Giving old themes, like the importance of family, new life

Reading “Aloft,” a quiet but stirring novel by Chang-rae Lee, is to remember why we read literature in the first place. With gorgeous prose and sharp-eyed metaphors, Lee reminds us of things we hold important but have somehow lost track of as he presents conventional tales in a fresh guise.

Author of two previous award-winning novels (“A Gesture Life” and “Native Speaker”), Lee has the exceptional ability to breathe life into themes that, on their face, would seem hackneyed. In “Aloft” he focuses on the importance of family, biological and otherwise, while evoking in subtle ways the reasons why such topics are essential to our humanity. The story in “Aloft” is simple enough. Jerome “Jerry” Battle is a white, middle-aged, middle-class man who has recently retired from the family’s successful landscaping company. Rita, his longtime Puerto Rican girlfriend, has left him; his son Jack’s lavish expansion plans are running the company into bankruptcy; his daughter Theresa, engaged to an Asian American writer, Paul Pyun, is pregnant and refusing care for a life-threatening form of cancer; and his father, Hank, has run away from Ivy Acres Life Care Center, the luxury facility in which Jerry has placed him at a cost of $5,500 a month.

The ghost of Jerry’s Korean American wife, Daisy, meanwhile, hangs over the family, her absence conspicuous in the lack of reminiscences offered about her. (She’d drowned in the family’s swimming pool some two decades earlier when the kids were little.) Jerry’s family, in short, is fraying to bits, but Jerry will turn a blind eye as long as he can get away, above it all, in the little plane he likes to fly.

The flying here is literal as well as metaphorical: Jerry will fly only in good weather, when he can see and prepare for all that might come at him. Problems of fog and visibility -- or of family elements he can’t anticipate and control -- don’t figure into any trip he’ll undertake. There is no point in flying, he believes, if he can’t fly alone and see where he’s going.

There’s not much to dissuade Jerry from this perspective. Financially he’s set. The family landscaping company left to him has allowed Jerry to live comfortably without ever having to exert himself. But it is this very ease that is the poison at the heart of the book, eroding his spirit and spelling trouble for the next generation that is growing up in the lap of financial wealth but without much genuine family interaction or the character-building need to struggle. Jerry sees the problems afflicting his kin but can’t rally himself to do anything. “I’m the one to leap up from the mat to aid all manner of strangers ... but when it comes to loved ones and family I can hardly ungear myself from the La-Z-Boy, and want only succor and happy sufferance in return.”

Much like Bartleby the scrivener’s iconic phrase “I would prefer not to” defines character in that Melville story, Jerry’s “I wish to decline” has become the soul-robbing motto of his life.

The need to fly off defines Jerry, just as the X he’s had shingled onto the roof of his home (using light- and dark-colored roofing tiles) delineates his place in the world, allowing him to keep tabs on what’s unfolding but from a distanced altitude.

When Jerry realizes the X is fading, he is simply resigned. “[I]t reads like a watermark on the broad, gently pitched roof of my ranch-style house, and the temptation is to interpret this muted-ness as muteness, my signage ever faint, and disappearing. This is probably true. I am disappearing. But let me reveal a secret. I have been disappearing for years.”

Ever since the death of Daisy, Jerry has removed himself from life as much as possible, certain that in that one tragic event, he’d “banked a life’s worth of slings and arrows ... maybe even enough to safeguard the next generation, maybe to wash back, too, on the one previous.” But life, he learns over the course of Lee’s graceful narrative, doesn’t give us credit on misery due. Being in a family means exerting one’s self and rallying at each new mishap, if not out of obligation or love, then as “a final mutual veto of any further abandonment.”

By the end of the book, Lee has done in “Aloft” what we hope all good books will do: renewed our faith in humankind and in our own stumbling efforts to belong to those we love.

We may not, as Jerry puts it in regard to his cranky father, so much feel love for each other as have love. And that, the story suggests, is something wonderful in itself. “[Y]ou can reach a point in your life” Jerry tells us, “when it almost doesn’t matter whether people love you in the way you’d want, but are simply here, nearby enough, that they just bother at all.”