Separate Flights is part of a short-story collection centered on a single theme: the disintegration of marital relationships within the nuclear family, now typical of the middle class.
One need only dwell on the short story that lends its title to the entire volume to grasp the author’s literary traits and flee, as quickly as possible, from the tedious repetitiveness of the situations, characters, and dialogue.
Beth cannot sleep and refuses to take sleeping pills: she wants to know why she cannot do something as simple as sleeping.

So night after night she went to bed to lie awake.
(...) she was not equipped to solve a problem of this sort, (...) what she needed was to look into herself, and that was a painful, unsuccessful task.
For when she looked into herself she found, oh God, she found nothing.

There was nothing left to do but fix a gin.
Lee, her husband, has to attend a corporate event; as they often do, the two take separate flights to avoid both perishing in a potential plane crash (it’s the portfolio theory of finance: spread the risk!).
Beth meets a man with whom she has a casual affair.
And it is precisely this fleeting and intense encounter that brings to light the root causes of her malaise: she no longer loved her husband.
For a long time

you suspected that something had died in your house, so you looked around and saw it was long dead in everyone else's house too; then you could come back and look under your own bed and find, truly, a corpse.
She accepted this death.
It was as natural and predictable as a wrinkled face

.
And indeed, there is no outlet for the marital crisis, for the loss of love, because it is something that "just happens and there is nothing we can do about it."

In a society in which everything disintegrates, even love, all that remains is turning to alcohol: loneliness is an existential dimension that cannot be escaped because it is grounded in the stasis of human relations, in our inability to truly love or to overturn our lives.
The author’s deep pessimism leaves the stories hanging, deliberately arresting the narrative’s development to create a static plot; the characters are cold, soulless, imprisoned in a flat, lackluster existence.
And Beth’s daughter is right to react violently to her mother’s warnings (

oh my baby, save yourself.
(...) it's a farce, love, marriage, fidelity..), and scream:

oh why did you come in tonight! Why! Why! Why didn't you stay upstairs and mind your own dirty business!"

There is no hope, perhaps that is true; but one would have wished for a better story, with intense dialogue, a few plot twists, and, above all, deeper insight into the characters and situations.
Instead, one is confronted with a tedious and oppressive narrative pace; a pity, because the writing is of a very high standard.

Why not read it? Oppressive and tedious.

Separate Flights and Other Stories