Plot's weak, but metaphor lets 'Aloft' soar
"Aloft" by Chang-rae Lee; Riverhead, hardback, $24.95
By Marta Salij
Knight Ridder News Service
What you need to know about Chang-rae Lee's third novel is in the title, "Aloft," and on the book jacket, an image of a speck-like private plane soaring alone in a blue sky.
The flying metaphor is all in "Aloft," to the good and to the bad. It's a book about a small man flying solo through seemingly empty space, and Lee makes every paragraph carefully support that image. Lee here is, as always, a tidy writer.
But I wonder: Shouldn't a metaphor establish a point of view, then submerge in favor of, well, character consistency and plot?
Or should such a lovely image sail through 300 pages, largely untouched?
The small man is Jerry Battle, our narrator. He's 59 and retired from his family's Long Island landscaping business. Battle Brothers was built by his father, Hank the Tank, who changed the family's surname from Battaglia in favor of something more suiting his personality. Pop is 85 and in a nursing home, but he's still combative.
Jerry has two grown children, Jack and Theresa.
Jack, a hardworking and quiet man, now runs Battle Brothers. He's married to a battle ax, Eunice, who's trying to vault the Battles out of middle-class entrepreneurship into a robber-baron life: huge house, luxury cars, designer furniture, fine art, live-in help, etc. She's also decided that Battle Brothers should expand into high-end interior renovations, which somehow requires the company to build posh new headquarters and buy designer furniture to fill it.
Theresa is a professor in one of those liberal arts disciplines only novelists know about. Theresa is sharp and angry — so that's where Pop's genes ended up! — though she's engaged to a sweet and self-effacing writer, Paul. Theresa vs. Paul is an easy call; Theresa vs. Eunice is even odds.
As for Jerry, he wanted to be a fighter pilot, but he didn't have the guts to apply to the military academies. He also didn't have the guts to stand up to his dad, so he spent his career trying to steer Battle Brothers while taking as few risks as possible.
After retirement, Jerry took a flying lesson at the urging of his love, Rita. He bought a used plane as soon as he touched down. Now Jerry loves nothing so much as being above the clouds, by himself.
As Jerry says of his first lesson, "my first thought when the instructor let me take the controls was that I wished he'd strapped a chute on himself, so he could jump the hell out. Nothing in the least was wrong with him — he was a nice, if alarmingly young, kid from an extended family of pilots, the Flahertys. But feeling the motor's buzz in my butt and legs, the shuddery lift of the wingtips in my hands, and gazing down just this middle distance on the world, this fetching, ever-mitigating length, I kept thinking that here was the little room, the little vessel, I was looking for, my private box seat in the world and completely outside of it, too."
No Rita? Well, no. Rita left Jerry a year ago, after 20 years together, because he never proposed. Jerry sees his lapse as a character flaw cloaked in a philosophical stance:
"Jerry Battle, it must appear, can let the mortar pit and crumble. He can stand by and watch the gutters overflow, the water pooling against the foundations. He can gaze yet a thousandth time upon the buckles becoming waves in the asphalt yard, only to pick up the phone and speed-dial ahead for his three-soft-taco lunch."
Jerry also swears that the Battles' tragedies are well-buried in the past. Jerry's younger brother, Pop's favorite, was killed in Vietnam.
And Jack and Theresa's mother, Daisy, drowned in the family swimming pool when the children were small. Before her drowning, she'd had a terrible run of mental illness, which Jerry describes but scrupulously never calls manic-depressive disorder. Was Daisy's death an accident? Suicide?
Doesn't matter, Jerry would say, we're all over that by now.
What a book like this promises, of course, is tragedies to come, turbulence as yet unseen. Lee tosses the usual storm pockets into "Aloft": Illness, old age, money woes, lost love, family strains, even actual bad weather.
The plot potholes can seem whimsical, but I can forgive Lee for that. This is a novel built around a metaphor, after all. But I have a hard time with Jerry. For one, I can't believe a man who doesn't seem to read would use "imbrication," even if his academic daughter or Chang-rae Lee might.
More, though, I'm not sure Jerry's problem is what he says it is, or even what others say it is. He talks about his unwillingness to get involved, but he acts no more "emotionally lazy," as Theresa and Rita call him, than anyone else. He's not even as bad as he says he is.
Is Lee after a grander statement about the impotence of the modern American in the face of plenty, which leaves him unable to savor life? Jerry rails now and then in that direction:
"I've never sat by well when others were at play," Jerry says, "not when I was five, or fifteen, or fifty. I'd like to believe this was a question of my desiring involvement and connection, rather than of envy or selfishness. I'd like to blame my ever-indulging, spoiling, obliging mother (God bless her), or my wonderful brother Bobby for guiltlessly using up the years of his brief life; I'd like to blame my father for giving me almost everything I required but really nothing I wanted, but that's the story of us all, isn't it, or of my particular American generation, or maybe just me, and nothing one really needs to hear about again."
In those instances, "Aloft" reminds me of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," down to a wince-worthy bathroom scene with Pop. Franzen's social commentary was more insistent, but Lee's point of view is more big-hearted, and I prefer that. And Lee's prose in "Aloft" is as finely crafted as any in his first two books, "A Gesture Life" and "Native Speaker."
That gets us to three stars for "Aloft": One for metaphor, one for prosecraft and half a point each for commentary and plot. I'll leave it to you to decide whether to subtract a point for weak character development, or whether just to chalk it up to some unexpected turbulence in Lee's third outing.
