Consistently interesting, but it doesn’t add up to much. Miller does seem more at home in the 18th century.
With compassionate intensity, British author Miller explores the ostensibly entangled lives of four people struggling to slip the bonds of their several obsessions and obligations (and thus “breathe” freely).
Unlike its predecessors (Casanova in Love, 1998, etc.), Oxygen has a contemporary (1997) setting. The action takes place on three continents: in England, where widowed Alice Valentine is slowly succumbing to cancer, patiently attended by her son Alec, an unmarried translator; in San Francisco, where Alec’s brother Larry, a popular TV soap-opera star, attempts to finance a trip home to be with their mother; and in Paris, where Hungarian émigré Laszlo Lazar, a successful playwright and part-time lecturer at the Sorbonne, lives with his devoted young lover Kurt. What (tenuously) connects the Valentines to Lazar is Alec’s employment as English translator of the latter’s new play Oxygène, a depiction of three men trapped underground in a collapsed mine. Miller is a graceful and imaginative writer, and he quickly elicits our interest in Alec’s carefully sustained passivity (which seems to have developed from his fearful relationship with his intermittently brutal late father) and in Alice’s complex reminiscences of her youth, marriage, and motherhood. Even better is the characterization of Larry, drifting along in an unhappy marriage and into porn films (co-starring with a brainless stud who lists his “influences” as “Marky Mark. Schwarzenegger. Sir Olivier of course”). What, the reader may well ask, has all this to do with Laszlo’s reluctant participation in a mission to Budapest as part of a plot concocted by Albanian Serbs against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic? The curious surprise ending suggests another of several ways in which cramped, stifled humans require, and use, oxygen—but does not convince us that Laszlo, Alec, Larry, and Alice are otherwise linked in any meaningful way.
Consistently interesting, but it doesn’t add up to much. Miller does seem more at home in the 18th century.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100721-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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