Flights of Fancy

Paul La Farge’s Luminous Airplanes Lifts Off

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, November 30, 2011

Halfway between Paul La Farge’s weathered barn and colonial farmhouse in Red Hook, a small promontory tops a stone wall. It’s his habit to start every workday by standing there, gazing over a broad meadow rimmed by a stream on one side and a tall fringe of trees on the other. A morning meditation?”

“More like a morning celebration of getting out of New York,” says the acclaimed novelist and Bard professor. He and his wife Sarah Stern, co-artistic director of the Vineyard Theatre, bought the house in July. It was literally a dream come true—the couple had rented the farmhouse for two blissful summers. “We used to wish we could stay here forever,” La Farge says, beaming. “And now we can.”

Someday they may even have time to finish unpacking. It’s been a busy fall for La Farge, whose new novel, Luminous Airplanes, debuted in October, garnering raves from the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and others. Usually a novelist’s work is done long before publication. But La Farge, whose previous books include The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999); Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s, 2005), has launched Luminous Airplanes in two different formats: a traditional print novel and a spectacularly ambitious online “immersive text,” to which he is still adding content.

The immersive text would doubtless fascinate Luminous Airplanes’ never-named narrator, a ‘90s-era computer programmer and erstwhile graduate student who leaves San Francisco to clean out his dead grandfather’s house in the Catskills, where he spent a series of summers while growing up. When he reconnects with neighbors Kerem and Yesim Regenzeit, a Turkish brother and sister who were—despite their families’ ongoing feud—his best friend and first crush, past and present collide in unpredictable, possibly dangerous ways. Also in the mix: twin mothers, an absentee father, the evolution of flying machines, and the Millerite cult who predicted (and dressed for) an 1844 Rapture that never occurred. When La Farge finishes uploading a decade’s worth of prodigious imaginings, the immersive text will contain many more storylines.

La Farge’s wire-rim glasses, silvering beard, and unruly dark hair suggest one of Chekhov’s eternal students. He’s a gracious host, offering a selection from “our large but idiosyncratic collection of teas” before sitting down at a kitchen table covered by a cheerful yellow ProvenÇal tablecloth to discuss his work.