Product Description

This gritty first novel takes us into the world of Ned Rose, who works nights checking the oxygen levels in fish farm ponds, does all the dirty work his boss requires, and silently shares the family home with his sister Daze, who is nearly blinded by bitterness and disdain. Since his early teenage years, Ned's life has been marred by anger that erupts and then quickly disappears, leaving him filed with secrets and regret. When Ned and Daze realize that they have one last hope for deliverance, The Oxygen Man moves into the deepest veins of the heart.

Product Details

• Published on: 1999-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.14" h x 6.28" w x 9.26" l, 1.25 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 280 pages

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.

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.

From Booklist
In the finest Southern Gothic tradition, Yarbrough's debut novel is about the estrangement and ultimate redemption of Ned and Daisy Rose, brother and sister who have spent 23 years avoiding one another even as they share quarters in the family house. Set in the Mississippi Delta, the narrative moves back and forth between 1996 and 1972^-73--the latter two years covering the period when Ned was a star on the high-school football team and Daisy first fell in love. In high school (a private academy to which they received scholarships), the Roses are outsiders: Daisy is a loner who eventually falls in love with the son of the town banker, and Ned, popular only during football season, befriends two teammates--one of whom, Mack Bell, he will spend the rest of his life working for. In their later years, Mack is a catfish farmer and Ned, aside from doing Mack's dirty work, goes from pond to pond checking oxygen levels and aerating where necessary. Laden with symbolism, this novel mixes well the classic elements of the family cycle of cause and effect, hidden and imminent violence, and the long gestation before restitution. Frank Caso