The Oxygen Man (review)

The Oxygen Man by Steve Yarbrough MacMurray & Beck, 1999, 280 pp., $20 In his disquieting first novel, the acclaimed short-story writer Steve Yarbrough depicts the struggle of a brother and sister trying to leave behind their violent histories. Sharing the family home in Indianola, Mississippi, Ned Rose and his sister, Daze, are often at odds. Ned works nights as an oxygen-level checker for a catfish farm owned by Mack Bell, one of his high school friends and football teammates. Ned is also Mack's "right-hand man," a middle-management role on Mack's Mississippi Delta catfish farm. When someone sabotages the ponds, Mack sends Ned to talk to the black workers ; the incident brings home to Ned the difference between his own poor "whiteness" and the privileged "whiteness" of his friend, a difference that has "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." At the Beer Smith Lounge, where Daze bartends, her relationship with her boss moves from friendship to romance, a slow shift that allows Daze to escape her mother's legacy of promiscuity and to loosen the past's embittering hold on her. Her bitterness is an essential element of the division between Daze and Ned— a division so vast that the reader questions whether Daze and Ned will overcome it. Other moments of The Oxygen Man flash back twenty-four years to Ned and Daze's admission into the expensive Indianola Academy on scholarships from the Red and Gray Foundation that have nothing to do with their academic performance. There both youths find a kind of refuge from the embarrassment of their home life: Ned through football and Daze through her relationship with Denny Gautreaux, the son of the town's banker. But even as Ned and Daze come to accept this refuge, they recognize that it's fleeting, that their prospects are limited by their background, growing up poor in one of the poorest counties ofMississippi. The violence that underlies many of the stories in Yarbrough's three earlier story collections is made explicit in The Oxygen Man. One of the novel's many successes is the sequencing of events to create a portentous pattern of human behavior. Violence isn't incidental to these characters, to Indianola, or, Yarbrough would suggest, to the South; rather, it is such an infused part of their lives that the characters in the novel have trouble separating themselves from it. Yarbrough is careful not to reveal too early whether such a separation is possible. For Ned and Daze, this ambiguity leads to an ending that both answers this question and asks new ones. Yarbrough's first novel has allowed him to explore the darker side of the South in ways his stories have only suggested. This beautifully rendered exploration shows the heartache of human possibility. (TW) Reviews by: Nancy Sherrod, Jeff Langmead , Seth Fletcher, Marta Boswell, Pam Johnston, Lynn Schenkman, Clair Willcox, Jack Smith, Jo Sapp, Tom West 188 · The Missouri Review ...