A review by robshpprd
Turbulence by David Szalay

1.25

David Szalay had an idea: a series of vignettes about a diverse series of characters loosely connected by their flights around the world. It’s not an especially interesting idea, probably one that should have simply been discarded. One might call it a gimmick. Well, Davis Szalay pursued his uninteresting idea with all the confidence and mediocrity of a dude with recent literary acclaim filling his sails. I don’t know about his previous work, but this is trite garbage. David Szalay sketches a cast of characters—60-something woman from Hong Kong, Alice Munro figure from Toronto, an exec from Senegal, an Indian doctor living in Hong Kong—all in the midst of existential crises and revelations, in tableaux entirely devoid of insight or development. 

I’m unsure where the lines are when it comes to writing characters whose identities and life experiences differ greatly from our own, but it’s pretty easy to recognize when it’s being done poorly. It’s fine to write badly. Lots of people write badly. But when you start to write badly into other people’s identities and cultures, it’s it’s hard not to write yourself into offensive territory. I remember vividly how Column McCann waded into similarly cringy waters in Let the Great World Spin. If there’s anything working for Szalay’s novel it’s that these characters are so sketchy and underdeveloped that he never reaches truly offensive territory. Still, there’s no escaping the impression this is a white dude dressing up his whitedude reactions and decision-making in different costumes, throwing around the superficial adornments of different cultures. “Ah, this character is in Delhi, so he doesn’t prepare a lunch, he prepares a tiffin.” This is about as deep as Szalay gets into the culture and headspace of his characters. His writerly gaze always rests on details that would be salient to an outsider in these global spaces, not the things that would be salient to the characters themselves who had grown up in them. As Szalay attempts to, say, depict the intimate conversation between two sisters from Kerala affected by domestic violence, I was left with the overwhelming sense of a writer with the gall but not the understanding or experience to write about these people and things. This isn’t a single example; it’s the whole book. 

Unsurprisingly, given what else we know about this book, Szalay has an unsubtle message to communicate to us, which is basically that everyone, when they act selfishly, have an outburst, seem aloof, has their own competing worries and needs, a world we may not see. To illustrate this point, Szalay struggles to come up with examples other than relatives having health scares somewhere else in the world. For a novel (if this is a novel) so interested in this concept, we get shockingly little interiority from these characters. 

If you think Crash (2006) was great cinema, then Turbulence might be the book you’re looking for.