The Oxygen Man: A Novel [Paperback]

Steve Yarbrough (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2000

In this powerful and gritty first novel, Steve Yarbrough takes us into the deep-South world of Ned Rose, who works nights checking the oxygen levels in fish-farm ponds and does all the dirty work his wealthy boss requires. He silently shares the family home with his sister Daze, who is nearly blinded by bitterness, obsessed with her mother's reputation as a loose, lustful woman. Since his angry teenage years as a scholarship student at a posh, segregated school, Ned's life has been marred by a violence that erupts loudly and quickly disappears, leaving him filled with secrets and regret. When one last hope for deliverance emerges, however, both brother and sister are forced to come to terms with their heritage.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; 1 edition (November 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743201655
• ISBN-13: 978-0743201650
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,143,898 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping and Deeper Than You Think, July 23, 2001

By 

"bethsd2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Oxygen Man: A Novel (Paperback)

Once I started reading this book I had a hard time putting it down. The plot is somewhat typical of backwater Mississippi characters ("white trash" trying to figure life out....usually getting caught up in violence and circumstance as they work it all out) - the saving grace, however, is yarbrough's skill with the written word. Something about the way he writes makes you feel as if you are in each scene - this facet is hard to come by in books which at first look like sheets of paper, bound between two thicker sheets of paper. What they really are, however, are stories harboring struggle after struggle but always maintaining a strand of hope that the tortured protagonist(s) will find a way to make their lives easier. If you are looking for a good end of summer read, this is one of the best. It is quick but is not fluff - you are definitely left thinking and trying to figure out when it was Ned started living as a "yes man" and why Daisy had such a hard time forgiving her brother.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth the read!, May 4, 2000

By 

M. T. Guzman "squeakychu" (Rockville, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Oxygen Man (Hardcover)

Life in Indianola, Mississippi, has some rough edges. In this earthy novel of Ned Rose and his sister Daze, the reader learns what it's like to grow up as a poor white in a state which is both class and color conscious. Ned works as an oxygen man who checks the oxygen level in the catfish ponds of Mack Bell, while his sister is employed as a bartender at the Beer Smith Lounge. There are glimpses of the sibling's often-absent, beer-in-hand parents, Ned's macho high school football buddies, and the gritty, more well-to-do employers of the common black and white folks.

This is an unsettling story which gets down and dirty right from the start. It's not a pleasant book nor one for the lighthearted. There's a strange uneasiness about it. You'll hope for the best as you read, all the while expecting the worst. The very real characters are not people you'd like to know. But the author, in a surprisingly good first novel, gets you deeply involved in their feelings of scorn. If you like the creepy characters in Pete Dexter's The Paper Boy, Ruth Hamilton's The Book of Ruth, or James Dickey's Deliverance, you'll like this book. The chapters are short and interesting. It's a book that's easy to read in short spurts, pick up and put down at any time, and the appeal is always there.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant tale where the past & present collide, September 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Oxygen Man (Hardcover)

The Oxygen Man is quite simply a wonderful novel. The writing is clear, vibrant, and imbued with the emotions of the story -- it carries the story like music carries lyrics. The characters are real, empathetic (even the worst of them), fallable and adeptly rendered. And it reminds us that the struggles of being Southern (and human) are more complex than we think, that it is hard to escape the life you were born into, and even harder to escape the life you've lived, but the struggle is wortwhile, and that a world seeming to lack light or love and contain only danger, can really have those things. A book anyone who cares about fiction should read.