Aloft
By Chang-rae Lee
Riverhead, 343 pages, $24.95
With his first two books, Chang-rae Lee, who was born in Seoul and moved to the U.S. at 3, established himself as the leading novelist of Korean-American experience. “Native Speaker” (1995) tells the story of Henry Park, an immigrant grocer’s son who finds work spying on a Korean candidate for mayor of New York. In “A Gesture Life” (1999), retired businessman Franklin Hata is forced to acknowledge the painful wartime memories he has tried to repress since coming to America.
With “Aloft,” Lee seems to take a flier from the responsibility to represent anxious Asian assimilationists. In the novel’s opening pages, narrator Jerry Battle is floating half a mile above the eastern end of Long Island in his private, three-seat Cessna Skyhawk. The prose is buoyant, as if, like Jerry, Lee himself feels liberated from the implacable laws of gravity governing American society. Jerry’s late wife, Daisy Han Battle, was Asian, and his son-in-law, Paul Pyun, is, a bit like Lee himself, a “semi-famous (and only semi-successful) Asian-American writer” whose books examine “the terribly conflicted and complicated state of being Asian and American and thoughtful and male.”
But Jerry flies above all that, propelled by a surname that is “ethnically indistinct.” In fact, the family came from Italy, and its original name, Battaglia, was changed to Battle by Jerry’s pugnacious father, Hank. Now 85 and living in the Ivy Acres Life Care Center, Hank transformed the masonry company that his own father started during the Depression into a prosperous landscaping operation. When Hank retired, Jerry took over. Jerry is now retired and content to let his son, Jack, run the family business. He is running it into the ground.
Viewed from above, Jerry’s favorite vantage point, “Aloft” appears to have less in common with other Asian-American fiction than with Louis Begley’s 1996 novel “About Schmidt.” Both 60-year-old Albert Schmidt and 59-year-old Jerry Battle are wealthy retired widowers leading lives of privilege on Long Island. Dimly aware of others in the margins (Jerry is startled to discover that the man he buys an airplane from is black), both take up with younger Puerto Rican women. Like Begley, a Polish Jew who came to the U.S. at 14, Lee uses fastidious English, a second language, to portray the ordeal of civility imposed on ambitious outsiders. Powered by a patrician sense of entitlement, Jerry soars above congested highways, but even aloft he fails to remain aloof.
“I have been disappearing for years,” confesses Jerry, the weekend aviator, but over the course of a few eventful days, conditions conspire to pull him back to earth. He realizes that he still loves Rita Reyes, the woman who moved in with him after his wife died and who, impatient for commitment, finally left him after two decades. If Jerry takes no action, she will marry a crass, cruel lawyer whose first name, Richie, sums up his distinction. Another former lover, Kelly Stearns, suffers a nervous breakdown. Jerry’s incontinent old father runs away from the Ivy Acres Life Care Center, not caring for the kind of life it offers. During a visit from Oregon, where she is a literature professor, Jerry’s daughter, Theresa, announces she is pregnant and in mortal danger from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His improvident son, Jack, is on the verge of bankrupting the family landscape business.
Recurrent memories of two missing characters also weigh Jerry down enough to keep him from wafting above it all. He still envies his younger brother, Bobby, who might have been a baseball star had he not enlisted in the Marines and died in Vietnam in 1968. And he cannot keep from thinking of Daisy, who, but for binges of spending and drinking, seemed the perfect wife and mother, before drowning in the backyard pool. Jerry’s decision to pave over the pool is symptomatic of how he tries to deal with any annoyance. He is a specimen of that familiar breed, the American male who cannot abide intimacy or obligation. Theresa describes him as ” `fine filler.’ ” Reaching for bean curd to cook up a metaphor, his half-Korean daughter observes: ” `You’re always just there, taking it in. Like tofu in soup.’ “
But if Jerry is not quite a monster of acedia it is in part because of his self-awareness. He acknowledges what Theresa calls his ” `preternatural lazy-heartedness.’ ” And not all the troubles that beset the House of Battle can be laid to Jerry’s evasions. He is quite a likable guy, not least when recounting the comic details of how Richie Coniglio forced him to wager his airplane against the lawyer’s 1992 Ferrari Testarossa on the outcome of a tennis match between the two.
Jerry, who cherishes a private fantasy of continuous solo travel, has visited almost every country on Earth. He attributes his wanderlust to the same impulse that sends him up in the air in his Cessna: “I simply wanted the continued promise of lift, this hope that I could in my own way challenge gravity’s pull, and feel for whatever moments while touring the world’s glories the mystery and majesty of our brief living.” After withdrawing from the landscape business, he takes a part-time job as a travel agent, not for the income but because every trip he books is “one more small victory for those of us who believe in the causes of motion and transit.” Lee sometimes overdoes the metaphor of flight; Jerry, who is not by any means an accidental traveler, even uses aeronautical imagery to describe a sexual encounter with Rita, and it seems too glib to have him identify his fate with that of a British adventurer, Sir Harold Clarkson-Ickes, lost in a balloon over the South Pacific. Lee carefully navigates his novel so that it comes down on the harmless side of affirming human ties. “Aloft” ends up as a homily in praise of gravity, though the ride that Lee provides fulfills the continued promise of lift.
Unlike the Koreans in Lee’s first two books, where language is a theme as well as the meticulously rendered medium, Jerry Battle grew up speaking only English. Yet he confesses to feeling as if he speaks a private language that no one else can understand. However, beyond language, he believes, lies something fundamental–“a shared condition of bemusement and sorrowful wonder that can maybe turn into something like joy.”
In English prose that rises to heights above merely mundane sights and thoughts, “Aloft” offers intimations of that condition.
