Aloft

Some-thang to Behold

In the spirit of St. Augustine, I have a confession to make. This is not something I'm proud of, but I guess that defines a confession. I winced at the prospect of reading Chang-rae Lee's Aloft because it was so obviously a multicultural novel. His first novel, Native Speaker, was assigned, like shots of penicillin, to the whole goddamn city of New York. Here, again, was fiction designed to be good for you, to instruct. This is not the reason I read.

The wince I trace to my father, a novelist and English department veteran several colleges over, who, at least in my world, was a quiet flank in the PC counter offensive staged in the late eighties and early nineties. Looking back, this must have been a perilous position to take, both because of the departmental power struggles taking place and because there were obvious and important reasons to open up the canon. The truth is, the look of America was changing fast. And yet could you deny that university lit classes were venturing in tenor toward a form of political indoctrination? The agenda -- and accompanying books -- could smack Soviet, counter the wild and ambiguous terrain of True Art.

Or so my father had me thinking. By the end of Aloft, this phrase, this notion with all its attendant baggage and freight, strikes with a sharp, revised power. And very near the beginning of Aloft, there's something else you'll likely realize: that you're reading yourself as raptly as the novel -- rapaciously, ruinously, chasing blood and revelation. It turns out Lee's portrayal of Jerry Battle does steer one into the wild and ambiguous, including, prominently, his own considerable father-and-son shit. As Jerry, the near sixty-year-old protagonist and narrator, puts it, "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?" Right on the money. And here in one neat, soulful package is a challenge to obsolete ideas of "ethnic literature" and anyone's unexamined Father Fealty. For a while I even weighed changing my name.

The mere existence of Aloft -- a novel to shelf near Updike's Rabbit quartet and Philip Roth's more recent, captivating fare -- made all of my bullshit multicultural predispositions fall from the sky in one scary, satisfying piece. At the feet of the father I was tempted (predictably, it turns out) to lay the Old Thinking debris. And reading Aloft you may be tempted to toss Rabbit Angstrom, and to a lesser extent Nathan Zuckerman -- Jerry Battle's now fusty literary uncles -- on the same slag heap. Which is to say that Chang-rae Lee's witheringly precise capture of who we are now, including all of the textures and complexities of our multicultural nation/project, makes this novel an exhilarating read. As across the land our blood is getting swirled with increasing velocity (and ostensibly as practical afterthought in Aloft), we have here a corresponding fictional alloy of new, complicated, tensile power.

It doesn't hurt to be in the hands of a writer who, like Roth, seems to know just about everything. Whether it's setting (north Jersey), milieu (from working class to nouveau riche), work (landscaping, travel agenting), hobbies (flying, traveling), or retirement homes, cooking, death -- the scrim of detail strikes one as rigorously authoritative and true. And yet Lee's foremost feat extends far beyond this to his convincing, seemingly effortless narration from the point of view of a white retiree. For Jerry Battle, and his grasp on our chaotic, contemporary world, is the core experience of Aloft, and the brio with which Lee brings him to life is so engaging that you can't help fall for the opinionated old guy (and the novel that has him caged). Write what you know? While at first thought that doesn't seem to apply here, Lee shows us how multicultural is becoming simply cultural.

Meanwhile, the novel's attention to language, everywhere apparent in Jerry's poetic and absolutely current vernacular, makes for constant prose pleasure, just about every rolling sentence a candy to pop in your mouth and suck. Take for instance one of the novel's most startling scenes, in which Jerry's wife, Daisy, attacks him: "She lunged at me, in her splendid nakedness, knife and all, her eyes dull with dark no-method, with the chill of empty space." Or in a light moment, Jerry contemplating the new office girl: "I can't remember her name and so I'm hesitant to start any small talk, though with her clingy top and even clingier matching micro-skirt with no panty lines discernible and heel-to-toe catwalk lope, a springy internal automata makes me want to utter some-thing, some-thang, some-thong." Okay, not exactly John Cheever, and yet Lee's own internal automata delivers a similar carved-from-bone plunk.

This same lyricism and intelligence gives rise to one of the novel's few significant flaws. Yes, one can begin to believe that Jerry Battle, retired landscaper, has a particularly lyric turn of mind, and yet some of the sentences have the mind-blowing length, intricacy, and rigor of Herr Von Aschenbach wandering Venice. At the same time, Aloft can move, via Jerry's penetrating eye, into a scathing cultural critique that deploys overblown lit-crit jargonese (modality, ideogram, rime, meniscal, Lacanian imbrications). Lee gives himself this out: Jerry's daughter, Therese, is an academic from whom he soaks up the bombast, though her folly is his sophistication. At times you yell, "Ah, Chang-rae, come on!" And though the novel funnels you through a gauntlet of wonderfully tense, tautly composed, rising confrontations, Lee loves to traffic in weighty Theme, whereby we listen to Jerry trying to square with the Real (and hankering for the Un -- ). In this way, Lee keeps you aloft. Yet each prose thicket into which he leads the reader can ultimately be forgiven as the sinewy beauty and thought ferries you through. More important, the novel's in-turn earthy and wry sense of humor arrives often enough -- every page has its "some-thing, some-thang, some-thong" -- to puncture any ballooning abstraction and leach off the warm air. In this multitiered fashion Lee manages, in the words of Walt Whitman, to "vivify the contemporary fact."

If Lee's apprehension of our moment can at times jar like an extended paternal lecture, out of Jerry Battle it's coming from the sort of highly evolved father most of us dream of having. The rap against him, one that he directs regularly against his own hide, is that he skirts the mess of life. The "No problem" his girlfriend Rita utters, "which anyone else even half-listening would think was a dirge of pure defeat and trouble" is Jerry's "favorite tune." We witness -- as he endures the loss of wife, job, girlfriend, business, daughter -- Jerry's face getting rubbed in the Real. Toward the close of the novel, he sits across from his daughter in a restaurant and experiences "the sort of stirring that can make you almost believe that there might not be any more crucibles ahead, just this perennial interlude of melody and ease." Yet they keep arriving, ease inevitably erased, more crucibles to break down and recast the man. Lee's balancing act allows us to believe utterly in the existence of this unreconstructed man's man, feel for him, and finally to experience this transformation.

The gathering presence of death becomes impossible for Jerry to ignore, not least his own (and ours! he keeps reminding us). Or, as Jerry puts it, "it takes a serious brush with death to really land oneself in Nirvana . . . soon enough me, soon enough you." With this knowledge, Jerry has no choice but to encounter the family he has long ducked. In all of its manifestations, past, present, and future, there is damage to repair. Family, the engine of trauma and love, cannot be sidestepped: you're going to get hit. Lee's portrayal of this particular family feels as vividly alive and accurate as any you're likely to read. Though Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections provides a similarly textured portrait of the family experience, the edge of mockery in his voice keeps the reader detached. In Aloft we are given characters who are precisely drawn, lovably human, and painfully flawed, viewed in the deep and knowing manner of a caring parent. The subterranean homesick blues of the Battle family -- unspoken resentments, grievances, befuddlement, failed expectations -- come to the surface, and you can't help but see your own family's blues in hard relief. The power your parents hold over you, alive or dead, is reaffirmed.

Jerry says his son must "face the paternal demonhead straight on, just accept whatever that minor if terrible god will extract of his vital masculine juices and afterward get on with the quotidian work of replenishing." By novel's end, Jerry is attempting his own act of replenishment. Looking up at the sky from a hole that awaits a swimming pool, the earth around him smells "loamy and fat and sweetly vernal, not at all of extinction," this vantage point "a perfect frame of firmament for flights endless, unseen." Meanwhile, my own mellowing father, with his newfound love of cooking, is home baking a cardamom cake and listening to the Outkast disc I burned for him. What he has given me -- long unseen, seemingly endless -- is bubbling up. The "Junior" at the end of my name I'll keep. Alas, there's plenty of work to get on with.

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