44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Okay story, but not for me, November 20, 2010
This review is from: Bound: A Novel (Hardcover)
This book was very highly recommended to me. I'm always looking for a story that grabs me by the throat and won't let go, so was looking forward to reading this "guaranteed awesome" book! My verdict? Not bad, but not awesome either.
The story followed several different characters and, as I read the majority of it during my lunch hour, it was a little confusing at times to keep track of everyone. Would have probably been easier if I'd read it straight through, but who has time to do that nowadays?
Catherine and Oliver are a married couple, and I think they're supposed to be the main characters. There's also Catherine's mother, Catherine's childhood friend and her daughter, Oliver's children and ex-wives, Oliver's mistress, and another woman who I didn't figure out how she fit into the mix until the end of the book. All in all, a little confusing.
The book starts off with Catherine's childhood friend dying in a car accident, and the ripple effects from the accident are felt by all of the other characters. Can't say that I really cared for any of the characters, as they were all a little unlikable. Not unlikable like evil bad guys, just unlikable as in flawed and/or weak. I think I liked the orphaned teenager Cattie the most, as she seemed the only one to have a backbone and any character.
Gave this one a 3/5 as it was okay, just wasn't for me. Nelson is a talented writer and I had no complaints about the story structure or pacing or anything, I just didn't care for the characters or the plot. Think someone else might enjoy this more than I did.
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36 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nelson has carved out some generous slices of a handful of lives and has served them up to us in all their messy complexity, October 20, 2010
This review is from: Bound: A Novel (Hardcover)
Antonya Nelson's fourth novel is a quiet character study of the bonds of family and friendship, at times fragile and at others strong as steel. Nelson plumbs the interior lives of a small but intriguing collection of characters, probing for some understanding of these often inexplicable ties.
Set in Nelson's birthplace of Wichita, Kansas (a locale she makes no attempt to glamorize), BOUND focuses on three women, one of whom dies in a car accident as the novel opens. Misty Mueller, the victim, is the mother of 15-year-old Cattie, who flees her exclusive Vermont boarding school when she learns of her mother's death. The other member of the triangle is Catherine Desplaines, third wife of Oliver, more than 20 years her senior, a prosperous Wichita businessman with an insatiable appetite for younger women.
When Misty dies, her childhood friend Catherine discovers she's been named Cattie's guardian, indeed that the girl has been named after her. That revelation triggers an evocative chain of reminiscences of the years Catherine and Misty spent growing up together in Wichita. They are an improbable pair: Misty, who lives with her grandmother and a dubious group of male relatives "who sat unmoving like volcanoes, simmering," and "drank is if to quench the heat inside," and Catherine, the daughter of a feminist college professor, "noisy and imperious, possessing moral certainty and a confident, no nonsense heart."
The girls' teenage years are shadowed by the emergence in the 1970s of Dennis Rader, Wichita's BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) serial killer (the house in which Misty lives is three doors down from the home of Rader's first victims), and it's only when Rader surfaces again after a hiatus of nearly 15 years that Catherine has any sense of the danger she and her friend had ignored. While recalling some of their more questionable escapades, her recollection of the countless hours she and Misty spent together have an elegiac cast, like those of the nights in which they were "inexhaustibly conversant, buzzing and pleased, two teenage girls burning bright as neon in the dark."
But Catherine and Misty drift apart, and until she learns of her friend's decision to entrust her daughter to her care, Catherine, childless herself, has no idea her former companion has forged a life as a successful real estate agent in Houston. She travels there to sift through the detritus of her friend's past and ponder whether she wants to assume the responsibility Misty has thrust upon her.
Meanwhile, Cattie and Randall, a troubled veteran living in the house where she had holed up after leaving school, take off in a decrepit car along with a dog (one of several that have close relationships to the novel's characters) and her litter of newborn puppies. The paths of Catherine and her namesake eventually intersect, and in the novel's concluding section, the two women warily explore the boundaries of their new relationship.
Despite portraying her male characters as faithless, troubled or worse, Nelson chooses to deliver some of her most acute observations through the eyes of one of them --- the philandering Oliver, whose affair with the "Sweetheart," an employee young enough to be his granddaughter, is the focus of much of his thought, when he's not worrying about fending off inevitable physical decline. "Did a life seem longer if you were leading two of them?" he muses as he embarks on his thrilling new relationship. Contemplating Cattie, he observes, "Teenage girls were graceless, moody, insecure, bad actors, annihilatingly melodramatic in the way of the suicide bomber: ready to claim collateral damage."
Though some writers who concentrate on short stories suffer in the longer form, Nelson adapts the skills she's displayed in six collections to great effect here. Her characterizations are carefully etched, and her prose is precise and razor-sharp, as in this one of many of Catherine's vivid recollections of her troubled friend: "It wasn't as if Misty's life had seemed ideal, back in high school; it had been, in fact, a frightening specter, grubby and violent. A life Catherine had been allowed to visit, and then leave, like a privileged tourist dunked briefly into the third world but in possession of a round-trip ticket out."
Like life itself, there's nothing especially tidy about the ending of BOUND. Nelson has carved out some generous slices of a handful of lives and has served them up to us in all their messy complexity. There are no fireworks here, only the light shed by an accomplished writer's unblinking attentiveness.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
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