THE DOUBLE BIND
Chris Bohjalian
Shaye Areheart Books
Fiction
ISBN-10: 1400047463
ISBN-13: 9781400047468

• Read an Excerpt

Beautiful college student Laurel Estabrook is viciously attacked and nearly raped while biking on a rural mountain road outside Burlington, Vermont. Despite being left for dead, Laurel recovers but finds herself irrevocably changed.

While working at a local homeless shelter a few years later, she meets Bobbie Crocker, a homeless man who shares her interest in photography and claims to have been a great photographer at one time. After his death, Laurel is given a box of old pictures found in his apartment and asked to curate a show of his work, provided that these snaps actually are his handiwork. Each photograph serves as a clue to Bobbie's colorful past, and Laurel is determined to find out exactly who he was and just how their two lives are connected.

Within the narrative of Laurel and Bobbie, author Chris Bohjalian cleverly weaves an intriguing thread featuring characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY. These characters figure into the story as if there really was a Jay Gatsby and a Daisy Buchanan. Laurel hails from West Egg, Long Island, the fictional town where GATSBY took place. Pamela Buchanan Marshfield is the daughter of Tom and Daisy Buchanan (Daisy was the object of Gatsby's affection) and possibly the only key to unlock Bobbie's troubled past.

As compelling as this story is, its genesis is even more so. One day in 2003, a friend of Bohjalian's, the Executive Director of Burlington, Vermont's Committee on Temporary Shelter, showed him a box of photographs left behind when a former resident passed away. The man was Bob "Soupie" Campbell, and the pictures displayed throughout the novel as Bobbie Crocker's are actually his, which only adds to the book's poignancy. Also, within the acknowledgments it is noted that Bohjalian will be donating a portion of his royalties to Burlington's Committee on Temporary Shelter. 

Bohjalian, the author of MIDWIVES and more recently BEFORE YOU KNOW KINDNESS, grips readers from the first two sentences of the Prologue: "Laurel Estabrook was nearly raped the fall of her sophomore year of college. Quite likely she was nearly murdered that autumn." Instantly, we are drawn into Laurel's harrowing story and how this one incident changed the course of her life forever. While not as grim as books like THE LOVELY BONES, this riveting literary mystery possesses the same lingering quality that will haunt the reader long after the novel is finished.

The integration of characters from GATSBY is perhaps the most ambitious undertaking by Bohjalian. He effortlessly blends the classic archetypes from Fitzgerald's masterwork into the modern-day story of a woman who searches for one man's identity and inadvertently discovers her own.


   --- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller

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