Advertisement

Book review: ‘Luminous Airplanes’ by Paul La Farge

Share

If the Internet boom of the 1990s inspired computer programmers and entrepreneurs bent on changing the world, its bust gave rise to hundreds of writers happy to chronicle it — perhaps, most famously, “And Then We Came to the End” by Joshua Ferris. Much of Paul La Farge’s novel “Luminous Airplanes” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 245 pp., $25) takes place in the slow days during which the boom was waning, and our unnamed protagonist is frittering away his days at a dying web company “like the middle of Moby-Dick; no whale in sight, only occasional contact with another passing ship, and nothing to fill the time except digression.”

Then the narrator’s grandfather dies and he journeys to upstate New York to clean out his family’s home because his self-absorbed family in Manhattan refuses to do the task. There are interesting bits here and there — he started writing a history dissertation on the Millerites, a 19th century band of Michigan residents convinced that Jesus was about to return to Earth; his grandfather sued the neighbors for inventing a machine that he complained made it snow; his childhood crush, who lives next door, is addicted to sex — but they are largely lost in a plodding plot and the protagonist’s desire to learn about his father, a clichéd hippie whom he never knew.

Forget the plot, though! Throw down the book and seek out the website that complements the book — https://www.luminousairplanes.com — and where La Farge has indexed characters, themes and segments of his novel. The protagonist first learned to program computers when hardly anyone knew what they were for, and scenes of him in boarding school creating a video game are among the most compelling in the book. The last page of the book directs readers to the website: Take one look at it, and it’s easy to feel what our protagonist must have felt when he first tinkered with computers and also easy to wonder — is this what will change the way we read or is it just a gimmick?

Advertisement

—Alana Semuels

Advertisement