Life in the Air Ocean: Stories - Hardcover

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.