{"product_id":"aloft-isbn-9781594480706","title":"Aloft","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e–bestselling novel by the critically acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eNative Speaker,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eA Gesture Life \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e My Year Abroad\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e At 59, Jerry Battle is coasting through life. His favorite pastime is flying his small plane high above Long Island. Aloft, he can escape from the troubles that plague his family, neighbors, and loved ones on the ground. But he can't stay in the air forever. Only months before his 60th birthday, a culmination of family crises finally pull Jerry down from his emotionally distant course.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Jerry learns that his family's stability is in jeopardy. His father, Hank, is growing increasingly unhappy in his assisted living facility. His son, Jack, has taken over the family landscaping business but is running it into bankruptcy. His daughter, Theresa, has become pregnant and has been diagnosed with cancer. His longtime girlfriend, Rita, who helped raise his children, has now moved in with another man. And Jerry still has unanswered questions that he must face regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of his late wife.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Since the day his wife died, Jerry has turned avoiding conflict into an art form-the perfect expression being his solitary flights from which he can look down on a world that appears serene and unscathed. From his comfortable distance, he can't see the messy details, let alone begin to confront them. But Jerry is learning that in avoiding conflict, he is also avoiding contact with the people he loves most.\u003cb\u003eChang-rae Lee \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of \u003ci\u003eNative Speaker\u003c\/i\u003e, winner of the Hemingway Foundation\/PEN Award for first fiction, \u003ci\u003eA Gesture Life\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAloft\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Surrendered\u003c\/i\u003e, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Selected by \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.Chapter one\u003cp\u003eFROM UP H E R E, a half mile above the Earth, everything\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003elooks perfect to me.I am in my nifty little Skyhawk, banking her back into the sun,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ehaving nearly completed my usual fair-weather loop. Below is the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eeastern end of Long Island, and I’m flying just now over that part\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eof the land where the two gnarly forks shoot out into the Atlantic.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe town directly ahead, which is nothing special when you’re on\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003efoot, looks pretty magnificent now, the late-summer sun casting\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eupon the macadam of the streets a soft, ebonized sheen, its orangey\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003elight reflecting back at me, matching my direction and\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003espeed in the windows and bumpers of the parked cars and swimming\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003epools of the simple, square houses set snugly in rows. There\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eis a mysterious, runelike cipher to the newer, larger homes wagoning\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ein their cul-de-sac hoops, and then, too, in the flat roofs of the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eshopping mall buildings, with their shiny metal circuitry of\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHVAC housings and tubes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom up here, all the trees seem ideally formed and arranged,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eas if fretted over by a persnickety florist god, even the ones (no\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003edoubt volunteers) clumped along the fencing of the big scrap\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emetal lot, their spindly, leggy uprush not just a pleasing garnish to\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe variegated piles of old hubcaps and washing machines, but\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethen, for a stock guy like me, mere heartbeats shy of sixty (hard to\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eeven say that), the life signs of a positively priapic yearning. Just\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eto the south, on the baseball diamond—our people’s pattern\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003esupreme—the local Little League game is entering the late innings,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe baby-blue-shirted players positioned straightaway and\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eshallow, in the bleachers their parents only appearing to sit churchquiet\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand still, the sole perceivable movement a bounding goldenhaired\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003edog tracking down a Frisbee in deep, deep centerfield.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGo, boy, go.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd as I point my ship—Donnie is her name—to track alongside\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe broad arterial lanes of Route 495, the great and awful\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLong Island Expressway, and see the already-accrued jams of the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSunday Hamptons traffic inching back to the city, the grinding\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ecolumns of which, from my seat, appear to constitute an orderly\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003elong march, I feel as if I’m going at a heady light speed, certainly\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emoving too fast in relation to the rest, an imparity that should by\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eany account invigorate but somehow unsettles all the same, and I\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eveer a couple of degrees northwest to head over the remaining\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003epatchworks of farmland and scrubby forest and then soon enough\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe immense, uninterrupted stretch of older, densely built townships\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003elike mine, where beneath the obscuring canopy men like me\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eare going about the last details of their weekend business, sweeping\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003etheir front walks and dragging trash cans to the street and\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ewashing their cars just as they have since boyhood and youth,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003esoaping from top to bottom and brushing the wheels of sooty\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ebrake dust, one spoke at a time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003econfetti of a million cigarette butts, the ever-creeping sidewalk\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emosses and weeds; I can’t see the tumbling faded newspaper circular\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003epage, or the dead, gassy possum beached at the foot of the curb,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe why of its tight, yellow-toothed grin.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll of which, for the moment, is more than okay with me.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIs that okay?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOkay.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI bought this plane not for work or travel or the pure wondrous\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethrill of flight, which can and has, indeed, been scarily, transcendentally\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003elife-affirming and so on, but for the no doubt seriously unexamined\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ereason of my just having to get out of the house.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat’s certainly what my longtime (and recently ex-) girlfriend,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRita Reyes, was thinking about several years ago, when she\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003egave me a flying lesson out at Islip for my birthday. Really, of\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ecourse, she meant it as a diversionary excursion, just a hands-on\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eplane ride, never intending it to lead to anything else.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the time she was deeply worried about me, as I was a year\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003einto having early-retired from the family landscaping business\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand was by all indications mired in a black hole of a rut, basically\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emoping around the house and snacking too much. On weekdays,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eafter Rita left for her job as a home-care nurse (she now works the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eER), I’d do my usual skim of the paper in front of the TV and then\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emaybe watch a ladies’ morning talk show and soon enough I’d feel\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethis sharp nudge of ennui and I’d head to the nearby Walt Whitman\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMall (the poet was born in a modest house right across the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003estreet, which is now something they call an “interpretive center”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand is open for tours) for what I would always hope was the easeful\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ecompany of like-minded people but would end up instead, depending\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eon the selling season, to be frantic clawing hordes or else\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ea ghost town of seniors sitting by the islands of potted ficus, depressing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand diminishing instances both.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen Rita came back home, the breakfast dishes would still be \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eclogging the table, and I’d be on the back patio nursing a third\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ebottle of light beer or else napping in the den after leafing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethrough my tattered Baedeker’s Italy for the umpteenth time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe’d try to be helpful and patient but it was hard, as that’s what\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eshe’d done all day long. More often than not we’d end up in a\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eshouting match because she’d toss aside my guidebook a bit too\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ecasually and I’d say something loose and mean about her mother,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand she’d retreat to the bedroom while I went to the car and\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003erevved the engine inside for a long minute before clicking open\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe garage door. I’d find myself at a run-down Chinese place on\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJericho, chasing a too-sweet Mai Tai with wonton soup for dinner\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand then phoning Rita, to see if she wanted her usual pupu platter\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eappetizer and shrimp with black beans, which she would, and\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ewhich I’d bring back and duly serve to her, as the saying goes, with\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003elove and squalor.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Riverhead Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303800492261,"sku":"NP9781594480706","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781594480706.jpg?v=1767721339","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/aloft-isbn-9781594480706","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}