J.D. Salinger is gone, but Holden Caulfield lives; if not onscreen, then at least in the staggering influence he continues to have on the Literary Protagonist. Diary of an Oxygen Thief’s anonymous narrator (nearly synonymous, of course, with its anonymous author) is an Irish advertising exec and recovering alcoholic – Holden in a phony’s body. Like Holden, in his contempt for everything, he has a preternatural knack for wit. Like Holden, we suspect he can care.
In the slimmish volume’s three distinct stages, the narrator begins as an alcoholic wreck, determined to wreak as much havoc as he possibly can on the soul of every woman he encounters. He claims to “enjoy hurting people,” but it’s unclear at first how much of this stems from his addiction and how much indicates that he’s just plain rotten. Damaged characters show up all the time in literature, so it’s easy to be skeptical of an unrepentant asshole. This first act is the rockiest of the three.
However, the author wins your favor with language that’s brisk, original, and deceptively astute. On walking the streets of Dublin: “I had to hold back the tears. I don’t think I can capture what it felt like to walk amongst all those beautiful young faces. It was as if someone was going to shout, ‘Not him. No. Everyone else is allowed [to] walk through here and to laugh and be easy-going and dress well but not him. He shouldn’t even be here.’”
After he sobers up, his company sends him to Minnesota, where dyspeptic zeal against the frigid climate and its inhabitants – “The snowplows were only keeping the roads open to feed these fat fucks pizza –“ impacts his own self-enforced celibacy.
“At one stage I was going to write a screenplay all about my right hand, a love story,” he observes from the bathtub of his Minneapolis Victorian. “There would have been scenes where I let my hand brush against my thigh and I would blush. In another, my right hand would get jealous of my left hand and refuse to make love.”
In the third act, his escape to New York marks the entrance of Aisling, a determined Irishwoman and photographer’s assistant. She’s the first woman he allows himself to date since sobering up. Devastating in her believability as a lover, Aisling unlocks in the narrator what amounts to his own capability of being harmed – just when we’ve started to believe in his survival.
A sarcastically romantic, exiled Irishman, the narrator might be a Nick Hornbyian hero, without all the pop-culture posturing. The book can, too, be likened to recent addiction accounts, both true and fabricated. But here, a deliberately gloppy blurring between truth and fiction is an act of wink-wink hostility. Late in the book, the author/narrator confesses to have written it as a revenge grab for what he perceives as an effort by Aisling and her friends to humiliate him in a series of photos. “My hope is that I can get it out and published before her book comes out. That way I’ll have the first word in,” he proclaims. In fact, the author’s anonymity seems to counteract the narrator’s aims.
He’s not rotten; it turns out, nor unrepentant. He actually changes, which is rarer in literature these days than you might think. Most remarkably, he kicks his addiction (and never relapses, though you keep expecting him to). By the time he gets all meta by offering an apology of sorts for the book you’ve just read, the sense is that the real journey has already been completed, so his motives don’t matter.
These days, nobody in his right mind would wisely publish a memoir without putting his name on the cover, because, like it or not, there’s no appeal to reading the dirty laundry of somebody you have no chance of spotting on the street. The author’s greatest bond with the late Salinger is their quaintly counterintuitive shared lust to remain obscure. His power lies in knowing for a fact you’ll pass him on the street and keep on walking: his real last laugh.
Claire Shefchik
Claire Shefchik has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and currently works as a freelance writer and bookseller. Her writing has appeared in Beyond Race Magazine, PopMatters, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and ChiChi212. She lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. ...
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