The Oxygen Man - Hardcover

Yarbrough, Steve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1878448854 ISBN 13: 9781878448859

Publisher: Macadam Cage Pub, 1999

Synopsis

Looks at life in the South through the eyes of Ned Rose and his sister Daze

About this title

About the Author

Steve Yarbrough is a professor of English and creative writing at Cal State, Fresno.

Reviews

With Merle Haggard playing in the background and bottles of beer accumulating in the fore, Daze and Ned, sister and brother, live restlessly and hopelessly in the small town of Indianola, Mississippi. The sharp and ragged edges separating the races and classes there are glaringly obvious. Ned, who drives through the fog-spooked back roads of Sunflower County by night, checks the oxygen levels in Mack Bell's catfish ponds. The rest of Mack's employees are black, but Ned perceives a vast difference in the ways he and Mack are white: "the difference had a lot to do with the fat content of the foods they'd grown up eating, the odor of the toilet bowls they'd grown up using, the number of evenings their daddies had spent at home, the number of evenings their mommas stayed gone." A deliberately severed injector line ruins one of Mack's ponds, costing him money and making him suspicious of the three oppressed black men he employs. Long-suffering, quiet Daze, meanwhile, doesn't flourish in the close quarters she shares with her brother, as their intimacy reveals its dark, manipulative side. Set in 1996, with frequent, lengthy flashbacks to the early '70s, when Daze and Ned were in high school, Yarbrough's bleak and yet extremely tender first novel explores the sad origins of their situation and exposes the sordid complications of small-town small-mindedness. Violence and racism claw their way into nearly every scene, and the language used by Yarbrough's characters can be disturbing and offensive, if on the mark. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A superb first novel, about a doomed Mississippi family, by the author of three story collections (Family Men, 1990, etc.). The ``oxygen man'' is Ned Rose, a checker of oxygen levels in stocked ponds maintained by fish farmers in the vicinity of his hometown, Indianola, Mississippi. We first meet him (following a dreamlike Prologue) in 1996, when Ned's employer and former high-school football teammate Mack Bell is scheming to punish the underpaid ``niggers'' he suspects of vandalizing his ponds. A heritage of bitterness and violence that continues to shadow not just Ned and cronies but his older sister Daisy (``Daze'') is then deftly revealedin a consistently suspenseful narrative juxtaposing the events of Daze and Ned's adolescence (attending a segregated private ``academy'' their family can't afford) in 197273 with the downward momentum of their middle years, when Daze, fearful she'll relive her ``trashy'' mother's loveless sexual adventuring, hesitantly considers the attentions of a much older widower, and Ned, dogged by spasmodic eruptions of the murderous rage he knows is his nature, numbly surrenders to the ``force out there . . . that had the potential to come and sweep everything and everybody away.'' Yarbroughs story abounds with generously detailed characterizations (malicious good-ole-boy Mack is a fine creation, as is Daze's ill-fated high-school boyfriend Denny Gautreaux), gritty detail (Indianola is a convincingly dreary snake-infested backwater), and sharply realized scenes that resonate strongly: a macho coach whipping teenaged footballers into foulmouthed frenzy; a laconic duel of wits between Ned and a car dealer who tries to unload a broken-down Mercedes; Red's moving conversation with his vagrant ``Daddy,'' an itinerant housepainter unable to keep himself at home. A wrenching, compassionate portrayal of wasted lives in explosive conflict. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the finest Southern Gothic tradition, Yarbrough's debut novel is about the estrangement and ultimate redemption of Ned and Daisy Rose, brother and sister who have spent 23 years avoiding one another even as they share quarters in the family house. Set in the Mississippi Delta, the narrative moves back and forth between 1996 and 1972^-73--the latter two years covering the period when Ned was a star on the high-school football team and Daisy first fell in love. In high school (a private academy to which they received scholarships), the Roses are outsiders: Daisy is a loner who eventually falls in love with the son of the town banker, and Ned, popular only during football season, befriends two teammates--one of whom, Mack Bell, he will spend the rest of his life working for. In their later years, Mack is a catfish farmer and Ned, aside from doing Mack's dirty work, goes from pond to pond checking oxygen levels and aerating where necessary. Laden with symbolism, this novel mixes well the classic elements of the family cycle of cause and effect, hidden and imminent violence, and the long gestation before restitution. Frank Caso

Ned and his sister, Daze, live together in their parents' house with the scars of the past. First novelist Yarbrough reveals the source of their unfulfilled lives by looking back on their high school years, a time when their dysfunctional and often absent parents stood in the way of a normal home life and the chance to fit in at school. In Ned's case, his spinelessness and desperate anger caused him to commit violent acts he will never forget. Daze is unable to forgive him, and brother and sister live in the same house almost without interacting. Now, 20 years later, they attempt to reconcile with the past and with each other. Yarbrough cleverly and clearly illustrates life unfolding in a small Mississippi town through subtle references to race relations and town politics as well as detailed description of the natural surroundings. His intimate descriptions of his characters' lives make them real. Highly recommended.AJudith Ann Akalaitis, Supreme Court of Illinois Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Daze Rose was sitting in the kitchen eating an omelet, with a little bit of ketchup on the side. While she ate, she read the Jackson paper. Somebody else she'd gone to school with had been convicted. Of a crime this time. He'd soon be home, back to Sunflower County, where they would put him to work in the Parchman Prison fields. So many people she'd known had gone to jail. So many more who should have hadn't.

She heard Ned's truck pull into the yard. His door slammed. His work boots crunched the gravel, she knew they did even though she didn't hear it. The screen door was closed.

"Hey," he said.

She kept her eyes trained on the paper. Behind her the refrigerator opened and closed. He popped the cap. The cap hit the counter.

He was drinking Beck's these days, and he'd brought himself some new clothes, replacing his old Rustlers with Levis-he'd even bought himself one pair of Calvin Kleins, though as far as she know he'd never put them on. He'd always wanted to be something he wasn't and if she'd been what he was, she might have felt the same way to.

He drove the backroads in his pickup truck all night. He drove from this fishpond to that one, from that one to the next, lowering a boom into the water, checking oxygen levels. Sometimes he turned on the aerators.

"I've never lost a pond," she heard him say.

"Out there at night, "he also said, "you see the damndest things."

She knew he wanted her to ask what kind of things, and so she wouldn't. She knew he needed her to ask, and so some part of her wanted to, and because she wanted to she couldn't.

He sat down at the table, stood the cold bottle on the placemat. She couldn't stop herself. Mistress of the gesture, she slowly stood up, let her gaze climb his torso toward his face. He needed a shave. His eyes were bleary. His hair was still more red than grey, but more grey was on the way. The fact that he had aged and would age further, was a huge mark against him.

He swallowed, though there was nothing in his mouth. He said, "What's in the paper?"

"Kyle Nessler's going to Parchman."

She pulled her bathrobe tight around her, laid her knife and fork on the plate and stood. She picked up the plate and took it to the sink. Behind her, wood groaned as he shifted his weight.

"He killed his little three-year-old daughter," she said, "and buried heron the banks of the Pearl River down close to Crystal Springs." Hot water splashed on the plate, diluting the ketchup, which began to spread to ward the rim. "They gave him life. If you ask me, life's the last thing the sorry bastard deserves."

She turned around slowly then looked at Ned. As if the weight of her gaze was more than he could bear, he dropped his head.

Edition details

• Publisher: Macadam Cage Pub
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1878448854
• ISBN 13: 9781878448859
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280