Chang-Rae Lee. Aloft. Riverhead, 2004.

Aloft is the third Chang-Rae Lee novel reviewed here. All three are very different. We loved Native Speaker, so it was with a little anticipation we read Aloft.

Aloft follows the tradition of an earlier generation of writers who seemed to focus on American men in some kind of midlife crisis, usually including adultery. I could not help think of Percy, Roth, Bellow, or Updike. Indeed, one of the supporting characters in Aloft is named Coniglio, Italian for rabbit, perhaps a tip of the hat to Updike.

Jerry Battle, an almost sixty semi-retired Long Islander, narrates the story. Left a widower with two young children after his Korean-American wife apparently committed suicide, he somewhat muddles through life. He is very passive or phlegmatic, tending to just let things happen and react if he has to.

The Battle family name was originally Battaglia, and Jerry’s father grew up on the mean streets of Queens and managed to operate a successful masonry and landscaping business. Jerry will work for the family business for years and eventually will let his son Jack take over the whole thing.

The title comes from Jerry’s one expensive hobby, flying a single engine plane. He usually flies alone. His flying symbolizes his life, trying to get above everything and looking down on what is happening.

He has a relationship with the pretty and loving Rita for twenty-five years. They never marry, but she becomes basically a stepmother to Jack and his sister Theresa. Theresa comes close to an academic stereotype. An expectant mother, she wants to name her child Barthes if it is a boy. Once she analyzes something her father tells her by calling it a Lacanic imbrication.

But even Theresa, when she steps outside her academic front, comes across as somewhat sensitive and perhaps even likable.

Jerry observes his father’s occasional infidelities. Some come from his work, landscaping or building something in the yard of a lonely housewife. Jerry, we see, follows suit in a few cases. Even he recognizes that he should have married Rita, but his phlegmatic approach to life keeps him from taking the step.

As I have noted elsewhere in reflecting on the authors mentioned above, this has great stretches of somewhat boring narrative about Jerry’s escapades. He intersperses his tale with clever or humorous observations that keep the reader’s interest. For example, speaking of his class-conscious daughter-in-law and his two grandchildren, he says:

I wish sometimes she would spend more casual, horsing around time with the kids, just lollygagging, rather than scheduling the endless “enrichment” exercises and activities for them that are undoubtedly brain-expanding but must be as much fun as memorizing pi to twenty-five places. (66)

While his daughter tends to look at people as ethnic and class stereotypes, Jerry sounds at least realistic in some of his observations. When describing his father’s youth in Queens, he truly satirizes our present culture.

Pop I guess was a lot angrier then inside and out for the usual reasons of privation and poverty and general mistreatment by family members and people in the street and at school and by the authorities, which these days you’d call racism and discrimination but then was known as the breaks, how it was, your miserable [expletive] life. No doubt these days they’d have identified him and his brothers and cousins and the rest of their street-clinging crew as “at risk” youth and place them in special programs with teams of sociologists and educators and therapists evaluating their intelligence and home life and probably diagnosing them with all kinds of learning and emotional disorders and prescribing medicines and skills-building regimens, finally buoying them up with grand balloons of self-esteem that they might float high above the rank fog of their scrounging dago circumstance, to land somewhere in the sweet-smelling prosperous beyond. (288-289)

Pop managed to make it “aloft” by taking what he had and making it work. Perhaps that is enough for us all.

Aloft is not for everyone. It describes various instances of adultery and fornication with some rough language. Perhaps not as redeeming as The Moviegoer, it nevertheless does end with a certain hopeful outlook. Life is hard and then you die—those are the breaks—but we are all in this together, and that can be some consolation.