Aloft in Around the World in 80 Books

May 20, 2020 Nadine in NY Jones rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, literary-schmiterary, audio

3.5 stars

This was complex, deep and meaty but the ending was a bit unsatisfying. Sort of like meat and salad but without the potatoes. (Why do I compare books to food so often?)

Lee is a genius writer. He takes this apparently boring person, living a regular life, rambling on about his boring days, and it all stabs me right in the heart with all the feels. How does he do it? I have no idea.

Here we have middle class Jerry Battle of Long Island, just another vaguely sexist Italian American who made 3.5 stars

This was complex, deep and meaty but the ending was a bit unsatisfying. Sort of like meat and salad but without the potatoes. (Why do I compare books to food so often?)

Lee is a genius writer. He takes this apparently boring person, living a regular life, rambling on about his boring days, and it all stabs me right in the heart with all the feels. How does he do it? I have no idea.

Here we have middle class Jerry Battle of Long Island, just another vaguely sexist Italian American who made his $$$ in construction (Battle Brothers, founded by his father). This is Joey Buttafuoco’s Long Island, there can be no mistake. Jerry starts off talking about his plane, then backtracks a bit and talks about his ex-girlfriend, Rita, and his adult children Jack, who now runs Battle Brothers, and Theresa, a tenure-track professor, who loves her father but is also justifiably disgusted with his vaguely sexist and racist ways, the racism particularly galling since her deceased mother was Korean American. That’s really boring, right? Nothing much happens. Jerry just sort of stream-of-consciousness babbles, and he’s completely tone-deaf and remains stubbornly unaware of his own inner emotional state. But it’s enormous. Gradually, it becomes clear that his life is absolutely not boring. Because - of course - no one’s life is boring. Thats a key fact that is often so hard for us to see when looking at our own lives.

And although Jerry sort of blunders through his life, he is not completely unaware. He has a vibrant inner voice, and he skitters just on the edge of the crux of the issue - whatever issue is at hand (aging, mortality, loneliness, etc), Jerry senses it, and then slowly backs away from it. He doesn’t feel capable of handling it, so he doesn’t. His interpersonal interactions can be a bit lacking. As Theresa points out, Jerry is like tofu, he is mild and takes in the flavor of the broth around him.

Jerry himself can be a pretty offensive guy at times, but the book itself always holds you in its good hands, the skilled hands of the author. So fear not. Jerry may be spouting bigotry at times, but the author is always there. This book never spiraled down into dick-centric offensiveness.

Some readers may think “aw what does Jerry know, he’s an uneducated blue collar concrete salesman,” but I think that’s part of the point here. Maybe sometimes readers like to think they are superior to the less educated? But, you know, we’re not. My dad was an uneducated blue collar construction worker, and yeah he was tone deaf, and prone to saying some insensitive things, but he was a person with the same richness of emotion and thought as any person.

The ending did not satisfy me, however. It was an ending like tomorrow is an ending - the day is over, but what has been resolved? What is next? Did I miss something? I thought perhaps Jerry would finally wake up and open his heart to the people around him. I didn’t see that. I didn’t feel like Jerry changed or learned anything, he just sort of spent some time examining his unexamined life and then went back to blithely not examining it, even after what could have been a life-changing tragedy. Maybe I missed something. He’s at peace, but he still seems to be the tofu.

Don Leslie is positively brilliant reading this. I probably would not have loved this book as much if not for him. ...more

1 like · Like · see review