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This stunning debut by a talented young writer brings together nine stories, some of them deeply shadowed, moving backward and forward in time to give us two generations of a family: the Mowrys of Carville, Tennessee. Daniel Mowry, a refrigeration engineer, is an expert on cold. His wife, Iris, is a casualty of the fifties: she's smart, but a woman sidetracked into marriage and motherhood. Daniel and Iris love their daughters, Ruth and Monica, in the best way they can. Ruth grows up to fixate on sex and one-night stands with Vietnam War veterans. Monica becomes pregnant by the man she lives with. In "Cave Fish," Daniel Mowry, Korean War veteran, expert in the design of domestic appliances (he tells himself he is making the world safe for women and children), is digging himself a real cellar, a crawl space below the kitchen floor. It's his way out, a place where he can tunnel down when his baby begins to scream. In "Boy Wonder," it is 1937. Daniel is eleven and has a habit he can't beat. Sometimes he wakes up in the morning with the sheet plastered under him and turning cold. Daniel's mother says about it, "It's near every night with him. It's too hard." But Daniel sees a way out. He watches the crows fly swiftly from the yard and envies them. He's going to fly. He's going to be a Boy Wonder.In the title story, Iris is exhausted from the travails of early motherhood, and is driven further over the edge when her husband suggests that they move to South America. Taking us from 1937 to 1982, these stories ex-plore the wilds of childhood and a barren landscape of adulthood, from the tar flats of Tennessee to the lush countryside of Bogotá, Colombia, where the Mowrys go to live in the early sixties in an attempt to bring their world into line. But no matter what they do to escape one another, they find themselves back together--a closed-in society of four. Theirs is a precipitous love that both cements the family and rends them apart, a love that the Mowry daughters endure and rebel against, each to reinvent her own.Simply and powerfully told, Life in the Air Ocean startles and moves us.… (plus d'informations)
Life in the Air Ocean is made up of nine short stories that are all interconnected.
"Cave Fish" introduces Daniel to the reader. Husband to Iris, he is a veteran and has a baby daughter. "Her eyes slipped back and forth like a cave fish" (p 10). I have no idea what that means.
"Boy Wonder" takes us back to when Daniel was an abused boy.
"Life in the Air Ocean" is from Iris's point of view. "Iris knew she was dawdling on the side of madness" (p 33).
"Elemenopy" is Ruth's story and alludes to a sinister secret.
"Off Grenada" introduces us to three year old Monica as the new addition to the Mowry family. Older sister, Ruth, is now seven years old. "Stilts of electricity were walking over the water" (p 74).
"Cloudland" is ominous. Allusions of sexual abuse and alcoholism are repeated.
"State of the Union" addresses Iris's alcoholism and growing paranoia that her husband is cheating on her. At this point, her children have grown (Monica, the youngest, is in college) and she barely has contact with them.
"History of Sex" is told from Ruth's point of view in first person and is probably the most disturbing of the stories.
"Dogfight" is told from the youngest daughter, Monica's point of view.
All along bits and pieces of the story are drawn out. Ruth is a baby without a name of gender for the first two stories. It's like a peep show where only tantalizing tidbits are introduced. As the curtain goes down on one story, you hope it opens to reveal more in the next. This was a difficult series of stories to read. Depressing doesn't even begin to describe it. I feel like I read this and winced all the way through it. ( )
Life in the Air Ocean is a book of inter-related short stories pulled from the lives of a small family in the middle of the last century. Daniel Mowry is a refrigeration engineer living in Carville, Tennessee and in Bogota, Colombia. His wife, Iris, drinks and imagines her husband's fictive affairs. His daughters struggle with intimacy and relationships in the shadow of the Vietnam war.
Foley writes beautifully about this damaged family and their ties to one another. Each story stands alone, but enhances the stories found both before and after it. ( )
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This stunning debut by a talented young writer brings together nine stories, some of them deeply shadowed, moving backward and forward in time to give us two generations of a family: the Mowrys of Carville, Tennessee. Daniel Mowry, a refrigeration engineer, is an expert on cold. His wife, Iris, is a casualty of the fifties: she's smart, but a woman sidetracked into marriage and motherhood. Daniel and Iris love their daughters, Ruth and Monica, in the best way they can. Ruth grows up to fixate on sex and one-night stands with Vietnam War veterans. Monica becomes pregnant by the man she lives with. In "Cave Fish," Daniel Mowry, Korean War veteran, expert in the design of domestic appliances (he tells himself he is making the world safe for women and children), is digging himself a real cellar, a crawl space below the kitchen floor. It's his way out, a place where he can tunnel down when his baby begins to scream. In "Boy Wonder," it is 1937. Daniel is eleven and has a habit he can't beat. Sometimes he wakes up in the morning with the sheet plastered under him and turning cold. Daniel's mother says about it, "It's near every night with him. It's too hard." But Daniel sees a way out. He watches the crows fly swiftly from the yard and envies them. He's going to fly. He's going to be a Boy Wonder.In the title story, Iris is exhausted from the travails of early motherhood, and is driven further over the edge when her husband suggests that they move to South America. Taking us from 1937 to 1982, these stories ex-plore the wilds of childhood and a barren landscape of adulthood, from the tar flats of Tennessee to the lush countryside of Bogotá, Colombia, where the Mowrys go to live in the early sixties in an attempt to bring their world into line. But no matter what they do to escape one another, they find themselves back together--a closed-in society of four. Theirs is a precipitous love that both cements the family and rends them apart, a love that the Mowry daughters endure and rebel against, each to reinvent her own.Simply and powerfully told, Life in the Air Ocean startles and moves us.
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(4.5)
1
All along bits and pieces of the story are drawn out. Ruth is a baby without a name of gender for the first two stories. It's like a peep show where only tantalizing tidbits are introduced. As the curtain goes down on one story, you hope it opens to reveal more in the next. This was a difficult series of stories to read. Depressing doesn't even begin to describe it. I feel like I read this and winced all the way through it. (