There's no escaping messy lives in Lee's inspired 'Aloft'

Chang-rae Lee, named by The New Yorker as one of its 20 writers for the 21st century, has confirmed his place in that company with "Aloft" (Riverhead, $24.95), a masterful treatment of a man coming to terms with his own disaffection.

In two previous novels, "Native Speaker" and "A Gesture Life," Lee, a Korean American, writes of lives being not what they seem: In the first, Henry Park is an undercover agent; in the second, the two halves of Franklin Hata's life never quite mesh. Both novels won numerous awards. In "Aloft," Lee revisits alienation, mixed heritage and questions about family.

Jerry Battle, né Battaglia, 59-year-old widower and father of two, retired from the unmistakably earthbound Battle Brothers Brick and Mortar, buys a small airplane because "From up here, a half mile above the Earth, everything looks perfect to me." Jerry escapes the turmoil below, saying "... the recurring fantasy of my life ... is one of perfect continuous travel, this unending hop from one point to another, the pleasures found not in the singular marvels of any destination but in the constancy of serial arrivals and departures, and the comforting companion knowledge that you'll never quite get intimate enough for any trouble to start brewing." He even takes a part-time job as a travel agent, so he can send others away from home and all it entails.

The view from aloft saves Jerry from the gritty reality of the detritus of life and its inevitable demands and entanglements. It isn't that he doesn't love his family and their ordinary lives — it is instead, as his daughter says, "... you had this supernatural ability to short-circuit dealing with the needs of others, so well in fact that people generally avoided any attempts to involve you."

This high-flier comes to earth when he finds that his daughter is newly pregnant, diagnosed with cancer and refusing treatment. His son, who is running the company, has piled up enough debt that bankruptcy is imminent. Meanwhile, his father has gone missing from his assisted living facility. Jerry can no longer say, with impunity, "Jerry Battle hereby declines the Real."

Son Jack has a home sprung from the pages of a magazine, a blond wife and two children with last-name unisex first names. Jerry's father, Hank, once possessed of "first-strike arrogance," is still mourning the loss of son Bobby in Vietnam. He's also cranky about getting old, forgetful and occasionally an embarrassment, and very funny about his hot sex life with age-mate Bea.

Daughter Theresa is an academic, feminist rebel engaged to Paul Pyun, academic doctor and author; her recent diagnosis has softened her stridency. In a departure from previous novels, Lee writes in the voice of the quintessentially American Jerry, Eastern seaboard variety, but waxes about race and ethnicity throughout. Jerry's deceased wife, Daisy, was Korean; his longtime and now former mistress, Rita, is Puerto Rican; his daughter Theresa's closest friends are surnamed Woo and Srinivasan; her affianced is Korean; Jack's wife is strictly Anglo; and his maid is Hispanic.

Lee takes us on great side trips into the intricate pleasures of food and recreational sex, weaving long, Miltonic sentences that start in one place and end up miles away, trailing clouds of insight and poignancy.

These digressions are less Jerry-like than Lee-like, but who can complain about such ramblings as this one, upon seeing Rita again: "She is wearing a loose white cotton dress, with a pretty lace pattern at the neck, sort of South of the Border style, the sight of this and her dark-hued beauty reminding me of those raven-haired señoritas in the westerns, not the lusty barmaid or wizened hooker but the starry-eyed young village woman who endlessly carries jugs of water and wears a big silver cross and though captivated by the stoic gringo gunslinger come to save the town remains loyal in the end to her long-suffering peasant husband." Lee just keeps getting better.