Turbulence in Suburbia
CASE, KRISTEN
Turbulence in Suburbia Aloft by Chang-rae Lee Riverhead. 343 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Kristen Case Editor, "Twelfth Street Review" Much of what is called "postmodern fiction" forces...
...But the verisimilitude at the heart of Lee's enterprise slips occasionally...
...Aloft is Lee's third novel, and those familiar with his work will recognize from the first sentence—"From up here, a half mile above the Earth, everything looks perfect to me"—that we are again bound to a narrator who simultaneously frustrates and appeals to us, who is only telling part of the story...
...Lee mentions her in passing throughout the opening chapters, but not until we are fully absorbed in the stream of Jerry's present circumstances do we get something approaching a full account (a few significant details are saved for the end...
...Jerry Battle, amateur pilot and early-retired head of a family landscaping business who works at atravel agency, prefers the ease of flight to the turbulence of life on the ground...
...If Jerry cannot see Daisy as a person, neither can we...
...For reasons we can readily infer, Rita has dumped Jerry after 20 years of satisfying his every sexual and gastronomic desire...
...Even Jack and Theresa, characters more fully realized than Daisy, appear to us through the haze of Jerry's reflections on their childhood and adolescence—we cannot perceive them directly...
...Lee admitted it was "completely intellectualized," and had "nothing to do with humanity"—a fairly apt critique of much contemporary fiction...
...Rather, it is part of the fabric of life, permeating Jerry's relationships with his father, children and Daisy...
...Except for an occasional line of postmodern critique from Theresa, the "issue" of race is not raised...
...Fortunately, these days Lee seems perfectly at home here...
...None of Jerry's memories of his marriage reveal much about who Daisy really was...
...But these are exceptions — forgivable in an otherwise first-rate novel...
...Pop" languishes volubly in a nursing home...
...When Jerry drops in unannounced at Richie's during a tennis brunch for his sycophantic associates, you can almost taste the champagne and curried lobster salad...
...She had a heavy accent to her English, but she...
...Lee has a habit of withholding information, of waiting until we commit our sympathies before dropping a backstory like a bomb to alter the emotional terrain...
...Reviewed by Kristen Case Editor, "Twelfth Street Review" Much of what is called "postmodern fiction" forces readers to assume a detached, critical stance and recognize at every turn what the author is "doing...
...she remains more or less a cartoon of sex and hysteria in broken English...
...This is pure speculation, however...
...Is that too much to ask?'" Jerry remains pretty much aloof from all the striving and bullying...
...Affairs on the ground are getting messy—Theresa and Jack are each in real trouble, as is a friend from the travel agency—and Jerry's noninvolvement begins to look like what Theresa calls "preternatural lazy-heartedness...
...Pop, an octogenarian, favors the word "whatever," and tosses it off with perfect adolescent timing...
...We'd like to focus on the business at hand...
...Daisy, a beautiful, young Korean woman who, for reasons never made clear, becomes mentally unstable and winds up drowned in the family pool, is less a character than a caricature—fragile, lisping, sexually alluring, by turns submissive and uncontrollable...
...Lee's execution of a realistically circumscribed point of view imparts his work with humanity and taps our willingness to sympathize with a character trying to tell the truth...
...let it all spill out in her messy exuberant froth of semi-language, clueless and charming and quite sexy, at least in that me Tarzan you Jane mode I welcome, withits promise of most basic romance...
...Just what has caused Jerry to, as he puts it, "disappear" from his own life, is not apparent for the first third of the novel...
...Given Lee's trajectory as a writer, it seems only fitting that Aloft should bring us from the beyond back down to earth again...
...Lee allows us no unfiltered impressions, no sense of what Jerry is not seeing, and the narrative's loyalty to his profoundly limited perspective is both a substantial achievement and a source of frustration...
...In his early 20s, Lee (now 38) wrote a novel that was never published...
...Can I ask you to do that...
...This endears him to us even as we recognize it as part of a general, andmore andmore problematic, withdrawal...
...Richie challenges Jerry to a highstakes match, and his freshly laundered, goodguy brutality is palpable...
...That includes Jack and his wife, Eunice, as well as the deliciously loathsome law partner Richie Coniglio, with whom Rita has become involved...
...When, eight years into their marriage, Daisy starts behaving erratically— indulging in $7,000 shopping sprees, for example—Jerry, on his father's advice, responds by getting "a little brutal...
...Huh...
...Complicating matters for Jerry are his ex-longtime girlfriend, Rita, his ailing and predictably grouchy father, and his two adult children, Jack and Theresa...
...Lee offers no counterpoint to Jerry's version of Daisy, but allows us to feel its suffocating limitations, Jerry's terrible and ordinary failure...
...At other points Lee seems more interested in stuffing each sentence with as many details as possible than he is in establishing an authentic voice: "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 upbrush 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 away from sixty (hard to even say that), the life signs of a positively priapic yearning...
...While describing the kitchenette Jack and Eunice had installed in the bedroom, Jerry analyzes their consumption: "Basically, he and Eunice wanted to be able to have a snack or make a cup of coffee without having to trek downstairs and to the other end of the house where the kitchen is, which seems reasonable enough until you realize that this is the kind of lifestyle detail that brought down the railroad barons and junk-bond kings and dot-comers and whoever else will next rocket up and flame out in miserable infamy...
...In Aloft the backstory concerns Daisy, Jerry's long-dead wife and the mother of his two children...
...The flashback, though, does show us Jerry in a different light, and we suspect that his inability to connect with or even perceive his wife's humanity contributed to her alienation...
...Lee skillfully renders the texture of suburban life, especially as it is lived by the anxious and upwardly mobile...
...After Rita objects to what is obviously a pissing contest, Richie smilingly hectors her into shutting up: '"We're having/«« here, Ri-ta,' he says, more pronouncing her name than speaking it...
...Jerry's thoughtful, meandering narration sounds, from time to time, a bit too writerly...
...Please sit down and watch, or else join my friends and have something more to eat...
...Jerry mimics Theresa and Paul's postcolonial jargon with the ease of an advanced graduate student...
...Chang-rae Lee's particular gift as a novelist is making us question the foundation of his narrative without for a moment compromising our involvement with it...
...The stories we tell about ourselves are necessarily partial stories, riddled with omissions and misplaced emphasis...
...In a recent New York Times profile of the author, Charles McGrath described the book as running "about 500 pages...
...There are a few other holes in the veil of realism...
...It is difficult to imagine this is an ordinary person talking—the illusion on which the novel rides, and for the most part succeeds...
...Jack, now at the helm of the family business, is courting financial ruin by expanding into interior design, and Theresa has returned home with her boyfriend, a writer named Paul (imagine an Asian-American David Foster Wallace), to announce her engagement...
...Andpriapic...
...Jerry's rivalry with the smarmy Coniglio is one of Aloft's most engaging plotlines...
...and heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon...
...Throughout Aloft, what we really experience is Jerry...
...These are people with uniformed in-house help and Subzero refrigerators, who keep extra pairs of new, still-boxed tennis sneakers in multiple sizes on hand "for guests...
Vol. 87 • March 2004 • No. 2
