Sometimes it takes more than a good story and positive reviews to entice someone to read a book; sometimes it takes a unique quality or a certain catch. In the case of Diary of an Oxygen Thief, its unique qualities are an extremely self-aware narrator and an anonymous author, both of which are interesting cherries atop a solidly grim story.
This approximately 140-page novel is broken into three lengthy chapters and details the life of an Irishman—predominantly his thirties—as he works advertising jobs in London, Minnesota, and New York, with the occasional visit back to Ireland.
Diary of an Oxygen Thief’s narrator is its best quality, alongside its crude writing style. Our anonymous chatterbox is a tangential man who is spurred to publish a diary-like book due to a mixture of guilt about his past, and a desire to get a one-up on a woman who managed to get well under his skin.
The narrator, by his own admission from the get-go, is not a great person. The main beat from which the story begins is when our alcohol-loving narrator decides to completely dismantle his four-and-a-half-year relationship with a woman called Penelope, and he does so in a scummy, booze-fuelled way. This is something he quickly finds himself regretting after she does move on from him and do everything he urged her to do.
In losing a woman he realises he truly loved, the narrator’s fiery self-hatred is doused with metaphorical petrol. His hatred for himself, and his newfound disdain for all women, sends him on a strange quest to emotionally and psychologically destroy many more females. He plays the long game to get them to fall in love with him, or allowing them to have sex with them, before he effectively bails out of their life through whatever means. All the while, his only real concern is finding some way to consistently be drunk—even when in the middle of drinking, he yearns for alcohol.
Because the story is so short, I don’t want to rattle off all details of Diary of an Oxygen Thief. The narrator ultimately finds himself in the United States in a well paying advertising role, having moved from London and cleaned up his alcoholism. Through this job, he meets a woman called Aisling, a Dublin photographer, who he falls in love with and effectively gets played the way he once played and destroyed women.
The story itself, whilst shocking and fairly original in its sheer filth and uncomfortable topics, is not really the prized part of this novel. The real gem is its narrator, who, for all his flaws, is one amusing and strangely relatable man.
I believe the narrator’s personality and overriding tone is what makes the story bearable, because the plot and world around the narrator/characters are both rather lacking in depth when you pause and analyse them. The narrator manages to bring so much life and momentum into what could have been a stale, uninteresting plot.
His personality is sold through many qualities of the author, particularly the humour and writing style. Sentences are typically short and punchy, but also ramble at times, which speeds and slows the pacing very well. It really does feel like reading someone’s raw thoughts (their diary, if you will), but with them being extremely aware that you are reading them. His self-awareness makes it an awfully meta novel, even making remarks throughout the book about ‘if’ it gets published, or even including a section dedicated to Penelope. It does a good job of making readers unsure if this is a real account from an anonymous author, or if it’s all just fiction from start to finish.
Regarding humour, the narrator has a lot of good lines. He is deeply cynical, sardonic, but also a tad absurdist. Although I rarely include lines and quotes from works, sentences like, ‘because I’d been taking the pith out of hiths listhp’ show wit. Whereas crude lines like, ‘I thought the four brothers were going to butt-fuck me as an after-dinner treat and then beat me to death,’ display how vulgar, humorous, and over-the-top the narrator’s voice-over is designed to be. I genuinely laughed at the smug, self-flattering line, ‘My ego had been fluffed to the point of ejaculation.’
Yet, that cynicism is ever-present in how the narrator hates basically everything around him and seems to find little connection or solace within the world. He thinks of suicide and ponders his loneliness throughout the story, whilst making glib, off-hand remarks like, ‘It was going to kill me and I welcomed the prospect’. I found this depressive edge, which ultimately fuels his wrongful actions and controversial views, to be the crucial element in fleshing out the narrator’s largely ambiguous character. He is not so much a sociopathic Patrick Bateman, more a so manic Holden Caulfield (something other reviews have suggested).
Yet, when the narrator recounts interactions with Aisling, the younger woman who managed to play him like a good old Irish fiddle, you sense that he is a fairly normal person who just never managed to retain full self-control. For all his faults, you want to sympathise with him, yet both you and he are fully aware that all his struggles and humiliation are effectively justice for his years of wrongdoings. It’s good stuff and allows for much interpretative analysis, whilst building a peculiar sense of familiarity between reader and narrator.
I seem to have quite enjoyed this book, haven’t I? Well, I did, and actually read it start to finish within a couple of hours. But I do have reasons for only awarding it a decent score out of five stars.
First is the actual lack of development in the world around the narrator. Of course, it’s designed to imitate a diary and off-the-cuff recounting of events from various stages of the narrator’s life, but there were just a lot of parts that felt glossed over. Judging from his slightly lazy personality, and the single perspective narrative, skipping out chunks and not having all the information does feel in-line with the narrator, but I think it would have been great to know a bit more about his past or his greater world.
The other reason I knocked it down to a three-and-a-half-stars comes down to a general lack of being moved by the novel in any meaningful way, and—major spoilers, skip to the penultimate paragraph to avoid—the story isn’t real at all. It is entirely fictitious, as is its narrator and every other fairly under-developed character. I know that last part feels incredibly unfair, of course it’s not real, the story isn’t all that tangible to begin with, and the work is a novel.
Still, I enjoyed the mystery around it and the slim chance that maybe this is all real, both the narrator and the women he meddled with, because that really would be interesting. It would make this whole publication an extraordinarily unique piece of literature. But no, couldn’t let that mysterious element live on. Nope.
I’m not upset that it isn’t a true story, I am upset about how the truth was revealed. The novel threw the mystique out the window right after the final page, without really letting you linger on everything you just read. In swoops the legal disclaimer to assure you all characters are entirely fictional, which is then followed by a rather corporate bit of splash text announcing that a sequel is on its way.
I remember feeling my lungs deflate with a sigh upon reading those two lines. I felt robbed or cheated, like the fun had been sucked out and I had wasted my time indulging in something, immersing myself in its potential to be true. Every reader of this novel has, or had been, well and truly duped by a clever author. Fair play, but as Diary of an Oxygen Thief’s narrator would certainly agree with, fuck them for pulling such a stunt, especially whilst having such a focus on the topic of sincerity throughout the story.
Still, I cannot deny that it was a good read; I enjoyed my time with it. The narrator was the best part, and the controversial and unconventional plot gave everything a raw tone, as did the vulgarity and self-aware nature. If only it didn’t have that one detracting factor I just spoiled, then I’m sure it could have gotten at least four stars.
I do recommend anyone who can stomach its simultaneously mature and immature tone, as well as its slightly disorganised way of chronicling story events, give it a read. It takes around three hours at most to finish, so why not check it out?
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