Aloft

Description

The New York Times–bestselling novel by the critically acclaimed author of Native Speaker, A Gesture Life and My Year Abroad.

At 59, Jerry Battle is coasting through life. His favorite pastime is flying his small plane high above Long Island. Aloft, he can escape from the troubles that plague his family, neighbors, and loved ones on the ground. But he can’t stay in the air forever. Only months before his 60th birthday, a culmination of family crises finally pull Jerry down from his emotionally distant course.

Jerry learns that his family’s stability is in jeopardy. His father, Hank, is growing increasingly unhappy in his assisted living facility. His son, Jack, has taken over the family landscaping business but is running it into bankruptcy. His daughter, Theresa, has become pregnant and has been diagnosed with cancer. His longtime girlfriend, Rita, who helped raise his children, has now moved in with another man. And Jerry still has unanswered questions that he must face regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of his late wife.

Since the day his wife died, Jerry has turned avoiding conflict into an art form-the perfect expression being his solitary flights from which he can look down on a world that appears serene and unscathed. From his comfortable distance, he can’t see the messy details, let alone begin to confront them. But Jerry is learning that in avoiding conflict, he is also avoiding contact with the people he loves most.Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.

INTRODUCTION
At 59, Jerry Battle is coasting through life. His favorite pastime is flying his small plane high above Long Island. Aloft, he can escape from the troubles that plague his family, neighbors, and loved ones on the ground. But he can’t stay in the air forever. Only months before his 60th birthday, a culmination of family crises finally pull Jerry down from his emotionally distant course.

Jerry learns that his family’s stability is in jeopardy. His father, Hank, is growing increasingly unhappy in his assisted living facility. His son, Jack, has taken over the family landscaping business but is running it into bankruptcy. His daughter, Theresa, has become pregnant and has been diagnosed with cancer. His longtime girlfriend, Rita, who helped raise his children, has now moved in with another man. And Jerry still has unanswered questions that he must face regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of his late wife.

Since the day his wife died, Jerry has turned avoiding conflict into an art form—the perfect expression being his solitary flights from which he can look down on a world that appears serene and unscathed. From his comfortable distance, he can’t see the messy details, let alone begin to confront them. But Jerry is learning that in avoiding conflict, he is also avoiding contact with the people he loves most.

Written with a captivating urgency, Aloft is a witty social critique of contemporary suburban America and a deft portrait of a man struggling to balance his responsibilities with his freedoms. It is the story of Jerry Battle learning to cope with life’s messy details, and the redemption he finds when he finally chooses to immerse himself in them.

 

ABOUT CHANG-RAE LEE

Chang-rae Lee burst on the scene with Native Speaker, which won numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, A Gesture Life, established him as one of the preeminent writers of his generation. Now, with Aloft, Lee has expanded his range and proves himself a master storyteller, able to observe his characters’ flaws and weaknesses and, at the same time, celebrate their humanity.

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Jerry’s relationships with the three women in his life are complicated and inter-related. What were the happiest moments of the life he shared with Daisy? Why did Rita help Jerry raise Jack and Theresa when he denied her the opportunity to have children of her own? Why doesn’t Jerry do more to help Kelly in her most desperate moment of need?
 

On the surface, Paul and Jack are completely different: Paul is a small, wiry bookworm, an out-of-work writer, while Jack is a natural-born athlete and manager of the Battle family business. But while the differences are apparent, both men practice a form of denial with regard to their relationships with their wives. How are both men governed by the demands of these relationships? Discuss the differences and similarities between Jack and Paul as they try to cope with the conflicts of their married lives.
 

Why is Theresa determined to have her baby—even at the cost of her own life?
 

When Jerry goes to Richie’s house to look for Rita and is reluctantly drawn into a high-wager tennis match against him, he allows his plane, Donnie, to be the collateral with which he will play. Donnie is Jerry’s favorite escape. Is his potentially sacrificing it enough to show Rita that he wants her back? Why does Rita decide to stay and help Jerry put his family back together again?
 

Discuss the metaphor of flight as it relates to Jerry’s propensity for escapism and for distancing himself from the problems that arise in the world.
 

How does Jerry deal with Theresa’s illness differently than with Daisy’s?
 

When Hank sounds sick over the phone, Jerry admits to his disbelief in “the Real.” Jerry continually tries to ignore “the Real,” to float beyond it until the trouble has passed and someone else has dealt with it. How does this attitude affect his ability to raise Jack and Theresa? Theresa later praises Jerry for his parenting skills. Would Jack feel the same way toward his father? Does Jack, instead, pity himself? Why?
 

When Paul and Jerry are in Pop’s bedroom watching TV, Paul explains that the problem with the world is that everyone is too self absorbed: “They think they can go anywhere and do anything, as if none of their actions has any bearing except on themselves.” Jerry often characterizes himself in much the same way. Does he avoid feeling guilty by believing his problems originate with Daisy’s death? Does he excuse all his family members of their faults with the same justification? How, if at all, does learning more about Daisy’s last few hours change Jerry’s opinions about himself?
 

How do you think Jerry characterizes Theresa’s death? Was it his fault? Hers? How would Jerry view Daisy’s death in contrast? What is your interpretation of the circumstances that lead to each woman’s passing?
 

The novel begins with Jerry flying in his plane and ends with him stepping into a rectangular hole in the ground that will later be a pool, lying down, and looking up at the sky. Discuss the symbolism of the book’s final image and how it relates to the metaphor of flight throughout the rest of the novel.

Chapter one

FROM UP H E R E, a half mile above the Earth, everything

looks perfect to me.I am in my nifty little Skyhawk, banking her back into the sun,

having nearly completed my usual fair-weather loop. Below is the

eastern end of Long Island, and I’m flying just now over that part

of the land where the two gnarly forks shoot out into the Atlantic.

The town directly ahead, which is nothing special when you’re on

foot, looks pretty magnificent now, the late-summer sun casting

upon the macadam of the streets a soft, ebonized sheen, its orangey

light reflecting back at me, matching my direction and

speed in the windows and bumpers of the parked cars and swimming

pools of the simple, square houses set snugly in rows. There

is a mysterious, runelike cipher to the newer, larger homes wagoning

in their cul-de-sac hoops, and then, too, in the flat roofs of the

shopping mall buildings, with their shiny metal circuitry of

HVAC housings and tubes.

From up here, all the trees seem ideally formed and arranged,

as if fretted over by a persnickety florist god, even the ones (no

doubt volunteers) clumped along the fencing of the big scrap

metal lot, their spindly, leggy uprush not just a pleasing garnish to

the variegated piles of old hubcaps and washing machines, but

then, for a stock guy like me, mere heartbeats shy of sixty (hard to

even say that), the life signs of a positively priapic yearning. Just

to the south, on the baseball diamond—our people’s pattern

supreme—the local Little League game is entering the late innings,

the baby-blue-shirted players positioned straightaway and

shallow, in the bleachers their parents only appearing to sit churchquiet

and still, the sole perceivable movement a bounding goldenhaired

dog tracking down a Frisbee in deep, deep centerfield.

Go, boy, go.

And as I point my ship—Donnie is her name—to track alongside

the broad arterial lanes of Route 495, the great and awful

Long Island Expressway, and see the already-accrued jams of the

Sunday Hamptons traffic inching back to the city, the grinding

columns of which, from my seat, appear to constitute an orderly

long march, I feel as if I’m going at a heady light speed, certainly

moving too fast in relation to the rest, an imparity that should by

any account invigorate but somehow unsettles all the same, and I

veer a couple of degrees northwest to head over the remaining

patchworks of farmland and scrubby forest and then soon enough

the immense, uninterrupted stretch of older, densely built townships

like mine, where beneath the obscuring canopy men like me

are going about the last details of their weekend business, sweeping

their front walks and dragging trash cans to the street and

washing their cars just as they have since boyhood and youth,

soaping from top to bottom and brushing the wheels of sooty

brake dust, one spoke at a time.

confetti of a million cigarette butts, the ever-creeping sidewalk

mosses and weeds; I can’t see the tumbling faded newspaper circular

page, or the dead, gassy possum beached at the foot of the curb,

the why of its tight, yellow-toothed grin.

All of which, for the moment, is more than okay with me.

Is that okay?

Okay.

I bought this plane not for work or travel or the pure wondrous

thrill of flight, which can and has, indeed, been scarily, transcendentally

life-affirming and so on, but for the no doubt seriously unexamined

reason of my just having to get out of the house.

That’s certainly what my longtime (and recently ex-) girlfriend,

Rita Reyes, was thinking about several years ago, when she

gave me a flying lesson out at Islip for my birthday. Really, of

course, she meant it as a diversionary excursion, just a hands-on

plane ride, never intending it to lead to anything else.

At the time she was deeply worried about me, as I was a year

into having early-retired from the family landscaping business

and was by all indications mired in a black hole of a rut, basically

moping around the house and snacking too much. On weekdays,

after Rita left for her job as a home-care nurse (she now works the

ER), I’d do my usual skim of the paper in front of the TV and then

maybe watch a ladies’ morning talk show and soon enough I’d feel

this sharp nudge of ennui and I’d head to the nearby Walt Whitman

Mall (the poet was born in a modest house right across the

street, which is now something they call an “interpretive center”

and is open for tours) for what I would always hope was the easeful

company of like-minded people but would end up instead, depending

on the selling season, to be frantic clawing hordes or else

a ghost town of seniors sitting by the islands of potted ficus, depressing

and diminishing instances both.

When Rita came back home, the breakfast dishes would still be

clogging the table, and I’d be on the back patio nursing a third

bottle of light beer or else napping in the den after leafing

through my tattered Baedeker’s Italy for the umpteenth time.

She’d try to be helpful and patient but it was hard, as that’s what

she’d done all day long. More often than not we’d end up in a

shouting match because she’d toss aside my guidebook a bit too

casually and I’d say something loose and mean about her mother,

and she’d retreat to the bedroom while I went to the car and

revved the engine inside for a long minute before clicking open

the garage door. I’d find myself at a run-down Chinese place on

Jericho, chasing a too-sweet Mai Tai with wonton soup for dinner

and then phoning Rita, to see if she wanted her usual pupu platter

appetizer and shrimp with black beans, which she would, and

which I’d bring back and duly serve to her, as the saying goes, with

love and squalor.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	1.0100 × 5.2700 × 7.9800 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09781594480706
ISBN-10	1594480702
Author	Chang-rae Lee
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC066000, FIC046000
Subjects	literary fiction, brothers, Cooking, book club books, realistic fiction, novels, chick lit, WWII, short stories, saga, collection, jewish, fire, coming of age, american literature, religious books, FIC046000, jewish fiction, jewish books, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, jewish novels, jewish fiction novels, Native Speaker, aging, philosophy, religion, divorce, marriage, relationships, family, writing, modern, music, classic, comedy, Literature, romance, love, drama, FIC066000, fiction, mystery, Friendship, grief, death, families, romantic