The Oxygen Man

Karen Shepard

Steve Yarbrough, in his absorbing first novel, The Oxygen Man has captured the traditional themes of Delta fiction...issues of race, blood and birthright framed by a landscape that at times can seem too alien to support human life...in a book that positively sparkels with soul and feeling.
— USA Today

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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.

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. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
— Judith Ann Akalaitis, Supreme Court of Illinois Library, Chicago

Rain Taxi

Mississippi 's Delta country is an inexplicably fertile breeding ground for great writers. Steve Yarbrough [is] one of the finest to emerge from Yoknapatawpha County in recent memory . . .

Richmond Times Dispatch

Yarbrough knows how to keep a story in motion with twists and turns that make you want to read just a little more...up ahead, lies another curve, and you can't stop just yet.

Time Magazine

[a] compassionate, clear-eyed, expertly written first novel.... Daisy [is] a figure strong enough to have been limned by Faulkner....

John Skow

[A] compassionate, clear-eyed, expertly written first novel.
—Time

Kirkus Reviews

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 revealed — in a consistently suspenseful narrative juxtaposing the events of Daze and Ned's adolescence (attending a segregated private "academy" their family can't afford) in 1972–73 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." Yarbrough's 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'smoving conversation with his vagrant "Daddy," an itinerant housepainter unable to keep himself at home. A wrenching, compassionate portrayal of wasted lives in explosive conflict.