Attention passengers: This is your captain speaking. The JetBlue crew and I are sorry to disturb you, but we are seeking any passengers with medical training who could assist a fellow novel whose interiority has unfortunately taken a turn for the worse. It’s urgent.
I repeat: We have an urgent novel onboard whose dazzling gravitas has spilled into the zeitgeist. Any help is welcome.
Attention passengers: The crew and I don’t mean to alarm you, but the novel is nothing short of an emergency. The novel is currently suffering from a miasma of catharsis and contemplative self-awareness, and anyone with even basic first aid training would be instructed to come to the front of the cabin, well, now.
Any assistance provided will guarantee you an additional 1,200 JetBlue Points plus a complimentary beverage of your choice on your next JetBlue flight.
Attention passengers: The crew would also like to ask whether anyone has a pen—not to write anything, but to pierce this novel’s trachea so that it can breathe a fresh, new voice into the American literary canon.
The novel is currently dizzy from groundbreaking vertigo and brave altitude sickness, which combined have made its formal departure, in turn, dizzying for the crew.
Attention passengers: It is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that the novel is now on life support, and if it does not receive immediate medical intervention, we will be forced to ground the plane in the liminal space between autofiction and memoir.
Without going into all the gory details, the novel’s spewing bildungsroman has congealed into a künstlerroman. We at JetBlue do not wish to be compelled by the death of this novel’s gripping and haunting prose and all of that ensuing tortious litigation.
Last year, JetBlue’s shareholders nearly voted out our CEO after another novel suffered from meandering autodidacticism in the first-class bathroom. There was so much bile and dreck pouring from that novel’s pages we ran out of barf bags and had to sop it up using emergency exit–row passenger luggage. Yes, that is why we require your affirmative, verbal consent to sit there.
Good morning, passengers. The crew is happy to report that a Good Samaritan, Dr. Cavendish de’ Medici von der Leyen, M.D. Ph.D. (gastroenterology, American studies), in row 12 has revitalized the novel as an art form. The doctor’s defibrillator, and his subjective consideration of the novel’s political beating heart, have lent a radical reimagination of the novel’s eschatalogical antifascism.
Round of applause for Dr. Cavendish! As a courtesy, the crew will also give him six more inches of legroom in his basic economy seat. Yes, we can do that for anyone at any time.
We are now beginning our descent into LaGuardia in a postmodern tour de force. Ground temperature is currently fifty-one degrees. Skies are cloudy with a chance that New York City itself will transmogrify into a character.