Aloft [Paperback]

Chang-rae Lee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2005

At 59, Jerry Battle is coasting through life. His favorite pastime is flying his small plane high above Long Island. Aloft, he can escape from the troubles that plague his family, neighbors, and loved ones on the ground. But he can't stay in the air forever. Only months before his 60th birthday, a culmination of family crises finally pull Jerry down from his emotionally distant course.

Jerry learns that his family's stability is in jeopardy. His father, Hank, is growing increasingly unhappy in his assisted living facility. His son, Jack, has taken over the family landscaping business but is running it into bankruptcy. His daughter, Theresa, has become pregnant and has been diagnosed with cancer. His longtime girlfriend, Rita, who helped raise his children, has now moved in with another man. And Jerry still has unanswered questions that he must face regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of his late wife.

Since the day his wife died, Jerry has turned avoiding conflict into an art form-the perfect expression being his solitary flights from which he can look down on a world that appears serene and unscathed. From his comfortable distance, he can't see the messy details, let alone begin to confront them. But Jerry is learning that in avoiding conflict, he is also avoiding contact with the people he loves most.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Chang-Rae Lee, named by The New Yorker as one of its 20 writers for the 21st Century, has confirmed his place in that company with Aloft, a masterful treatment of a man coming to terms with his own disaffection. In two previous novels, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, Lee, a Korean-American, writes of lives being not what they seem: in the first, the protagonist is an undercover agent; in the second, the two halves of Franklin Hata's life never quite come together. Both novels won numerous awards, including Best First Novel, the Hemingway PEN Award, the American Book Award and the Asian-American Literary Award, among others. In Aloft, Lee revisits alienation, a fractured family, mixed heritage and the quest for identity.

Jerry Battle, 59-year-old widower and father of two, retired from the family business--the unmistakably earthbound Battle Brothers Brick and Mortar--buys a small airplane because "From up here, a half mile above the Earth, everything looks perfect to me." All is not well below. Jerry knows it, saying

...the recurring fantasy of my life... is one of perfect continuous travel, this unending hop from one point to another, the pleasures found not in the singular marvels of any destination but in the constancy of serial arrivals and departures, and the comforting companion knowledge that you’ll never quite get intimate enough for any trouble to start brewing.

His view from aloft saves him from the gritty reality of the detritus of life--and from life itself.

This high-flyer must come to earth, however, when he finds that his daughter is newly pregnant, diagnosed with cancer, and refusing treatment; his son, who is running the company, has piled up enough debt that bankruptcy is imminent; and his father has gone missing from his assisted living facility. Jerry can no longer say, with impunity, "Jerry Battle hereby declines the Real." Lee takes us on great side trips into the pleasures of food and recreational sex; his wife Daisy's death; his longtime lover Rita's almost endless patience, weaving long, Miltonic sentences that start in one place and end up miles away--flights of fancy--trailing clouds of insight and poignancy. With Aloft Lee just keeps getting better. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Lee's third novel (after Native Speaker and A Gesture Life) approaches the problems of race and belonging in America from a new angle—the perspective of Jerry Battle, the semiretired patriarch of a well-off (and mostly white) Long Island family. Sensitive but emotionally detached, Jerry escapes by flying solo in his small plane even as he ponders his responsibilities to his loved ones: his irascible father, Hank, stewing in a retirement home; his son, Jack, rashly expanding the family landscaping business; Jerry's graduate student daughter, Theresa, engaged to Asian-American writer Paul and pregnant but ominously secretive; and Jerry's long-time Puerto Rican girlfriend, Rita, who has grown tired of two decades of aloofness and left him for a wealthy lawyer. Jack and Theresa's mother was Jerry's Korean-American wife, Daisy, who drowned in the swimming pool after a struggle with mental illness when Jack and Theresa were children, and Theresa's angry postcolonial take on ethnicity and exploitation is met by Jerry's slightly bewildered efforts to understand his place in a new America. Jerry's efforts to win back Rita, Theresa's failing health and Hank's rebellion against his confinement push the meandering narrative along, but the novel's real substance comes from the rich, circuitous paths of Jerry's thoughts—about family history and contemporary culture—as his family draws closer in a period of escalating crisis. Lee's poetic prose sits well in the mouth of this aging Italian-American whose sentences turn unexpected corners. Though it sometimes seems that Lee may be trying to embody too many aspects of 21st-century American life in these individuals, Jerry's humble and skeptical voice and Lee's genuine compassion for his compromised characters makes for a truly moving story about a modern family.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade; First Riverhead Trade Ppbk Ed.,2005 edition (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594480702
• ISBN-13: 978-1594480706
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chang-Rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life, and Aloft. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-Rae Lee teaches writing at Princeton university.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "There's no point in flying if you can't fly alone.", March 8, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aloft (Hardcover)

Jerome Battle, a self-described "average American guido," has managed to live most of his sixty years "above it all," never quite engaging with those around him or becoming emotionally intimate. On weekends he is aloft in his small plane, his "private box seat in the world and completely outside of it, too," flying alone around Long Island, observing the apparent orderliness of the landscape without the "pedestrian sea-level flotsam" of everyday life. Unfortunately, Jerry also lives his personal life the way he flies his plane, as if he's seeing it from a great distance. Numerous personal catastrophes, enough to unhinge a man more sensitive to his surroundings, are now occurring around and to Jerry and his family, but Jerry's long experience in avoidance allows him to remain disengaged from these events. Slowly, inexorably, the author develops the family's crises until they finally force themselves onto Jerry's personal radar screen, and he realizes that "I cannot stay at altitude much longer, even though I have fuel to burn."

By focusing on character, especially that of Jerry, rather than plot, and telling the story from Jerry's point of view, author Lee has created enormous challenges for himself. He must engage the reader's interest in a man who is not really interested in much of anything--a man who does not see family emergencies as the dramatic and heart-wrenching events that they would be to other people and who has no real interest in changing. So successful is the depiction of Jerry's phlegmatic point of view that the reader, too, may not see these events as very compelling or dramatic until Jerry himself starts to respond to them. Yet Lee's novel succeeds in its characterization. His depictions of Jerry and his family strike chords of recognition as he explores the universal questions of how we become the people we are and how we affect the generations which follow.

Beautifully written, and full of penetrating observations and felicitous turns of phrase, the novel is a sensitive and often painful exploration of the human condition, filled with characters who are utterly isolated at key turning points in their lives. Subtle in its development, and rich in imagery and obvious symbolism (Sir Harold Clarkson-Ickes's attempt to fly a balloon around the world, the Discovery Channel's story of the defeat of a lion king), this quietly complex novel by a prodigiously gifted author offers evidence that even a man as determined as Jerry Battle to remain above the fray must ultimately connect with the earth. Mary Whipple

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Novel Told with Wit and Extraordinary Insight, May 20, 2004

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aloft (Hardcover)

Chang-Rae Lee's third novel brilliantly evokes the angst of a man stunted by his own passivity. Jerry Battle, by his own account, is not a fighter. He flies his airplane in only the fairest weather, and usually does so solo since from that height, with no one making demands on him, "everything looks perfect." On the ground, though, his life is less than perfect. He would rather let the woman he loves live with another man than express his true feelings for her. He turns from the implications of his son's extravagance in running the family landscape business, and he prefers to keep his distance from his gruff father. If Jerry sees the signs of imminent destruction, he keeps them to himself, for to bring them to the fore would be to require action on his part. In fact, the last time in his life when he took charge of his personal life, he pushed his wife and the mother of his children to her early death. All in all, he'd rather not know about the crises embroiling his family. However, when his adult daughter breaks some distressing news, all his carefully constructed aloofness begins to crumble.

With wit and insight, Lee has created not only a memorable character, but an unforgettable novel. The interior nature of the first person narrative might disappoint readers looking for more pizzazz to the plot, but the intimacy created as Jerry leads the reader through his thoughts - on everything from his young wife's death to his father's "years of being a pigheaded domineering irascible bull in the china shop of life" to his tender. confused feelings for his son and daughter - makes up for the lack of action. The emotional depth Lee provides is stunningly full. Although the imagery can be heavy-handed with its references to flight and being grounded, Jerry's wry acknowledgment of these elements rescue them. The decadence of contemporary culture and the melting pot of Long Island provide strong foils to this novel essentially about a fifty-nine year old man coming of age.

Admittedly, this excellent novel is not for everyone. Its detailed examination of mundane but revelatory moments might get tedious for some. However, for those who like the quiet realism and intimacy of a man's struggle against his own nature, this will be one of the best novels of 2004.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful story about an imperfect but loving family, March 19, 2004

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Aloft (Hardcover)

Jerry Battle is almost 60 and semi-retired from Battle Brothers Brick and Mortar, a company his father, who is living unhappily in a retirement home, took great pride in. He works part-time at Parade Travel and lives the good life in Huntington Village, a wealthy (and mostly white) area on Long Island that is a far cry from his Italian roots in nearby Whitestone. He has spent his entire life skating around relationships --- his first wife Daisy drowned in their backyard pool, and his long-time girlfriend, Rita, leaves him after taking care of his children and waiting over 10 years for Jerry to pop the question. Kelly, Jerry's co-worker at Parade Travel, dates him briefly and is similarly exasperated with him.

His children also don't seem to know what to do with him. His son, Jack, is a solid guy who is married to an All-American blonde named Eunice, has two children and lives in a ridiculously over-decorated house they can't quite afford. Jack is running the family business into the ground but neglects to discuss this with Jerry directly. Theresa, who is by far a more colorful and interesting character, is Jerry's daughter. She is an overeducated professor, also cursed with thinking too much, and is engaged to Paul, an Asian-American poet who has a serious case of writer's block. Theresa calls her father by his first name and adamantly refuses treatment when she finds out she is simultaneously pregnant and has cancer.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Jerry unintentionally befriends strangers --- such as the couple who sell him his airplane --- but is removed from those he loves the most. Truth be told, everyone thinks Jerry is lazy and aloof. He ruminates about all the neighbors he was cordial with, all the girls he ran around with in his youth and anyone else who might have passed his way in 60-odd years of living. Yet Jerry feels he doesn't have real friends and tries desperately to get back together with Rita.

The novel starts off slowly. There are a lot of unnecessary details about minor characters and it's initially hard to feel sympathy for the protagonist. Once the conflicts of the story are presented and Jerry decides to take some action for once, the pace quickly picks up and doesn't dissipate. Though the story is plot-heavy and meanders right up until the last page (pg. 343), it is immensely readable. Whether it's a lunch celebrating Paul and Theresa's engagement or Jerry remembering his childhood, the details are so vivid and plentiful that the reader will relate to the Battles immensely, even if they've never met anyone like them.

This could have easily been a novel about illness, but Lee is nothing if not ambitious. The author of two previous, critically acclaimed novels about Asian-Americans, Lee tackles race from the perspective of privilege. Daisy was Asian, Jerry's children are half-Asian, Paul is Asian and Jerry has a co-worker whom he calls "the resident Hispanic." But by and large, everyone is white and, true to his character, Jerry thinks about race a lot and shares those thoughts with the reader. Not that Jerry focuses only on people of color. He is equally baffled by women, including Kelly, who hails from the South. Through reminiscences and dialogue, Jerry analyzes the way men treat women without delving into a decisive diatribe.

Chang-rae Lee could have easily (and understandably, depending on your perspective) written a story about how badly white men treat the rest of the world. In interviews, Lee has been quoted as saying that he identifies with his protagonist despite the racial and age differences (Lee is in his 30s). It shows. Lee has written a wonderful story about an imperfect family who love each other at the end of the day.

--- Reviewed by Jane Van Ingen