Fiction: No matter how many ways writers tug and pull at the notion of narrative, one man's story retains its appeal. Aloft is the earthy, likeable, if lengthy third novel by Korean-born Chang-Rae Lee whose fiction increasingly looks towards the US where he was raised.
He has begun to move away from the immigrant experience and his voice is now that of an American writer, albeit one very conscious of the fragmented cultures that form part of that voice.
This new book offers an account of how easy-going, increasingly bewildered Jerry Battle, a late middle-aged Italian-American of good intentions, humour and some bad luck, begins to consider what exactly has happened to his life.
Having taken early retirement from the family landscaping business, begun by his grandfather and now being bloated towards bankruptcy by the wild ambitions of his son's extravagant wife, Jerry has taken to flying. His hobby was initiated by the gift of a flying lesson from Rita, his exasperated long-term girlfriend. She has reason to complain about her lot. Having raised the widower Jerry's son and daughter, Rita has finally rebelled over her 20-odd years as girlfriend with no prospect of marriage (save being described as an "almost stepmother") and has also taken to flight. She has had enough.
It seems that the only place Jerry can escape chaos is high up above the clouds in his little plane. The rest of his time is divided between his stints working in a local travel agency and the various ordeals that pass for conversation with the troubled members of his family and his two competing lady loves. It is a narrative driven by the cast of characters as much as by Jerry's musings. Lee has concentrated on the life and times of an American male, or rather a male living in the US. By his own admission, Jerry is one of life's passengers.
Survival for him has always been made possible by his ability to stand back and watch. Watch as his lusty old father acted out the fantasy of the stud at work; watch as his quiet mother did nothing but cook a vast amount of fairly average meals; watch as his own wife, Daisy, a beautiful Asian girl, went from unhappy, to eccentric, to exhibitionist, to crazy, to finally drowning in the family swimming pool.
Now alone, his thoughts still on Rita, Jerry knows his wild father, currently a reluctant resident in a rest home, is heading for the last round-up. Never the most engaged of fathers - after all, once Daisy died, he had Rita to pick up the pieces - Jerry is alone. He is aware that he barely knows his son Jack, now living in a dangerous opulence and expanding the family business from landscaping to kitchen design and skid row.
Even more worrying is Theresa, his daughter, a high-minded academic who has no time for material excess. Her husband, Paul, is a writer who can't seem to write any more and has instead turned to cooking. They are about to have a child, but there is a problem - Theresa is terminally ill and is refusing treatment. All of the detail, all of the description should combine to weigh down the narrative. Instead it all helps to create a sense of one man facing into the fear of loneliness and death.
Initially it seems that Lee is aspiring towards the jaunty eloquence of Richard Ford. For a while, it almost works, before the tone moves quickly closer to the less literary, if always urbane Richard Russo. However, at times throughout the book, the easy philosophy of Jerry acquires a sophistication that is not quite in character with this guy about whose early life we never learn all that much because even as a boy he was too busy watching Pop chasing women.
There are passages that leave one wondering who is telling the story, Jerry or Princeton lecturer Chang-Rae Lee. Still, Lee has a light touch as well as a shrewd awareness of the way a life, and lives, tend to limp along shaped by specific episodes that invariably determine what happens next. This novel engages and convinces by always staying on the right side of sentimentality and horror.
True, Theresa's final scene and the birth of her child are about as black as black can be. There are several vivid, and saving, set-pieces, particularly a memorable lunch in Pop's rest home. Lee exercises sufficient caution and charm and a sense of contemporary US life as lived by one man attempting to figure it all out, to sustain the narrative and beguile his reader.
- Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
