While Diablo Cody’s charged off into new and exciting ventures, her Juno collaborator, Jason Reitman, has kept mum on his much-anticipated follow-up. A month or so ago, he hinted to MTV’s Movie Blog that he was adapting a book that dealt with “corporate” matters. Back to the nonfiction trough, eh? Not exactly. Latino Review’s El Mayimbe is reporting that Reitman’s taking on Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air.

The satiric tale of a “transition counselor” (i.e. axe man) scrambling to reach one million frequent flier miles before he gets pink-slipped himself, Up in the Air will be something of a family affair for Reitman, as papa Ivan’s Montecito Pictures controls the rights to Kirn’s highly regarded 2001 tome. Ignore the suspect Amazon reviews, and dig this write-up from The New York Times:

Your seatmate, as you crisscross Western America, will be Ryan Bingham, 35, a career transition counselor at a Denver-based management consulting company. That is to say, he flies around the country firing people. Find a niche and empty it, you might say. He’s a tragicomic fusion out of Martin Amis, Nicholson Baker and Jay McInerney on a good day. But that’s no way to put it. Walter Kirn, not those others, came up with Ryan Bingham and he can take a deep bow. For all his problems, and does he ever have those, Ryan is as original and cool a character to come along in American fiction in a while. Into the bargain, Kirn is such a sharp writer he gives your brain paper cuts. Never have I so happily bled to death.

That’s a rave from Christopher Buckley, the (not-so-concidental?) author of Thank You for Smoking. That’s worth more than a million Amazon slams.

I only know Kirn from his NY Times columns and the very awful film version of Thumbsucker, but the premise of Up in the Air is intriguing; sounds like a more measured, less homoerotic version of Fight Club. Reitman hopes to begin shooting his adaptation by the end of the year.