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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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