Sixty-year-old Jerry Battle works part-time at a travel
agency, now that his son Jack is at the helm of the family landscaping
company. However, Jack’s “lofty”
attempts to change the company’s direction now have the company teetering
toward bankruptcy. Jerry spends as much
time as he can, weather permitting, in his Cessna plane, drifting above Long
Island and all the problems down below.
In fact, Jerry is much maligned by both his family and Rita, his former
girlfriend of twenty years, for being emotionally distant, even after the
tragic death of his mentally ill wife, Daisy.
Jerry’s life just keeps getting more complicated by family issues, as
his daughter, Theresa, has made a difficult and possibly unwise decision, and
Jerry’s aging father is creating crises of his own. What Jerry really wants is to persuade Rita
to come back to him, but she is now involved with a very successful and wealthy
lawyer. One particularly entertaining
scene in the novel is a tennis match between Jerry and Rita’s lover on which an
outlandish bet is made. Another terrific
section is at the beginning when Jerry is buying the plane from a guy who had a
stroke while piloting it at 9500 feet. This
beautifully written book obviously has lots of family drama, plus plenty of
soul-searching as Jerry tries to navigate through the turbulence and steer his
life’s sudden bumps toward a smooth landing.
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