Christopher Schaberg's Airportness: The Nature of Flight is the latest in a series of books (his own and others’) about flight and its place in contemporary culture – or, more specifically, its place in Western culture. The typical stance is that of the solo white male passenger flying at will for business or leisure. In few books of this genre is there any explicit consideration of what it might be like to fly for other purposes or at someone else's command – in forced migration, or in trafficking, or at moments of family crisis. Pico Iyer, in The Global Soul: Jet-Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home (2000), is something of an outlier in the genre in foregrounding questions of racial and class power. Lee, as we will see in a moment, also reflects on this. Gender rarely gets a look in even though the experience and representation of flight, from its earliest days, has both troubled and exploited models of masculinity and femininity (Schaberg's Airportness notes the significance of gender only in passing and in rather contradictory fashion; we are told first that gender “has been a fraught aspect of aviation throughout its history” (59) and, later, that “gender in flight is not a problem” (142)).

It's a characteristic of the genre to insist, from the outset, that its own object is “mundane” (11) (in Schaberg's previous book, The End of Airports (2015), “mundane” and “banal”), yet also to suggest that it is sufficient to bring about a kind of existential ennui. The habitual mood is one of cultivated lassitude – a form of malaise that is simultaneously regretted and embraced as a sign that the traveler has arrived at a level of insouciance only attainable by travelers for whom flight is no longer a novel or thrilling experience. Mark Vanhoenacker's Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (2015) is an exception here; his book does evoke the astonishing perceptual and technological features of flight. What we often see elsewhere is a kind of performative sanguinity – a scaled-up version of visibly declining to watch the safety video on takeoff.

The trope of flight as an unremarkable feature of everyday experience which is, nevertheless, a worthwhile object of attention has been developed by Schaberg over three books in seven years – first in The Textual Life of Airports (2011), which teased out some of the narrative and poetic implications of air travel or, more properly, of transit through airports; second in The End of Airports, which saw Schaberg developing his characteristic hybrid style – part anthropology, part memoir, part cultural critique – in order to consider the purpose (end) and future (end) of airports; and now in Airportness: The Nature of Flight. The topic here is “how the feel of air travel precedes and extends past the more obvious dimensions and boundaries of flight (3) – an echo, but also an extension, of the observation in his first book, The Textual Life of Airports, that “airport tropes and paradoxes circulate beyond the bounds of air travel per se” (3). In the acknowledgements to Airportness, Schaberg offers thanks to “my editor Haaris Naqvi for believing that I could write a third book about airports” (169). It's appropriate, then, to ask what this book offers that its predecessors did not.

In a sequence of almost fifty short sections, which in some ways mirror those in The End of Airports, although they are rather more abstract, Schaberg offers rapid vignettes of life in and around the airport, from the anticipation of a particular trip in “Preflight” (1–3) through the etiquette of “Armrests” (55–59) to the collection of “Baggage” (154–58) and the return “Home” (160–67). Airportness is, by turns, an anthropology, a deconstruction, a work of eco-criticism (see “Sparrows” and “Water Landing”), a travelers’ companion (Schaberg nudges us along: “Let's take a seat,” “Let's pause to really think,” “Let's head to our gate” and so on), and even an improving book. The section on “Workers” notes that airports are places of work and admonishes us that “this fact should not be forgotten” (35), while “Attack” cautions that “media streams are far from neutral features within and beyond our terminal landscapes” (33).

It is also a series of personal reflections. Many of these are suggestive (the section on “Play,” for example, with its reading of the signification of Lego playsets; or the discussion of the specificities of airport spaces with their “awfulness … a quality so dissonant with the actual technics and spectacle of flight just beyond the panoramic windows” (81); or the fleeting allusion to the “poetics” of the curbside, about which I would have liked to hear more). Others are less so. Of “Snacking,” for instance, Schaberg observes, “Snacking has become a part of airportness, and for airportness to become better, so must our relationship with snacks” (74), and we are given a whole paragraph tracing the process of retrieving a saved copy of an in-flight safety card from a laptop (120). At times, the enervated tone tends towards the jaundiced. In his discussion of so-called “gate lice” (passengers who loiter around departure desks), Schaberg comments, “Gate lice often smell like hotel soap, and occasionally wear special shoes with extra arch support. I'll bet that ‘Untuckit’ shirt company thrives on purchases from gate lice” (39). It's a gratuitous point, one that says less about “airportness” than it does about the author's growing fatigue with the conditions of which he speaks – although, of course, such impatience is itself a characteristic of this experience and of this space.

In the end, then, much though I admire Schaberg's earlier interventions in this field, I am not entirely convinced by Airportness's contribution. It offers an at times thought-provoking tour through some familiar features of flight in a certain set of contexts. I concur that this can be a tedious experience, and that there is value in stopping and reading the significance of what might otherwise pass us by in a daze. But in the end, this is a fairly familiar take on a fairly familiar experience, and to really understand the multiple, shifting, and contingent meanings of the airport, it might be necessary to consider it from other perspectives and in entirely different circumstances.

Christopher J. Lee's Jet Lag moves a little in this direction. Published in the terrific Object Lessons series – of which Christopher Schaberg is one of the series editors – it takes a specific feature of rapid, long-distance flight and tracks its presence across contemporary discourse. Its sources range from Levinas, Marx and Heidegger to films (Lost in Translation (2003) and Frances Ha (2012)), novels (including Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2004)), and even album cover art (Led Zeppelin from 1969). Jet lag – a specific form of fatigue first identified in the 1960s in tandem with the earliest long-distance commercial jet flights – has “multiple stories to tell – about globalization, time and timekeeping, our enchantment with (yet precarious dependence on) technology, the acceleration of modern life, and our own biological limits” (7). The relationship with time and the significance of jet lag as an unintended consequence of globalization are key concerns. With respect to the latter, Lee's account has something in common with the discussion in Iyer's The Global Soul. Like Iyer, and indeed like Schaberg, Lee tends to read the discomfort of jet lag as the price “we” have to pay for the convenience and/or imperative of flight, whether for business or leisure. “Jet lag,” Lee argues, “is what global capitalism feels like” (11, original emphasis). I agree. But I would add is that it is only what global capitalism feels like to certain people in particular circumstances. Lee concedes as much:

His aim for the book, then, is to take seriously that which might seem to be the least pressing, because most rarified, of conditions.

It's a bold move, and the result is a pleasing meditation on the nature of that kind of disrupted, delayed consciousness which comes with jet flight across and between time zones. Lee looks back to pre-jet-age depictions of train travel and then propeller flight. He considers the relationship between flight and the ways we have experienced and measured time over the ages (including, of late, in the field of chronobiology), the marketing and promotion of flight as a consumer good, and finally the seeping dispersal of jet lag into many other areas of existence: “The technological enervation we once felt as being exclusive to jet travel has become commonplace. Jet lag has become a way of life” (137).

Like Schaberg's Airportness, Jet Lag is rueful in tone as it tussles with the dialectic of pleasure and pain that comes with air travel. This is the cost, Lee suggests, for “the imagined freedom of travel” (87). He closes with the suggestion that we should embrace the condition; that we might learn from it something about human and technological limitations; and that we might arrive at a new consciousness, particularly in the wee small hours of the morning in a country a long way from home.