Bracing tale of anorexia, death and duty free

In a fogbound Munich airport, a man waits with his widowed father to bring the body of his sister back to America. With them is Trish, a young woman from the US consulate. It was Trish who informed the narrator of the cause of his sister’s death – Miriam had starved herself in her Berlin apartment – and she has been something of a steadying influence on the men since their arrival in Germany three weeks before.

The American narrator is a marketing consultant who’s been living in London for two decades. His father, who left Germany as a child, is a retired historian. Neither had maintained much contact with Miriam since her departure from the US 20 years before. When the narrator last saw his sister, she was frighteningly thin. She said she “felt really empowered by denying appetite”. Not knowing whether or how to intervene, he did nothing. Such streams of guilt course under the surface of the novel.

Why did Miriam starve herself to death? Why does anyone? The narrator’s forays to his sister’s flat reveal little, other than that she had good taste and few friends. But this isn’t a story about Miriam’s anorexia so much as it is about the age in which we live, the nature of consumption, and the terrors that beset us and alienate us from ourselves and each other.

The three weeks father and son spend in Germany – details of which are interspersed throughout the narrative – veer between anguished gluttony (“we fattened ourselves like swine”) and harrowing spells of renunciation. When the narrator imagines his return to London, he feels himself “fattening – expanding with habits, ideas, opinions, things”, his work a “plague of superabundance and anxiety”.

As a setting for a reflection upon the realities the novel explores – that superabundance and our slavishness with regard to it, and the drama of boredom and anxiety that help to fuel consumption – where better than an airport? Baxter does a wonderful job of portraying the strangeness of the place: the “obelisks” on which ads run, the Formula One car in the middle of the concourse. At one point he views an exhibit on women in aviation, which contains “of course a panel about aviation and the Holocaust”. This leads him to begin reading about Munich airport itself on his phone, which leads – inevitably, it feels – to a letter written by an American soldier following the liberation of nearby Dachau: the “corpses piled up like kindling”.

And then, Baxter writes, “I put the phone away and say to Trish, I entered the raffle for the race car.”

Highland lodge

Such is the stuff of our days, and the novel shunts powerfully between images of death and material profusion, between everyday banalities and searing pain. The one still point – or would-be still point – in the family’s mythology is a lodge in the Scottish Highlands, where the parents honeymooned and to which the father tries, periodically, to gather what remains of his family. If such a gathering never quite comes off, the place hovers like a suggestion that an elsewhere, an otherwise, is possible.

Baxter was born in Texas, lived for a time in Dublin, and now lives in Berlin. He is the author of a memoir, A Preparation for Death, and The Apartment, a compelling first-person novel about a former intelligence contractor in Iraq. Munich Airport is more intimate than The Apartment, although it shares certain traits with that novel, most obviously the continuous flow of text, in which conventional transitions are eschewed and set pieces rise up and fall away seamlessly, reflecting the way the times and concerns of our lives press upon the present. The voice is without affect – flatly recounted facts and incidents are interspersed with discussions of music and history; often lacking are the standard explanatory revelations, the why of things.

In discussing The Outsider, Roland Barthes used the term the "degree zero of writing" to describe Camus' flat, neutral language, and it is a phrase that could apply here. It's a kind of writing that is conscious of itself as not only a vehicle for story-telling but as the enactment of a certain aesthetic creed – in Munich Airport, embedded, literally, in the text.

When discussing Schoenberg’s innovations, the narrator notes that music had become to the composer “a dumping ground of human emotion, and each new wrinkle . . . a movement towards the accessible”. Regarding a review his father wrote of a book about the Holocaust: “In histories of suffering, style is unconscionable.”

At work, he can’t help thinking that a presentation “had been more convincing for the numbed manner with which I had delivered it”.

Refusing escapism

And so, readers are being asked not only to witness the suffering of the novel’s characters but to consider the ways in which the world we inhabit reduces our emotional and intellectual selves, and the pains we endure, to so much schmaltz, and that induces us to quell our unease by consuming. (What comes also to mind is Steve McQueen’s excellent film

Shame

, about a sex addict.) What is posited instead is a stringent refusal of escapism. At one point, the narrator remarks of his own agony: “to save myself from this pain was hedonism”.

The narrator is an inveterate note-taker, and among the quotes he recalls is Walter Benjamin’s line that the self-alienation of humankind had reached the point where “it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure”. Benjamin was discussing fascism, but one can think, on the level of the individual, of anorexia, which has become perhaps our most aestheticised form of suicide. Of the many ideas the novel explores is whether, in an age of superabundance (and self-alienation), the refusal to consume is experienced by some, consciously or unconsciously, as the only meaningful form of resistance.

This is not to say that, for all its austerity, its intelligence, and its emphasis on ideas, the novel is without moments of human connection and tenderness – it is, after all, like any serious literature, a novel about how human beings survive the fact of being human. It is rather to say that Munich Airport is so much more bracing and consequential than the bulk of contemporary fiction precisely because it refuses, in both its form and its content, the easy or obvious consolations – a refusal arising from its insistence that a recourse to comfort isn't going to save us.