Families can be tricky. While some are comprised of members disturbingly similar in appearance and outlook, others make even the thought of DNA relations hard to accept. In Chang-Rae Lee's most recent book, \Aloft,"" he focuses on a family fitting the latter description.
Spanning three generations, the family members are connected only by shared blood lines, but are forced to confront their frayed relations and difficult past in a time of crisis. The book is written from the perspective of 50-something Jerry Battle, a man who loves his family the most when they are at a distance.
""Aloft"" lives up to the copious amount of praise splashed over the cover and first six pages. While it does not feature flashy characters or unnatural plot twists, the story shows just how dramatic and intense real life can be. The characters and situations are filled with the weirdness, humor and disasters that readers will recognize from their own lives.
The story begins as Jerry flies over Long Island in the private plane he bought after only one flying lesson. From this perspective, ""everything looks perfect,"" though the present state of his life is clearly not. Rita, his girlfriend of 20 years, has left him, his children are not around to answer his calls, and his father advises him that if his plane went down, to ""Aim at the old bag waving in the window.""
When Jerry lands, life only becomes more complicated. He learns that his pregnant daughter has been diagnosed with cancer, but is refusing treatment so she can keep the baby. Jerry becomes suspicious that the family business he passed on to his son may not be doing as well as the extravagantly-spending son makes it out to be. Jerry's father becomes simultaneously more helpless and defiant in Ivy Acres Life Care Center. Finally, Jerry finds that he must fight a millionaire to win back Rita, which dissolves into a single tennis match with dangerously high stakes.
In the middle of all this, Jerry often finds it hard to act. The decades-old suicide of his wife continues to haunt him and continually threatens to push him away from the family he loves at a distance.
Critics have praised Lee's writing as ""masterful,"" ""spectacular"" and ""beautiful."" These striking terms perfectly convey the prose that describes Jerry's point of view. All the characters are quirky and fascinating, and the book could have focused solely on any one of them. However, Lee uses their intertwining lives and relationships to paint a painfully honest family portrait.
Some readers may find Jerry's constant philosophizing and almost obsessive memories hard to get into at first, but with persistence they will find themselves engrossed. As more family secrets and situations arise, it is impossible not to empathize with the characters as real people.
This novel is both inspiring and dismal in its truthful look at family duty versus family devotion. As Jerry Battle says about family in his typical gray-area way, ""We are consigned to one another, left in one another's hands whether we like it or not, and perhaps the sole thing asked of us is that we never simply let go.\
