of Meats, Ozeki returns repeatedly to a single cen-
tral metaphor. In this case images of seeds, rather
than meat, are pervasive and serve to underline the
connections between various elements in Ozeki’s
complicated novel.
While some critics have expressed reservations
about Ozeki’s characters and some of the more un-
likely turns in her novel’s plot, reviewers have been
intrigued by the novel’s unconventional merging
of politics and art. The winner of a 2004 American
Book Award from the Before Columbus Founda-
tion and the Willa Literary Award for Contempo-
rary Fiction, All over Creation was a national best
seller and is Ozeki’s most commercially successful
work to date.
Bibliography
Cohen, Judith Beth. “Bad Seeds.” Women’s Review of
Books (May 2003): 6.
Dederer, Claire. Review of All Over Creation. New
York Times Book Review, 16 March 2003, p. 30.
DiNovella, Elizabeth. “No Small Potatoes.” Progressive
(March 2003): 41.
Ozeki, Ruth. “Ruth Ozeki, Bearing Witness.” Inter-
view by Dave Weich. 18 March 2003. Available on-
line. URL: http://www.powells.com/authors/ozeki.html.
Downloaded on January 30, 2006.
Rachel Ihara
Aloft Chang-rae Lee (2004)
For Jerry Battle, Italian American, pushing 60, and
protagonist of CHANG-RAE LEE’s Aloft, the world
is much more orderly when viewed from above
in his private airplane. First encouraged to fly
by his longtime girlfriend Rita Reyes in order to
counteract his post-retirement passivity, he now
uses his plane to escape from his empty house,
as Rita has recently left him. However, the prob-
lems that develop throughout his extended family
during the course of the novel cause Jerry to re-
evaluate what his daughter calls his “preternatural
lazy-heartedness.”
On the surface, his grown children, Jack and
Theresa, seem to be doing well. Jack is expanding
the family landscaping business, Battle Brothers,
and his wife, Eunice, is furnishing a grand home
in a gated development. But Jack’s improvements
exceed the business’s real capacity, driving him and
Battle Brothers toward financial ruin. Theresa has
an academic career and a new fiancé, the mildly
successful novelist Paul Pyun. However, she is
also pregnant and suffering from non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma. Although she has been advised to
terminate the pregnancy in order to receive can-
cer treatment, she insists on carrying the child to
term. In both cases a veneer of normalcy covers
deep problems.
Jerry sees Rita’s relationship with his nemesis,
Richie Coniglio, as his most immediate problem.
But his history with Rita is also entangled with one
of his oldest problems, the death of his first wife,
Daisy, who drowned in the backyard swimming
pool during a manic-depressive episode when
their children were young. Attempting an instant
cure for his bereavement, Jerry filled in the pool
and found Rita to help with Jack and Theresa. Rita
eventually became their second mother and prac-
tically a wife to Jerry, who realizes his mistake in
never formally proposing to her when Richie of-
fers her an engagement ring.
In the novel’s climactic scene, Jerry breaks his
usual rule—flying only alone and in the clear-
est weather—in order to satisfy Theresa’s sudden
appetite for Maine lobster. Over their airplane
headsets they finally discuss some of the family’s
problems, including Daisy’s death and its after-
math. She suggests that he invite Paul, the baby,
and the rest of the family to move in with him
as well. The airplane encounters turbulence, and
Theresa’s water breaks much too soon. Jerry rushes
her to the hospital in time to save the baby but not
Theresa. Jerry finally resolves to ground himself
emotionally, and at the end of the novel, Paul and
his baby, Jack and Eunice and their children, and
85-year-old Pop all move into Jerry’s house.
The third of Lee’s novels, Aloft continues to ad-
dress the issue of emotional distance but tackles
questions of ethnicity from a new perspective,
that of an assimilated Italian-American man. The
novel shows the evolution of Jerry Battle’s Long Is-
land from the time when his forebears, the Batta-
glias, were considered exotic, to the present day inAloft 13