Family is wonderful - from a distance

Jerry thinks he'd be happy to keep soaring above all the messy and irreconcilable complications of family relationships - relying on what his daughter calls his "preternatural lazy-heartedness." But despite his best efforts, what he refers to as "the Real" keeps calling him back down to earth.

First, there's his son's new opulence, all the flourishes of suburban royalty from teak cabinetry to nickel-plated faucets, wonderfully satirized by Jerry, who suspects the business won't support such excess for long. But of course, he can't bring himself to ask how it's going (too personal), and he knows (or wants to believe) that his offer to help would be declined anyway.

More troubling, his daughter announces that she's pregnant and diagnosed with cancer. Furious about her decision to delay medical treatment until the baby arrives, he nevertheless knows that she won't listen to him even if he could summon up the equanimity to speak calmly before his frustration and her pride blew them back into silence.

His affections, though well muzzled, refuse to stay quiet, even after a lifetime of avoiding "in-depth and nuanced discussions." In one of several very funny scenes, he tracks down his girlfriend at the mansion of her fabulously wealthy new boyfriend and proposes. When she scoffs at him - "You have no clue what you're saying or what it might mean!" - he wagers his plane in a tennis match with her lover.

But "Aloft" is not really a book of scenes or events, as funny, moving, or tragic as those are. Lee's genius is this confidential voice, full of cultural analysis, ironic asides, sexual candor, and unconscious revelations, laced along through one breathless paragraph after another in improbably extended sentences, perpetually buoyed by wit and insight. He's perfectly captured the conflicted confidence of a man who knows he can be a jerk but hopes that knowing that might win him some consolation.

Strung between his father, who taught him how "effective it can be to say grindingly little at the very moment you ought to say a lot," and his children, who can't imagine how much he needs and loves them, Jerry must finally learn how to speak from the heart - to move beyond the "patriarchal Post-it Notes" - before his family collapses in a series of financial and physical disasters.

This feels like Rabbit country, of course, the anxieties of a suburban man so masterfully tended by John Updike in those four devastating novels. But Lee is after something altogether more hopeful here, though no less sophisticated: the anti-Rabbit, at least an antidote to Rabbitism.

Jerry runs from his responsibilities with no less vigor than Harry Angstrom, and he's grown just as rich, but when he comes finally to rest, it's not in death or the clouds, but in the deep satisfaction of embracing his family with all those annoyances and entangling affections he thought he wanted to flee.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. E-mailRon Charles.

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