Writer Walter Kirn tells a story about the way weapons of mass communication such as the Blackberry have made an impact on intimacy issues:

He’s lying in bed with his girlfriend, post-whatever, and she takes out her Blackberry and starts checking her messages. Not to be left out, Kirn takes out his Blackberry and peruses his own incoming email. And then he turns to her triumphantly and says, rather than feeling rejected by her devotion to her device, he feels triumphant.

“My messages are better than yours,” he says. “George Clooney just agreed to star in the movie of my book.”

As I sit down to dinner with him, Kirn has the slightly wide-eyed look of someone who realizes that the old lottery ticket he’s been carrying around in his wallet is, in fact, a jackpot winner. Which, in a sense, it is.

“Up in the Air,” Jason Reitman’s acclaimed new film, is based on a Kirn novel that was published in 2001 – and which vanished almost immediately. It didn’t help that the book, about a guy trying to reach an impossible level of frequent-flyer miles, featured the equivalent of an airplane crash as part of its cover illustration – and that the book was published shortly before 9/11.

Now, with sterling reviews for the movie, the book is back in print and Kirn is happily riding the zeitgeist surrounding Reitman’s film, which has been changed significantly for the film.

“I love getting credit for anything good,” Kirn says. “The movie ‘Frankenstein’ is not much like the book but there’s some essential creation in the book without which there could not be the movie. For me, the most durable elements of the book are the characters and the setting. Giving the setting respect as a world unto itself is something I did in the book and Jason did in the movie.”

That milieu– which Kirn christened “Airworld” in his novel – is the domain of the central character, Ryan Bingham (Clooney), a corporate downsizer. He is obsessed with accumulating mileage and feels completely in his element within the bubble of airports, airplanes, hotels and rental cars. The character, in part, sprang from an encounter Kirn had during a flight on which he was sitting in first class.

“I asked the guy next to me where he was from and he said, ‘Right here. I’m from this seat’,” Kirn recalls. “He said, ‘This is my family.’ He took that route often enough that he knew the flight attendants. I did research in airport clubrooms and found there was this camaraderie among those people. They should have been the loneliest people in the world but they knew each other.

“There was this world of airports, rental cars, hotels that seemed to be a superficial, sterile environment, in which people found a way to feel at home. People can make endless adjustments; you can set them down in any environment and they’ll make a home. And they had made a home in this commercial, plastic, brightly lit world. To me, that was a tribute to the adaptability of human beings. And I imagined a character who felt more at home when he was away than when he was at home.”

Kirn had written a screenplay himself after early interest in the novel as a film (“It was terrible”) but took a hands-off approach once Reitman became involved. Though he visited the set, he didn’t see any footage until Reitman showed him the finished film. He burst into tears when it was over.

“I thought, This guy’s made a movie about America now,” Kirn says. “And not just because it was dealing with the recession and hard times. There was a range of faces, extras, passersby, a great diversity of aerial landscapes. It’s a movie about how we’re all in this together. It gave me a feeling about America as a unity.

“Movies often are about intense niches in the culture, neighborhoods, regions, milieus. But airports are places we’ve all been and travel is something we’ve all done. Art reintroduces us to the familiar in a way that’s newly interesting. There are so many mundane experiences that have been raised to stylized ballet. There’s a real basic aesthetic and a pleasure in recognizing what we usually are numb to.”

As for the differences between his novel and Reitman’s film, Kirn has no problems. They are different works of imagination, telling similar stories in different ways.

“The movie resembles the book in the way two brothers from the same family resemble each other,” Kirn says. “They’ve got the same genetic code. Watching the movie is like going to a country you’ve read about in the New York Times’ travel section. You’ve got some preconception of the monuments – but when you walk the streets, you get a feeling that you couldn’t predict. I felt like I walked into a fully realized world that was funnier, stranger, more melancholy and more surreal than even I expected.

“For example, one thing I thought was essential: The character of Ryan Bingham travels alone. The idea of a sidekick violates the very premise of the book. But when I saw the movie, I was completely delighted and engrossed by it. Why didn’t I think of giving him a companion? It’s an idea I wished I’d had on the page.”

So Kirn is happy to be along for the ride with “Up in the Air” as the originator of the material. He had given up hope that the book itself would ever find an audience – and now that possibility is very real indeed.

“I’m 47 and the hottest 32-year-old director in Hollywood made me feel hip by making a movie of my book,” Kirn says. “I guess I’m not completely over the hill.”

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