Marcy Dermansky’s Hot Air had me questioning reality from the very first page. But that’s life, isn’t it? The most unrealistic anecdotes, the zaniest events, are usually the ones that actually happened.
Joannie is on a date, a little unsure of how she feels about the date, and is, of course, overanalyzing why she’s unsure. Does she like him? Is she finding him attractive? From the jump, Dermansky shows the full kaleidoscope of all we can feel from moment to moment, all we can talk ourselves in and out of. She doesn’t find him attractive, but he has a pool, and the pool she finds attractive.
Then, a hot air balloon careens into the pool, heavy like a sack of coals. It’s now that we think surely this can’t be real, but I never found myself questioning the hot air balloon crash. Of course that would happen. And of course, the man who’s nearly drowning in the pool, thrown from the hot air balloon with his wife, is an old summer camp crush. Why would he not be?
Joannie, on her date with are we attracted to him Johnny, dives into the pool to save Jonathan—not Johnny, but Jonathan, camp crush, first kiss who felt so desperately cool—and his philanthropist wife Julia, who are, of course, billionaires.
A funny, slightly traumatic event begets dinner, begets a few glasses of wine, a change of (matching) dry clothes, and suddenly: an inherently page-turning sleepover. Children in the basement, the adults rule the roost, and they switch places, trying each other’s partners on for a change, Joannie with her clandestine reunion of summer camp’s past, and Julia with a new man that isn’t her smarmy husband who lusts after their assistant, Vivian. Neither finds what they were looking for, but neither is sure where they’d rather be.
What starts as absurd and completely unprecedented becomes the meat on the bones, becomes life coloring outside the lines, with every character pretending they have any semblance of control. Dermansky’s depiction of each character’s thoughts is improbably frank and yet again, realistic, the ugly inner thoughts that these characters don’t care to monitor, would never turn down their own volumes. They’re all so painfully unselfaware, as so many are. I’m not sure they would be my friends in real life, but I wanted to see where they ended up.
The sleepover turns into a rollercoaster weekend, with these four becoming deeply entangled not only by their pasts, but by their resentments, their children, and their desires, both financially and sexually. Dermansky jumps between each head rapidly, particularly Joannie, Jonathan, and Julia, leaving each one before there’s a chance to occupy it for too long. In each vantage point on an outlandish situation there’s a common thread: four people that wonder what’s in it for them, that feel consistently slighted in some way.
What’s revealed is deeper unsettlement, a sort of ennui that they’ve each been resigned to and took a potentially fatal hot air balloon ride to snap into focus. Hardened by a collective post-pandemic confusion, financial insecurity for half and insecurity about the grandeur of their financials for the other half, each character wants something more, and thinks this weekend might be a chance to reach out their hand and finally grab at something.
But the further they mesh, ultimately driven to madness by a humid trip to Disney World, the more they repel each other’s company, acting as a boomerang back to their old lives that they end up aching to return to—the same lives they were so desperate to leave at the start of the novel. Dermansky shows that they were perhaps fine all along, that the grass is always greener. That Julia might not need to become a mother just because it feels like everyone else is, that Jonathan might be content to continue being the worst (again, the most realistic), and that Joannie’s daughter’s happiness might not be contingent on the fanciest swimming pool in her backyard. That perhaps, the rose colored glasses, the walking a day in someone’s shoes of another life, won’t magically make them kinder, happier people. That perhaps, for Joannie, putting in effort in her current life might be enough. It might have always been enough.
FICTION
Hot Air
By Marcy Dermansky
Knopf
Published on March 18, 2025
