04 Jun / Aloft by Chang-rae Lee + Author Interview [in AsianWeek]
Flying ‘Aloft’ with Chang-rae Lee
Speaking in superlatives about Chang-rae Lee or his work seems somewhat cliché these days. All three of his novels, Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and his latest, Aloft, have been so lavishly lauded that coming up with yet another praise-filled accolade becomes redundant. Suffice it to say that Lee is surely one of our best writers ever, regardless of age, ethnicity, economic background, social status, etc. Any way you look at it, the result is the same: He’s the real thing.
I caught up with Lee by phone at his Princeton home on a rare non-travel week. He has just finished criss-crossing the country to promote his novel-of-the-moment, Aloft (as if it needed any help flying off the bookshelves). The novel is a departure from his two previous titles, both of which featured Korean American protagonists.
In Aloft, Lee’s magnificent prose (whoops, had to slip that one in) runs through the mind, body, and soul of an Italian American, Jerry Battle (the family name was conveniently shortened from the original Battaglia). Lee’s main man is a longtime Long Island native who was once married to a Korean American and is the father of two hapa children. His greatest joy is to fly high above the clouds in a “nifty little Skyhawk” plane named Donnie after a young man tragically killed by a drunk driver. And, yes, it’s in those kind of details that Lee brings his characters so fully to life.
AsianWeek: So why an Italian American middle-aged protagonist?
Chang-rae Lee: I didn’t start out with him specifically. I initially wanted to write about a character in that kind of landscape. My wife’s extended family is partly Italian American, and my father-in-law is from Long Island. So I took the outline of him [the father-in-law] as a character who represents a certain generation of American life, his surroundings, his family. Because I was focused on that generation, that time period, it occurred to me very quickly that this was not a story about an immigrant – that would be a slightly different book.
I wanted a family who had been here quite a long time, and a main character who felt comfortable with the idea that he was a longtime citizen of his society. So that naturally becomes somebody who is an earlier immigrant in American history, you might say, since we’re all immigrants at some point. I needed a character whose family had been here long enough that his focus was not on being an immigrant. …[click here for more]
Author interview: “Flying ‘Aloft’ with Chang-rae Lee,” AsianWeek, June 4, 2004
Readers: Adult
Published: 2004