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The Breezes
An examination of a family subjected to misfortune of absurd but tragic proportions, and of the mechanisms for coping with that misfortune - blind optimism, cynicism, the pretence that things aren't happening and, ultimately, the desire to laugh. By the author of "This is the Life".
- GenresFiction
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
Joseph O'Neill
33 books239 followersJoseph^O'Neill
There is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.
Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. His previous works include the novels This is the Life and The Breezes, and the non-fiction book Blood-Dark Track, a family history centered on the mysterious imprisonment of both his grandfathers during World War II, which was an NYT Notable Book. He writes regularly for The Atlantic. He lives with his family in New York City."
There is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.
Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. His previous works include the novels This is the Life and The Breezes, and the non-fiction book Blood-Dark Track, a family history centered on the mysterious imprisonment of both his grandfathers during World War II, which was an NYT Notable Book. He writes regularly for The Atlantic. He lives with his family in New York City."
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 8, 2024
Born in 1964, half Irish half Turkish, this was O'Neill's second novel ,published in 1996. He appears to have lived a peripatetic life particularly in his younger years. In an interview in 2014 he said, "I’ve moved around so much and lived in so many different places that I don’t really belong to a particular place, and so I have little option but to seek out dramatic situations that I might have a chance of understanding." Since 1998 he has lived and written in New York.
So what to make of The Breezes? It is an intensely Irish novel. But if it came down to it and I had to identify what made it an Irish novel I would be hard pushed to state precisely what that meant. It is not simply geographical location. Perhaps it is an acceptance of Fate with a lackadaisical charm of 'getting on with it' combined with a sense of the surreal and comedic in life.
The Breezes as a family are pretty dysfunctional in a non-Irish sense, or maybe just pretty dysfunctional full stop. The mother died after being struck by lightning. The father has worked the poisoned chalice of a job as the controller of the regional railway and endpoint for all those service complaints from the railway using public. The daughter Rosie is an Irish beauty with a temper who is prepared to drift. Part of that drift is centred on her eternal bum and no-hoper of a live-in boyfriend, Steve. We view the happenings through the eyes of the son Johnny who has given up his accountancy studies to make furniture bordering on art rather than function. Johnny's girlfriend is Angela, a high flier in business management.
Like Jude the Obscure, everything that could go wrong does go wrong. Pa is a disastrous football referee which he only took up to bond with young Johnny’s interest in football and his support for the local professional team, Rockport Utd, has come about for the same reason (the team are relegated at the end of the season in a game which they dominated). Johnny’s chair making is a disaster compounded from a lack of interest and ability, Pa’s best friend dies in an accident, Pa’s house is burgled just after he is made redundant on the spur after 25 years’ service, the writer of the report that saw him fired being Angela. Rosie has an air hostess job she hates but cannot make a decision and regularly flies off the handle, Steve commonly being the butt of her ill-temper and at the same time the object of her affection. The disastrous series of events is like Johnny’s love of cartoon Wile E. Coyote’s total failure to capture the Road Runner due to circumstances beyond the Coyote’s control.
How can this make a novel which holds you to the end? In part it is O’Neill’s lush and expert handling of narrative; in part it is the comedic side that all these events bring to us. We all carry that ability to laugh at another’s misfortune/mis-happenstance. It is inherent in comedy. But it is more than that. The events as well as being comedic are also tragic and farcical, essential elements in comedy. The burglary also released Pa’s on-heat basset hound whose main activity when not in the mad grip of oestrus appears to be to shit anywhere and everywhere throughout Pa’s house. It is this stoical acceptance of bad luck and happenstance which continues throughout the novel which makes for the comedy and the hyper-reality of the book and which is a reflection of the tragedy of life. It might turn out alright…. but it invariably will not.
There is almost a defenceless facetiousness in the attitudes of all these characters that might be summed up by the phrase ‘Shit happens’ just like the inevitability of Trusty the basset hound fouling the house. They accept the inevitability of these disasters until they are forced to the bottom and break down. Pa takes to his bed. Johnny appears to accept that his romance with Angela has reached the end of its tether, but in the end, acceptance is better than railing at the misfortunes of life. That ‘acceptance’ of Fate is very Irish. It is as if all O’Neill’s characters are exhibiting a state of mid-life crisis under the bag of woes dealt to them. Indecisiveness lurks within all of them. And that flows right to the very end of the novel where Johnny is travelling by train to see Angela to sort out their relationship.
So what to make of The Breezes? It is an intensely Irish novel. But if it came down to it and I had to identify what made it an Irish novel I would be hard pushed to state precisely what that meant. It is not simply geographical location. Perhaps it is an acceptance of Fate with a lackadaisical charm of 'getting on with it' combined with a sense of the surreal and comedic in life.
The Breezes as a family are pretty dysfunctional in a non-Irish sense, or maybe just pretty dysfunctional full stop. The mother died after being struck by lightning. The father has worked the poisoned chalice of a job as the controller of the regional railway and endpoint for all those service complaints from the railway using public. The daughter Rosie is an Irish beauty with a temper who is prepared to drift. Part of that drift is centred on her eternal bum and no-hoper of a live-in boyfriend, Steve. We view the happenings through the eyes of the son Johnny who has given up his accountancy studies to make furniture bordering on art rather than function. Johnny's girlfriend is Angela, a high flier in business management.
Like Jude the Obscure, everything that could go wrong does go wrong. Pa is a disastrous football referee which he only took up to bond with young Johnny’s interest in football and his support for the local professional team, Rockport Utd, has come about for the same reason (the team are relegated at the end of the season in a game which they dominated). Johnny’s chair making is a disaster compounded from a lack of interest and ability, Pa’s best friend dies in an accident, Pa’s house is burgled just after he is made redundant on the spur after 25 years’ service, the writer of the report that saw him fired being Angela. Rosie has an air hostess job she hates but cannot make a decision and regularly flies off the handle, Steve commonly being the butt of her ill-temper and at the same time the object of her affection. The disastrous series of events is like Johnny’s love of cartoon Wile E. Coyote’s total failure to capture the Road Runner due to circumstances beyond the Coyote’s control.
How can this make a novel which holds you to the end? In part it is O’Neill’s lush and expert handling of narrative; in part it is the comedic side that all these events bring to us. We all carry that ability to laugh at another’s misfortune/mis-happenstance. It is inherent in comedy. But it is more than that. The events as well as being comedic are also tragic and farcical, essential elements in comedy. The burglary also released Pa’s on-heat basset hound whose main activity when not in the mad grip of oestrus appears to be to shit anywhere and everywhere throughout Pa’s house. It is this stoical acceptance of bad luck and happenstance which continues throughout the novel which makes for the comedy and the hyper-reality of the book and which is a reflection of the tragedy of life. It might turn out alright…. but it invariably will not.
There is almost a defenceless facetiousness in the attitudes of all these characters that might be summed up by the phrase ‘Shit happens’ just like the inevitability of Trusty the basset hound fouling the house. They accept the inevitability of these disasters until they are forced to the bottom and break down. Pa takes to his bed. Johnny appears to accept that his romance with Angela has reached the end of its tether, but in the end, acceptance is better than railing at the misfortunes of life. That ‘acceptance’ of Fate is very Irish. It is as if all O’Neill’s characters are exhibiting a state of mid-life crisis under the bag of woes dealt to them. Indecisiveness lurks within all of them. And that flows right to the very end of the novel where Johnny is travelling by train to see Angela to sort out their relationship.
But anyway, you never know, things might turn out all right. You just never know.After a 12-year hiatus O’Neill followed up The Breezes with Netherland, a wonderful, brilliant novel which made his name. O’Neill is a decent writer (I say this merely on the basis of having read two novels and some journalism). These novels may seem gloomy, obsessed with the inevitable misfortune of Fate. And yet there is something quite life affirming about them.
December 14, 2025
Dios mío, que aburrido, lo cogí del metro porque me gustó el título y resulta que es el APELLIDO de la familia
September 23, 2016
Joseph O'Neill has a way with words. Life can be pretty crappy at times and for the Breeze family that seems to be most of the time. In spite of that, this is not a depressing story but rather humorous (albeit a black humor) as they stumble through the events that cause them to rise above their circumstances. There's nothing earth-shattering, nothing remarkable about their story but it is told with such a level of honesty that the reader comes to feel empathy for these characters as though they are someone we know and, in a way, they are someone we know because we can all find something of ourselves in them.
November 16, 2019
After reading the splendid Good Trouble collection of short stories by Joseph O’Neill, I went back into his canon and read his marvelous novel The Breezes. One would look hard to find a better writer than O’Neill: Powers, McEwan, Lawrence Osborne? He writes candidly of place without being a regionalist. He engages you with rather scurrilous but fully drawn characters, like the father, son, daughter, boyfriend of the daughter, girlfriend of the son. In fact, he etches even minor characters into a veritable copper plate of completeness with a skill not often encountered in contemporary fiction.
July 27, 2016
One of the blurbs on the back of the book says "A hilarious chronicle of life's crappiness". I agree that it was about life's crappiness, but this is no laugh-out-loud comedy. Borderline dark comedy perhaps. The Breezes is a quirky book and I liked it very much. I particularly enjoyed the interaction between the five main characters. But if you're after (as it says on the front) an "extremely funny" read - be warned!
January 4, 2025
Picked up this book years ago because of the favorable snippets of reviews on the cover. I finally read it a couple of days ago.
It is delightful.
O'Neill tells the story of a fifty-something widower father, a twenty-something sister and her boyfriend, and a twenty-something girlfriend from the point of view of a twenty-something man, son of aforesaid father. Large parts of the book revolve around living through your twenties and the several ways of navigating that fraught but intoxicating period.
The sibling Breezes variously support, or are supported by, father Breeze, who will probably never quite recover from the untimely accidental death of his wife. Indeed, so afflicted is the poor man by injuries professional, physical and psychological, that he is regarded by both son and daughter with an embarrassed pity, which brings out their compassion but never their admiration.
The Pollyanna-ish senior Breeze terrifies the son, as, despite being financially secure, otherwise models everything a man would never want to be.
The siblings' reactions to Dad and his misfortunes, and the descriptions of the associated characters are where the humor comes in. The impossible father and his impossible children stumble onwards in a comedy of erroneous assumptions towards what becomes, in the end, a merciful redemption of sorts.
I was delighted to learn that Joseph O'Neill went on (after a 12 year break) to write many other books. I've added some to my 'to read' list and am looking forward to them.
It is delightful.
O'Neill tells the story of a fifty-something widower father, a twenty-something sister and her boyfriend, and a twenty-something girlfriend from the point of view of a twenty-something man, son of aforesaid father. Large parts of the book revolve around living through your twenties and the several ways of navigating that fraught but intoxicating period.
The sibling Breezes variously support, or are supported by, father Breeze, who will probably never quite recover from the untimely accidental death of his wife. Indeed, so afflicted is the poor man by injuries professional, physical and psychological, that he is regarded by both son and daughter with an embarrassed pity, which brings out their compassion but never their admiration.
The Pollyanna-ish senior Breeze terrifies the son, as, despite being financially secure, otherwise models everything a man would never want to be.
The siblings' reactions to Dad and his misfortunes, and the descriptions of the associated characters are where the humor comes in. The impossible father and his impossible children stumble onwards in a comedy of erroneous assumptions towards what becomes, in the end, a merciful redemption of sorts.
I was delighted to learn that Joseph O'Neill went on (after a 12 year break) to write many other books. I've added some to my 'to read' list and am looking forward to them.
October 30, 2018
Maybe three and a half. It has a welcome lightness and optimistic tone that is not in the later works.
December 24, 2024
glad i didn't finish this before my date yesterday because it would have put me in a foul mood
June 3, 2021
Almost gave up on this one chapter in, the cadence of the writing seemed so strange: flippant. This tone continues throughout, mordant is perhaps the better word. The characters drift along and the accumulating calamities sweep them away and, well, that’s kinda how life sometimes is. Theres a Wile E Coyote in all of us, and that’s not a bad lesson for a novel to remind us of.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews