I spend part of July being bored "Aloft"

Aloft **1/2
By Chang-Rae Lee

Jerry Battle is battling (get it?) a mid-life crisis while he lives in comfortable early retirement on the profits of his family's landscaping business. He's also battling his essential passivity--his comfortable life has never demanded much from him--and now he's losing loved ones in various ways, and he knows he needs to get his butt in gear.

But Jerry prefers to see the world from high up in his airplane than to live life on the ground, hence the title (“Aloft,” get it?).

Despite these somewhat heavy-handed touches, “Aloft” is, at heart, a melodrama/soaper, albeit a very writerly one. Lee’s sentences are long and meandering, almost intricate little stories within themselves that are marvels of style, but ultimately exhausting to read.

A good editor would have insisted that Lee cut out the many extraneous characters and cut the book by about 100 pages.

I much preferred Lee's "A Gesture Life," about a Japanese soldier in World War II coming to grips with the exploitation of Korean "comfort workers," forced into the sexual servicing of Japanese troops.