From Amazon.com
In Andrew Miller's third novel,
Oxygen, the award-winning author of
Ingenious Pain offers an intense, claustrophobic tale of parallel lives, of 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. Gathered at her side are her two sons: Alec, a myopic, indecisive translator, and the more gregarious Larry, an unemployed TV soap star whose glittering U.S. 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 feted playwright, whose latest work, Oxygen, 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 skillfully evokes his characters' stories and their common theme--the liberation of self--even if the end result is self-destruction. He writes compassionately of the terminally ill Alice, clinging to the last vestiges of life, the last agonizing 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, Amazon.co.uk
From Publishers Weekly
Three characters on the cusp of crisis and one on the brink of death inhabit Miller's moving new novel, in which each grapples with despair and discovers that love can confer purifying strength. Widowed school administrator Alice Valentine is dying at her home in England's West Country. She's dependent on an oxygen tank and on her younger son, Alec, who has left his London apartment to care for her. Depressed and feeling unable to cope, the unstable Alec has coincidentally received an assignment that could make his career: to translate a play called OxygŠne, written in French by Hungarian exile L szl¢ L z r. Alice's older son, Larry, had always been the successful brother, early on as a tennis star and later as a TV actor. But Larry's been out of a job for some time, and drink and drugs have eroded his moral judgment, alienated his wife and possibly affected his six-year-old daughter. When the family convenes at Alice's bedside for what will be her last birthday, each member is submerged in private struggles. Meanwhile, in Paris, L szl¢ is surrounded by friends and grateful for the devotion of his lover, Kurt, but he remains guilt-ridden because of his failure to avert a tragedy during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Contacted by Albanian exiles conspiring to fight the Serbs in Kosovo, L szl¢ has a chance to redeem himself on a dangerous mission. With brilliant dexterity, Miller intertwines the strands of his plot and leads each character to epiphanies, capped by a breathtaking denouement. Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, won several important literary prizes, including the IMPAC. It's no wonder that Oxygen was a Booker Prize finalist. Written in elegant, resonant prose, this book breathes with compassion and honesty, and with the rare quality called hope. (Apr.)Forecast: Apt comparisons to Michael Cunningham's The Hours may add impetus to sales bound to be initiated by good reviews and a seven-city author tour.
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