the reader by having Elyse think what the reader is thinking, “I strongly suspect they will be the same three things.” Wright creates a plain-spoken protagonist unafraid of being wrong or truthful or disheveled. My shirt is stained with burrito juice and my hair has dried really strangely and I start to tell him that usually I don’t look this bad. Which isn’t exactly the truth. I often look this bad but I guess what I want to tell him is that I am capable of looking much better. Elyse has a sense of humor about her “clean, well-ordered little” marriage: “I have often lobbied for direct conversation, but Phil seems more comfortable with Post-it notes…” Therapy is a place where one is “worn down with the steady drip of words.” Elyse recounts her session: “Fifty minutes of trying to describe what I wanted at the beginning of my marriage and trying to describe why it’s no longer what I want.” Midway through the book, a friend says: Sometimes I wonder what would happen if a woman was completely herself within a marriage and said everything she wanted to say and did everything she wanted to do and just let the chips fall where they may. What kind of marriage do you think she would have? No response necessary. Wright trusts her reader. And the women in this novel are aware that part of the fault in these bad relationships lies with them. Love in Mid Air is an engaging, light read with an interesting female character. Near the end of the book, in a therapy session after their cat has been attacked, Elyse says, “We could sit here all day debating exactly when the cat died.” Isn’t that the truth? The only hint that this is a first novel comes in an early chapter when the characters are introduced in serial fashion accompanied by hunks of backstory, but for the most part, the writing here is confident. At the end, when this confident writing hits the seriousness of the story, the novel breaks out of genre for a moment into a remarkable seven-page interior monologue that stretches out to the future and back to the past, looping over and over again as it tries to make sense of the present. In the last pages, Elyse tells the reader that Kelly, her best friend, “believes that she and I will end up together, living somewhere out west where the sky is wide and bright. She says we’ll go there when we’re old and this part with the men is over.” As Jake Barnes says to Brett at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Cynthia Newberry Martin is a writer who lives in Columbus Georgia. Visit her blog, Catching Days. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/0446540447http://catchingdays.cynthianewberrymartin.com/http://catchingdays.cynthianewberrymartin.com/Reviews_2010.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/0446540447shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3
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