Princeton, N.J. ? A few weeks ago, as novelist Chang-rae Lee was carting his clubs around a golf course near his home, two white golfers interrupted their conversation to ask whether he belonged to the club.

Lee, whose new novel, “Aloft,” has been highly praised, politely told the men that, yes, he was indeed a member.

The incident served as a mildly uncomfortable reminder to the Korean-born Lee — whose novels often explore the concept of assimilation — that fitting in, even on a suburban golf course, is not all that easy.

“Questions like that make you think, ‘Hmmm, they see me quite differently, don’t they?”‘ says Lee, who speaks as precisely as the characters in his novels. “That exposes their perspective. Whereas, my perspective is not that I’m any different from anyone else. I’m just hitting golf balls.”

Lee, 38, however, is different — and not just because as a golfer he has a 10 handicap. Observers have him pegged as one of the rare writers of literary fiction who could become a household name.

“Aloft,” released in March, has become a best seller, its film rights sold to Warner Bros. and producer Scott Rudin; Lee has been pronounced one of America’s best young novelists.

And after three novels, he is ensconced as a professor at Princeton University, where his colleagues — and friends — include Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Muldoon.

“He brings a spirit of buoyancy and youth and cultivation and warmheartedness,” Robert Fagles, another Princeton colleague and the translator of critically acclaimed versions of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” said. “And he can turn a sentence like nobody’s business.”

Another Princeton associate, C.K. Williams, who recently won the National Book Award for poetry, said Lee is “really an astonishing prose stylist, and that’s a gift you can’t make for yourself. It’s talent.”

Novelist and Princeton University professor Chang-rae Lee smiles during an interview at his campus office in Princeton, N.J. Lee's new novel, Aloft, has become one of the most highly praised books of the year.

As was true with “Aloft,” Lee’s first two books, “Native Speaker” in 1995, and 1999’s “A Gesture Life,” were lavishly praised, and each won several honors, including the PEN/Hemingway award for “Native Speaker.”

Lee has most often been compared to John Cheever and John Updike — best known for stories featuring white suburbanites, typically male — whose protagonists have come to regard the suburbs as an oppressive force.

Unlike his literary predecessors, Lee holds his characters, not the suburbs, accountable for their own shortcomings. That distinction is perhaps not surprising since Lee grew up in the New York City suburb Pleasantville, in Westchester County, and thoroughly enjoyed his childhood.

The narrator of “Aloft” is Jerry Battle (shortened from Battaglia), an Italian-American on the eve of his 60th birthday who has no greater joy than flying his Cessna Skyhawk above Long Island, picking out his house from the rows of others (he has arranged lighter colored shingles in an ‘X’ on the roof).

He does his best to avoid family entanglements or unnecessary emotion. A retiree with far too much time on his hands, Jerry has spent his life coasting above the maelstrom, even after his first wife succumbed to manic depression and drowned in the backyard swimming pool and his girlfriend of 20 years moved out, accusing him of being emotionally lazy.

Lee believes that today’s wealthy suburbs, with their big lots and the importance residents place on privacy, can be harmful for new immigrants who find little community and few people similar to themselves.

His model for Jerry is his Italian-American father-in-law, who until recently lived on Long Island. “A loose inspiration. Quite loose,” he says, laughing. Lee and his wife, Michelle, have two daughters, Annika, 6, and Eva, 3.

Lee was born in Seoul in 1965 and moved to the United States at age 3 with his mother and sister while his father, a psychiatrist, worked at the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital.