Nothing feels less subversive today than the quasi-spirituality of self-realization. We are all on our journeys, all trying to live our best lives, all trying to believe in the beauty of our dreams. But what if those dreams are really, really weird? This is the shrewd conceit of Kate Folk’s loopy, compassionate, surprisingly poignant first novel, Sky Daddy, the story of Linda, a young woman who wants nothing more than to marry an airplane. You may wonder what this means. You need not wonder long, for Linda herself, a delightfully unselfconscious narrator incapable of coyness, lays it out for us on the novel’s first page: “He” (all planes, we’re told, are men) will “recognize me as his soulmate midflight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.” In other words, Linda’s highest ambition is to die in a plane crash. You can’t say she doesn’t dream big!
All of this is very funny in a silly-audacious way, made even more so by Folk’s unabashed shout-outs to arguably the greatest novel of nonnormative obsession, Melville’s Moby Dick. “Call me Linda,” Sky Daddy opens, doubling down on the novel’s wink-nudge whale-centric epigraphs and gearing up for a lyrical précis on aviatorial lust. That Sky Daddy works so well is largely thanks to Linda’s voice—erudite, a little formal, and clinically precise (save for some choice metaphorical flourishes), so much that of a dispassionate outsider that it brings an anthropological objectivity to her account of her own all-too-familiar milieu. A 30-year-old content moderator paid $20 an hour (“more like fifteen after taxes”) to confirm whether an AI has correctly marked the loathsome comments on online posts as merely hateful or a violation of the parent company’s terms of service, Linda has arranged her life to minimize any obligation that might impede her wants. She spends her days in an office park on the outskirts of San Francisco and her off-hours riding BART’s AirTrain or holing up, “like a river eel in its mud burrow,” in the windowless cube built into an Outer Sunset garage she rents for $900 a month—a sum that leaves her just enough for an occasional flight and, she hopes, the consummation of her truest desire.
But Linda is not a hermit at heart, and soon her need for connection disrupts the single-minded existence she’s labored to create. It’s not that Linda doesn’t want friends; it’s that she fears mockery—lest they learn of her proclivities—and the idea that she’ll cause them grief when her untimely (if ecstatic) death comes to pass. When her work buddy Karina persuades her to come to a monthly “Vision Board Brunch” (or VBB) hosted by college friends, Linda warily agrees, hoping that the vision board’s promise of manifesting hopes will hasten the realization of her own. The outcome of the brunch is twofold: First, Linda discovers that the boards do have a kind of power (she constructs her own around the more palatable theme of marrying a pilot), and second, she learns that Karina—the pretty, neat, high-fem germaphobe she’s previously relied on as a source of all things “in”—is something of an outsider herself. A camaraderie, and all its complications, ensue.
What, Sky Daddy asks, does being “in” mean anyway, in a present more attuned to the needs of faceless corporate entities than actual people? What’s a reasonable desire when modest human comforts feel aspirational? Alongside its riveting depiction of obsession, Sky Daddy traces our corporation-exploited present’s fundamental strangeness and, with it, the compromises extracted from everyone just hoping to live a “normal” life. When dwelling in a garage cube, training an AI for pennies (thereby hastening one’s own obsolescence), and subjecting oneself to an onslaught of hate acceptable under the terms of service is the stuff of average, is wanting to marry a plane really all that weird? Rather than pathologize Linda, Sky Daddy portrays her passion as gloriously authentic, a vibrant counterpoint to the depressingly careful dreams that populate the other vision boards of the VBB. Here, wanting to get outside or pay down a mortgage by turning a basement into an Airbnb count as ambitions. In one sense, everyone here is living in a cut-rate garage cube—Linda could count herself lucky that hers is only literal.
To its credit, Folk’s novel never treats the desires of any of its characters as trivial or wrong. From the mid-manager middle-aged Dave, who wants to get his groove back after a divorce, to Simon, a sleazy bad date turned porn moderator who just needs a win, to Karina and her modest hope of marriage to her sweet dope of a fiancé, everyone here is just trying to find a modicum of satisfaction. Against the backdrop of our all-but-mandatory participation in a tech culture that values us mostly for our insatiable discontent, it seems almost radical to celebrate any desire’s true fulfillment. Who are we, says Sky Daddy, to deny the Lindas of the world theirs?•
