Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

It was my birthday recently, and though halfway through a great book of recently translated German modernism about the bleakness of the weekend in an ossified life (perhaps too on-the-nose given my recent and very – to me – sad return to full time work) and also halfway through a beautifully composed book of literary criticism by William H Gass, I decided to give myself a break from those serious reads and knuckle down with Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy for a bit of light, sleazy, relief.

This, for sure, delivered that.

Linda is a 30 year old woman living in an illegal windowless room built into the garage of a San Franciscan suburban home, who works as a comment moderator for a social media website. She is single, very solitary, but does have one friend, when this friend – Karina – invites her to join her quarterly Vision Board Brunch, Linda reluctantly agrees to go.

Reluctant not because Linda doesn’t know what she wants, but rather the opposite – Linda knows exactly what she wants from life, but is aware that most people find her desires at best weird and – at worst – actively psychotic.

Because what Linda wants more than anything, more than life itself, is to be married to one – any – of her dream paramours. And the lovers that Linda desires (and, arguably, has on a few occasions during the course of the novel) are planes, airplanes, aeroplanes, as although she regularly gets herself off as she recreationally flies, the marriage she yearns for is the erotic, literal and ultimate fulfilment of a crash fantasy: dying in an explosion of metal and flesh as the airplane she rides is destroyed on impact with the ground.

She flies a round trip every month, yearning for death, and uses the quarterly Vision Board Brunches to try to communicate this urge, this need, to the universe. But, alas, she feels she cannot be direct about her desires, which increasingly alarms her, because what she does attach to her Vision Boards does seem to come true. After several cycles of the brunches, she is willing to, desperate to, even, reveal her true and complete desire, as on the way she has accidentally manifested herself a brief interaction with the CEO of Airbus, she has accidentally manifested herself a date with a man pretending to be a pilot, and she has accidentally manifested herself a brief relationship with her recently divorced boss, who she – in a moment of plane-based erotic thrill – unintentionally brings into her sexual orbit despite him being not a plane but a man. When this affair is exposed (which happens because another passenger films and uploads the interaction, which I would say is a far more embarrassing and shameful thing to do than a bit of heavy petting on a flight, but I really am out of step these days), the hush money Linda receives from her employer provides her with the slush fund she needs for a binge of flights chasing that ultimate and irrevocable menage of erotic destruction. The Vision Board, yes, provides…

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In part, then, it’s a typical quarter-life (early mid-life?) crisis novel; it’s bildungsroman… it’s also romance, it’s also a narrative about finding friendship and community, almost by accident. Linda doesn’t find other people who yearn for death in the metal embrace of an airline disaster, but she does find people who like her and want her in their lives, even as she yearns, deeply and constantly, to be removed from her own life in that fiery ball of hot hot plane flame.

It is, as you might expect, a very funny novel, with the eroticisation of planes a constantly enjoyable and entertaining bit; the shapes and features of a plane’s body are described with the tenderness and also the hot desire of a lover’s eye, and Linda’s solo (and briefly not solo) sexual play on the planes she flies on is described with a directness from her plane-focused perspective that is fresh and funny but also feels, yes, how one imagines a person who is sexually obsessed with dying in an aeroplane (airplane) crash would get off.

There are jokes and pointed comments here about housing precarity (precariousness), about toxic social media behaviours and realities, about the cruelties and hypocrisies of employer-employee relationships; there are great jokes about growing old and failing to mature, about bitterness and regret that Linda – oblivious to most of the people around her who can’t – or won’t – fulfil her desire for oblivion – fails to notice.

It’s satire of late stage capitalism¹, of mis-placed desire, of avoidance of real life and consequences, of online dating, of millennial and gen Z sociocultural interactions and the legacies of Gen X ageing out of sociocultural relevance but not ageing out of being the worst – and least self-aware – generation of them all.

Sky Daddy is very entertaining and very serious in places in its insights, but it never loses sight of what it is – a raucous novel about a young woman who is erotically obsessed with planes.

The ending is, perhaps inevitably, a little abrupt, but that aside, the whole novel is an enthralling and turbulence-free journey from departure to arrival. I enjoyed it a lot. A real birthday treat. I’ll never ride a plane in the same way again….

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1. As always, flagging that “fingers crossed” with the old “late stage”. Come on, Andy Burnham and nationalise everything. ↩︎