Oxygen - Softcover

Miller, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156027402 ISBN 13: 9780156027403

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2003

Synopsis

It is the summer of 1997. Alec Valentine is returning to England to care for his ailing mother, Alice, a task that only reinforces his deep sense of inadequacy. In San Francisco, his older brother Larry prepares to come home as well, preoccupied with an acting career that is sliding toward sleaze and a marriage that is faltering. In Paris, on the other hand, the Hungarian playwright Lászlo Lázár seems to have it all--critical acclaim, a loving boyfriend, and a close circle of friends--yet even he is haunted by guilt and tragedy. For each of them the time has come to assess the turns taken, the opportunities missed. And for each there will be one last chance to break free from the past and find redemption in a moment of clarity and courage.
Andrew Miller has given us an intimate, compelling meditation that evokes an extraordinary range of emotions and insights--Oxygen lives and breathes beyond the final page.

About this title

Review

In Andrew Miller's third novel, Oxygen, the IMPAC-award winning author of Ingenious Pain offers an intense, claustrophobic tale of parallel lives experiencing regret and redemption.

A family reunion of sorts is underway in the summer of 1997 for Alice, a newly retired, long-widowed schoolteacher, dying of cancer at her home in the English countryside. Gathering at her side are her two sons: Alec, a myopic, indecisive translator, and the more gregarious Larry, an unemployed TV soap star whose glittering US career is about to take a nosedive into the shabby territory of porn films, so he can stave off bankruptcy and hold on to his disintegrating marriage. The counterpoint to this scenario is Laszlo Lazar, Hungarian exile and fêted playwright, whose latest work, Oxygene, Alec is translating. Lazar, who has a comfortable existence in one of the more fashionable Paris quartiers, seems to possess everything that Alec does not: critical success, a loving partner, a longstanding circle of artistic friends. Yet Lazar is tormented by memories of the 1956 uprising and a comrade he feels he betrayed. When a political splinter group asks him to undertake a mysterious mission, he seizes his chance to atone for the past.

Shifting between a quintessentially English idyll, the carousing bars of Paris, the physical and emotional aridity of California, and a Budapest of the past and present, Miller skilfully evokes his characters' stories and their common theme-the liberation of self--even if the end result is that self's destruction. He writes compassionately of the terminally ill Alice, clinging to the last vestiges of life, the last agonising breath: "Was that the last to go? Certain gestures, reflexes, a way of cocking the head or moving the hands in speech?" He reminds us that human beings have choices, even in despair, and he provides a suitably ambiguous ending to round off a wise and engrossing novel.--Catherine Taylor

Review

PRAISE FOR OXYGEN

"Lovely, striking, strange, evocative . . . There is not a page of this book that does not offer the reader exquisite . . . prose."--The Washington Post Book World

"A writer of verve and talent . . . [Miller's] prose is fluent, lucid and at times radiant."--The New York Times Book Review

"Poignant, probing, brainy fiction . . . enlivened by a sly, stoical wit that keeps cropping up where you least expect it."--Chicago Tribune

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0156027402
• ISBN 13: 9780156027403
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344