There are increasing concerns about the ability of pandemics to overwhelm our health system given the ease of global travel. One unsuspecting carrier might infect a flight of passengers who radiate around the world in their business or family adventures.

David Szalay’s wonderful new novel, Turbulence, addresses the increasing interconnectedness of our modern global world, yet Szalay‘s novel lands more specifically on the everlasting human condition, constant for millennia: human connection.

Turbulence, a series of twelve interconnected chapters, takes the reader around the globe, from, among others, London to Spain to Brazil to the United States to India—plane hops to repair or to pursue love, to hold, even for an evening, another in one’s human orbit, notwithstanding the emotional winds that shake love’s flight or the sudden understandings that cause the heart seemingly to drop hundreds of feet with only a few words.

This slim volume began as a radio commission for the BBC, and Szalay acknowledges that the radio broadcast structure—“15 minutes each, so about 2,000 words each”—shaped the format of the novel. “Each story,” Szalay states, “had to get its job done quickly.” Consequently, the tone, more emotionally resonant than, say, Szalay’s debut novel, London and the South-East, with its comic scenes redolent of Kingsley Amis’s own debut, Lucky Jim, is more wistful, full of human longing. “Given the constricted space considerations,” Szalay asserts, “there wasn’t much space for the comic elements present in my earlier novels.”

Szalay acknowledges that his previous novel, All That Man Is, with its own series of connected stories, provided a template he could use for this BBC project. “The idea for the novel arose from flights and airplane journeys,” Szalay explains. “The challenge was to create variation. Flights are a repetitive motif, so I needed to introduce variation for narrative engagement.” The generational, family, and romantic turbulences, then, create a sequence of variations on the theme of connection in the modern age, a structure and approach not unlike the interlocking musical elements of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. “The reader gets to see the characters from different angles,” Szalay explains. “Each major character is viewed at least twice, sometimes three times. These different points of view round out the reader’s insight into the characters. And the narrative gaps or spaces between the stories create another layer of meaning and depth.” These narrative interstices are akin to the glances and looks between people that frequently signify more than words.

Setting his work in the present is important to Szalay: “As a writer, I want to set my stories in the time in which I live. But I don’t think my work is self-consciously contemporary in terms of its themes,” Szalay asserts. “In fact, I hope my work suggests that the present is not fundamentally that much different from the past. I don’t think human nature changes. What needs to change is the way we use form and language to talk about those fundamental enduring realities—a writer’s form and language have to grow out the specifics of his or her own culture.”

Szalay began to see himself as a writer in his adolescence. “Canonical modernists influenced me: Joyce, Eliot. I was inspired,” Szalay says, “by their use of language and the way their work engaged the world.”

Szalay’s life, in many ways, is a reflection of the characters in Turbulence: he was born in Canada, grew up in the U.K., and now lives in Budapest. “My own life,” Szalay explains, “and the lives of my family members have fed into my sense of how the world is set up now.”

J. W. Bonner writes frequently for Kirkus Reviews, and he teaches writing and the Humanities at Asheville School.