Customer Reviews

The Double Bind (Vintage Contemporaries)

5 star:		(113)
4 star:		(59)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(46)
1 star:		(46)

 

 

Many years ago, I stayed up nights, enthralled by The Great Gatsby. Here, author Chris Bohjalian commandeers the Great Gatsby characters and breathes new life into them in this complex literary thriller.

The preface is heart-pounding: Laura Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont's back roads. What really happened during that attack? I won't spoil it, but it's the catalyst for the rest of the novel, as Laura becomes obsessed with a former homeless patient with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that may hold the key to her past.

I welcomed "old friends" into my life again -- Jay Gatsby, Daisy & Tom Buchanan, their daughter Pamela (now a dowager herself), George and Myrtle Wilson. They hold sway with the new characters brought to life by Chris Bohjalian.

There are as many twists and turns in this novel as there are on the Vermont bike roads that Laurel no longer travels. It's a psychological mystery story that kept me turning pages. Once started, the book becomes a compulsive page-turner; not perfect, but highly readable.

From the opening pages, I was mesmerized by the story of Laurel Estabrook, a young woman who at the beginning of her sophomore year in college is brutally attacked while bicycling. The attack sends her into a dramatic downward spiraling, changing her in ways that concern her friends. She appears to pull herself together and after graduation begins working at a homeless shelter. It is there she encounters Bobbie Crocker, a homeless man, who apparently had been a world-class photographer at one point in his life but dies homeless and without any known family. Laurel becomes obsessed with a box of photographs he left behind and begins piecing together a story of what his life must have been like before he lost control of circumstances.

If you've read The Great Gatsby, you will be doubly intrigued as favorite characters from that novel play prominent parts in this one. Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Myrtle and George Wilson, Meyer Wolfsheim, and particularly the Buchanan daughter Pamela and Jay Gatsby himself all figure prominently in Laurel's story.

Chris Bohjalian has taken an intriguing premise, juxtaposing the life of a fragile woman alongside her obsession with a homeless man's former life. What he does for readers is extraordinary, giving us a true page-turner that delves into delusions and blurs fiction with reality so effortlessly, that we are stunned as we race toward the heart-stopping finale. From the nostalgic photographs peppered throughout to the psychiatric documentation that periodically jars the reader, this is a mesmerizing novel that will keep you up all night and have you pondering its shocking conclusion long after you have shut the book.

Part way through this review I'm going to give away the ending of Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind. Consider yourself warned.

Novelists can feel free to invent imaginary worlds. Philip Roth did this very well in The Plot Against America, imagining a world in which Charles Lindbergh had become president; and Michael Chabon in The Yiddish Policeman's Union has created a world in which 1948 marked the increased ostracization of Jews rather than the creation of the state of Israel. (I think that's what he's done; I just started reading it.) But having established the rules of their fictional worlds, writers must abide by them.

The world Bohjalian creates in The Double Bind is identical to the real world in every way, except that the novel The Great Gatsby was a true story: Jay Gatsby, Jordan Baker, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, their daughter Pamela, and others from the classic Fitzgerald novel are or were real people. Several characters in the The Double Bind confirm this; indeed part of the story is told from the point of view of one of the characters from Gatsby. But Bohjalian changes the rules of his world at the end of the novel by revealing that The Great Gatsby is fictional afterall and the main character of The Double Bind is delusional. Things Bohjalian has presented to us as facts did not really happen. Characters we have seen interact with other "real" characters do not really exist. They were part of an account written by the deranged heroin of the story.

Watch The Sixth Sense again and look for interaction between the guy who turns out to be dead and any other living characters except the boy who sees dead people. Doesn't happen. That's what makes the revelation that the guy is actually dead so powerful: we realize we should have, or at least could have, known it along. With The Double Bind, we didn't have that chance. The ending leaves us feeling cheated, because we were.

A surprisingly literate psychological thriller about a social worker, a destitute photographer and the folks who flocked around The Great Gatsby. This book gets better and better as it goes, and evolves into one of the most interesting novels I've read in quite a while. Highly recommended, but be careful not to let anyone tell you too much about it. By all means, avoid all reviews that might give away too much.

This is one of the best books I've read this year, I've been recommending it to everyone I know. The book starts with a frightening attack on a young woman named Laurel on an idyllic country road in Vermont. Seven years later, Laurel is working at homeless shelter in Burlington, Vermont. She becomes immersed in a project involving photographs taken by Bobbie Crocker, a recently deceased man with mental illness who received services from the homeless shelter where she works. Laurel, who grew up in West Egg on Long Island, becomes convinced that Bobbie was the son of Daisy Buchanan, the mistress of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. Laurel begins a quest to discover why Bobbie, son of a privileged American family, ended up homeless and alone in Vermont. It's a true page-turner. The surprising ending is revealed at just the right time and makes you want to re-read the book immediately to catch what you missed the first time. I was sad to say good-bye to the characters because good books like this are so rare. Savor it.
I live in Vermont and being able to identify various settings in the book was a thrill. I'll be interested to hear what my out-of-state reading friends think about it.
If you want to read more books by the author, I also recommend Hangman. It's a great ghost story, also set in Vermont.(I believe it's out of print but my dad recently bought a copy on Amazon Marketplace)

I have to give Mr. Bohjalian 5 stars for chutzpah. How many authors would so tightly link their own work to one of the American classics of the 20th century--perhaps the Great American Novel itself--forcing any reader to compare Bohjalian to Fitzgerald? I can assure you that, if this work is representative, Mr. Bohjalian is no Fitzgerald; they hardly speak the same language.

But wait, the chutzpah gets even more extreme! It is possible that Mr. Bohjalian has deliberately given us this rambling, slack style--sometimes seemingly deliberately hanging with Spanish-moss-like clumps of unfocused, clicheed phrases that only a nonwriter would dare have appear under his own name--for a literary purpose. Without revealing too much--and the book is all about the series of relevations that progressively emerge--I think I can safely suggest that Mr. Bohjalian may be dropping a (perhaps massive) clue about where the story is heading by writing in such a slack, nonliterary style. Chutzpah indeed to set himself up so close to a master stylist like Fitzgerald just to make himself look like a bad writer to advance his own plot.

Or maybe not. Maybe the book really isn't that coherent. It teems with references to The Great Gatsby on many levels. It invites the reader to hear these references in multiple voices speaking in the primary narrator's voice. But for the life of me, I can't distinguish where one voice starts and another leaves off. Shifts appear to occur in the middle of paragraphs. Or at least, the story can be viewed as coherent only if this is going on. As a reader, I feel like one of the early German scholars of the Bible trying to sort through the distinct voices present in the text and wondering what scribe could have edited these voices together in such a haphazard patchwork. What was the scribe trying to do?! What is the author trying to do here?

I can't be more detailed without revealing key elements of the story. Let me say simply this. I came to the book with great expectations. I actually lived in F. Scott Fitzgerald's dorm room in college and had a classmate who saw himself and his girlfriend as the reincarnations of F. Scott and Zelda. (Sounds like part of some alternative take off on Gatsby, but this one wasn't fiction ;-)). I felt a literary mystery story unfolding through the pages of The Double Bind and my expectations rose. I love a good literary game. But as the revelations unfolded, I couldn't make them hold together. Other readers I have spoken to have had the same reaction. At the end of the day, I can't tell what the author actually intended us to believe happened in his story. More than anything, I felt as though he had not played fairly by any set of rules he had set for the game. Or maybe more mercifully, the game didn't have coherent rules to begin with. Takes Mr. Bohjalian off the hook, but it takes any fun out of the game. I came away frustrated and disappointed.

I have ready every book written by Chris Bohjalian and I eagerly await each new volume. As I read this book, I waited for it to get better, waited for the story to pick up and it never did. And then the ultimate insult, from a man who has written so lovingly about women, of whom I have spoken about to many readers as the guy who writes as if he has the soul of a woman, the horrifiying ending. I was left speechless and then thought I will have to reread the entire book and try to figure out what was really fantasy and what was real fact. A great disappointment.

I have read some really good books lately that I would recommend to people but none so much as The Double Bind, a novel by the man responsible for such bestsellers as Midwives and Before You Know Kindness. The Double Bind tells the tale of Laurel Estabrook and her survival and subsequent psychological trauma from an attempted rape in the sleepy town of Underhill, Vermont. A social worker for a homeless shelter called BEDS, Laurel focuses on her humanitarian efforts in order to forget the recurring nightmares of the assault. When a man named Bobbie Crocker who lived at the shelter dies, Laurel is given a project by her boss Katherine - restore some remarkable old photographs of Bobbie's and curate a show as a fundraiser for the shelter. Laurel's passion for photography has her delving deeper into the photos than she ever imagined, images of famous musicians, film stars and the legendary Jay Gatsby and the Buchanan family arousing her deepest curiosities. Believing Bobbie is the son of well-known socialites Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Laurel's sleuthing goes from mild inquisitiveness to full-blown obsession, alarming her friends and family. What she uncovers towards the end of her seemingly self-indulgent investigation will hit the reader like a ton of bricks, Bohjalian's purposeful and juicy twist on the plot making The Double Bind one of the most distinguished novels in American literature.

Bohjalian's writing is graceful, intelligent and engaging, pulling the reader in with eloquent prose and superb storytelling and keeping them hooked from beginning to end. He has crafted yet another intriguing tale, one that definitively captures the avid reader's interest with characters so thoroughly constructed that they are nearly made of flesh. He perseveres with his proclivity to bring minutiae to the forefront and though these details may seem inconsequential to some, it tickles me as a writer to see another writer bring the smaller things into the bigger picture, enhancing the mental perspective. Call it bringing HD to a standard transmission. Some lovely examples of this are his physical descriptions of people, such as a character named Reese:

"Reese was a heavyset man with wild eyebrows and wavy white hair, and a chin that slid without interruption into a neck the size of a log. He was wearing tinted eyeglasses and a crewneck sweater with an Oxford button-down shirt, and he was grinning at the camera in a manner that could only be called rakish." (pg. 178-179)

It even extends to delightful trivialities such as this:

"The woman nodded, and then rested a finger - the nail a near-perfect oval, the white at the tip a crisp sickle moon - on her chin." (pg. 247)

Bohjalian's original inspiration for his story came from a box of old photographs taken by real-life photographer Bob "Soupy" Campbell, a transient who died in a studio apartment and whose photos were provided to Bohjalian by Committee on Temporary Shelter in Burlington, Vermont. Campbell's photographs are prominently featured throughout the novel and Bohjalian even offers a website on which to view more of Campbell's exceptional work.

Bottom line: The Double Bind is a rapturous read to the last word and no doubt one of the best novels of 2007. I am fairly certain that his most recent novel (Skeletons At The Feast, which I have yet to read) either equals or transcends this magnificent piece of literary genius.

I am not usually a reader of fiction, but there was such good buzz about this book that I decided to give this a try. I was extremely disappointed at the ending--I felt duped and felt that the author really played a cheap trick and one that really didn't hold up in the context of the rest of the book.

With the big hype this book received, I purchased another by the author at the same time. After reading this one, I won't read the other. This story should have been packaged very differently--if packaged at all. It was definitely pitched to the wrong audience. I rarely review books I don't recommend, but in this case, I felt genuinely ripped off.

I was disappointed by the choppy style, disenchanted with the many poorly drawn characters and jarred by mediocre writing interspersed with literary phrases. The literary descriptions were great, but didn't flow with the adjoining text. If the effort was intentional--to match the thinking pattern of the mentally ill--the experiment was a failure for this reader and came off as merely bad writing.

I'm game for an unusual story, but never appreciate being 'knifed in the back' by an author. I had low expectations for the ending, but they weren't low enough. It was awful. I recommend this book only to aspiring writers who want to learn what alienates a reader.