Chang-Rae Lee: Aloft

Reviewed by PHILIP CULBERTSON

May 20 this year in the Christian calendar is Ascension Day, marking the moment when with little warning Jesus suddenly flew upward into the air and vanished. I have an icon on the wall of my study showing one of the disciples hanging on to his feet, trying to keep him from leaving.

Jerry Battle, the loveable but flawed hero of Chang-Rae Lee's Aloft, spends a lot of time in the air as well. He's on the eve of turning 60, and has just busted up with his girlfriend.

Even before his Korean wife drowned in the backyard pool, he'd begun to "disappear". Whether in his beloved private Skyhawk plane, or on terra firma among his family, he's here, but he's not present. He prefers to be "suspended, up here before I was ever up here".

Rather than being flash, Jerry is simply bewildered and struggling: "that's the case with almost every one in the broadening swath of middle age, isn't it, that we're all fatiguing in some critical way (sex, job, family), some prior area of happy vitality and self-definition that is now simply a source of anxiety and dread".

His two children are married normally to badly, his cantankerous Pop is erotically terrorising a nursing home, and his son is bankrupting the business Jerry hoped would fund his own retirement. Jerry is just a "getting-old guy" who prefers not to have to think, "rabid about nothing", possessed of an "oft-documented lazy-heartedness".

Is Jerry's ascending (is Christ's Ascension) an escape or a triumph? That depends on who's telling the story. Jerry thinks he's a failed father, yet that is the very reason his daughter loves him. He thinks he's a bumbling coward, but in the end those qualities win his girlfriend back. In fact, the novel floats us through the turning of Jerry's life from escape to triumph, as he realises that he "cannot keep marking this middle distance".

Lee, who teaches creative writing at Princeton University, was named by the New Yorker as one of the 20 best American writers under the age of 40.

As in his previous two award-winning novels, this one offers little dramatic action, and not one cliff-hanger. Instead, Lee writes brilliantly about identity and relationships, about the every-dayness of our regular lives, and about the fears and anxieties that characterise our inner dialogue.

Lee's style reminds me of Richard Russo's, one of my favourite American authors. The style is so smooth I often forgot I was reading; it was more like talking to a familiar and wordily-clever old friend. In this way, Lee offered me, too, the chance to spend some time aloft.

* Allen & Unwin, $35