Aloft
By Chang-rae Lee, Riverhead Books, 2004

Jerome Battle is 59 and emotionally adrift. His longtime girlfriend has left him, his short-term girlfriend is suicidal, his elderly father is unhappily confined to a retirement home, his daughter is on the verge of being estranged from him, his son’s extravagant spending is threatening to run the family landscaping business into the ground and the memory of his long-dead wife continues to haunt him. Although wealthy (at least for the time being) he fills his days with a part-time job as a travel agent, but his only real escape from the rigor of his life is the time he spends flying solo in his small plane over the coast and suburban sprawl of Long Island. A family crisis, however, suddenly shakes the fragile equilibrium that Battle has managed to achieve in his life and threatens to bring him crashing back to earth.

Such is the framework of Chang-Rae Lee’s latest novel, Aloft, a family drama that is at once both ambitious and severely limited in scope. The Battle family is a substantial one, and its story stretches over generations, but there is nothing here that feels epic. If anything, the characters are more quickly sketched than meticulously rendered, and the reader can never truly connect with any of them. Jerry’s daughter Theresa, for example, is painted in broad strokes, despite her crucial role in the novel, and we are given little reason to care about her.

Lee uses Jerry Battle’s love for flying as a metaphor for his need to flee from the complications in his familial and romantic relationships, but after introducing the metaphor in the opening scene (as well as in the title of the book), Lee turns away from it. Once Jerry’s initial flight is over, he does not again take to the air until the climax in the book’s final pages. Instead, Lee builds new layers of metaphor - Jerry’s work as a travel agent, for example, allows him vicarious escape through the adventures of his clients - but in the process, the book’s central conceit, although always terribly obvious, is never satisfactorily explored. Why, if flying is so important to Battle, does he not get into his plane more often?

One cannot help but notice similarities between Lee’s novel and John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, another story of a man who, facing late middle-age, does all he can to wiggle free of the emotional bonds put upon him by his family. Aloft is written in the present tense, as are all of Updike’s Rabbit novels, giving the reader an eerie sense of the protagonist’s relentlessly ticking life-clock. Both Jerry Battle and Updike’s Harry Angstrom endure the difficulties caused by emotionally unstable wives, demanding girlfriends, and belligerent children. Both Jerry and Harry are thrown into financial crisis by a son who is unable to manage a family business that had been, with the protagonist (Jerry and/or Harry) at the helm, quite successful. The heroes of both novels are emotionally unavailable to those around them, and both struggle to find meaning in their quickly decelerating lives. However, while Updike’s Angstrom constantly bucks and kicks (if clumsily and ineffectively) against the constraints of his situation, Lee’s character is resigned and passive. He lets events wash over him, and for most of the novel, he cannot even manage the energy to run away. Updike’s protagonist is prickly and ignorant, but thanks to his vitality, he is somehow more attractive than repellant; Lee’s hero is, on the other hand, blank and bland, and it is difficult to muster much interest in his fate.

Jerry Battle’s relationship with his father brings to mind a work by another masterful American writer, Philip Roth’s autobiographical Patrimony. Roth’s story of his father’s decline and death from cancer - and the way that their father-son role reversalshifts their always turbulent relationship - is weakly echoed in Aloft. In Lee’s novel, however, the precise nature of the relationship between Battle and his Pop is never clearly drawn; Battle’s tendency to waffle and whine makes us wonder if we really know how he feels. The novel’s pat and saccharine conclusion does little to put a satisfying cap on the story of the relationship.

The problem with Aloft lies, perhaps, in the identity of the author. Lee is fully two decades younger than his protagonist, and his constructed portrait of a retired Italian-American landscaper rings hollow, as if such a character is too far removed from Lee’s own experience and, thus, just beyond his grasp as a writer. Jerry Battle, it seems, is supposed to be a man’s man who just wants to be, ultimately, left alone, but Lee instead gives us a character who is indecisive and ineffectual, a pushover who lets his life happen to him. Whatever the reason for Battle’s lack of depth, he is not a character with whom you’ll want to spend a significant amount of time.

Copyright 2004 Ad Media Inc.