Product Description

When Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont’s back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography, spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won’t let anyone see. When Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret–a story that leads her far from her old life, and into a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers who claim they want to save her.

In a tale that travels between the Roaring Twenties and the twenty-first century, between Jay Gatsby’s Long Island and rural New England, bestselling author Chris Bohjalian has written his most extraordinary novel yet.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8783 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-12
• Released on: 2008-02-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400031665
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Best known for the provocative and powerful novel, Midwives (an Oprah Book Club® Selection), Chris Bohjalian writes beautiful and riveting fiction featuring what the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed "ordinary people in heartbreaking circumstances behaving with grace and dignity." In his new novel, The Double Bind, a literary thriller with references to (and including characters from) The Great Gatsby, Bohjalian takes readers on a haunting journey through one woman's obsession with uncovering a dark secret. We think Bohjalian fans will be thrilled with this compelling and unforgettable read, but just to be sure, we asked bestselling author Jodi Picoult to read The Double Bind and give us her take. Check out her review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Jodi Picoult

From the provocative and gut-wrenching The Pact, to the brilliant genre-bending The Tenth Circle, to her latest novel about a high school shooting Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult's riveting novels center on family and relationships, and bring to light questions and issues that remain with a reader long after the last page is turned.

I once heard a fellow novelist call writing "successful schizophrenia"--we invent people and worlds that don't exist; but instead of being medicated, we are paid for it. Although countless novels succeed in whisking the reader away on the heels of such fabrications, there are very few that pull the curtain away from the craft, allowing us inside the mind of a working novelist as he combines reality and fantasy. Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind is not just one of these; it's the finest example I've ever read of a book that tips its hat to both the beauty of the literary creation, as well as the magical act of creating.

Fact and fiction become indistinguishable in The Double Bind: The story centers on Laurel Estabrook, a young social worker and survivor of a near-rape, who stumbles across photographs taken by a formerly homeless client and tries to understand how a man who'd taken snapshots of celebrities in the 50s and 60s might have wound up on the streets. However, an author's note tells us that Bohjalian conceived this book after being shown a batch of old photographs taken by a once-homeless man; and the actual photos of Bob "Soupy" Campbell are peppered throughout the text. In another neat twist, Bohjalian's resurrects details from The Great Gatsby, which become "real" in the context of his own novel--Laurel lives in West Egg; part of her hunt for her photographer's past involves meeting with the descendants of Daisy and Tom Buchanan.

As a writer who counts The Great Gatsby as one of the books that changed her life, this inclusion was both startling and remarkable for me. Who doesn't want one's favorite characters to come to life--even if it's only within the constraints of another fictional work? But Bohjalian chose his text wisely: no discussion of The Great Gatsby is complete without alluding to missed opportunities and unreliable sources--critical elements in Laurel's quest. And therein lies Bohjalian's true double bind: all stories--even the ones we tell ourselves--are subject to our own interpretation, and to the degree we can make others believe them.

The Double Bind may flirt with the classics, but it's not your father's stuffy old tome: it's the sort of book you want to read in one sitting, and it packs a twist at the end that will leave you speechless. It also, worthily, spotlights the cause of homelessness in a way that isn't preachy, but honest and explanatory. Ultimately, what Bohjalian's done is offer his lucky readers another reminder of why he's such an extraordinary author: by creating characters that become so real we lose the distinction between truth and embellishment; by reminding us that the story of any life--whether fictional, functional, or marginal--is one to be savored. --Jodi Picoult

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From Publishers Weekly
Readers will be startled to learn early on that the heroine of this engrossing puzzle, 26-year-old Laurel Estabrook, was born in West Egg. Wait a minute, wasn't West Egg where Jay Gatsby lived? Laurel works in a Burlington, Vt., homeless shelter and is trying to overcome mental and physical scars incurred from a brutal assault some six years earlier. After being given a portfolio of photographs taken by a recently deceased resident of the shelter, Bobbie Crocker, she becomes obsessed with questions surrounding what appears to be a picture of herself shot on the day of her attack. Laurel's already fragile mental state begins to unravel as she follows Bobbie's life from his rich-kid childhood on Long Island to homelessness in Vermont. The Gatsby references form the basis of the mystery, compelling readers to try to imagine how this fictional backdrop relates to the novel's "reality." It's a high-wire act for bestseller Bohjalian (Midwives), and while the climactic explanation may be a letdown for some, he generally pulls off a tricky and intriguing premise. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Carrie Brown

The last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has become one of literature's most recognizable sentences: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Nick Carraway's haunting reflection as he stares up at Gatsby's abandoned mansion from the shoreline on his last evening in West Egg is part stately elegy, part defeated warning, and it tolls out across the landscape of American fiction with the beautiful and mournful sound of a bell ringing in the mist. Few writers have expressed the hopelessness of the human condition -- the "hopeless dust," as Nick says, the "abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men" -- with as much eloquence as Fitzgerald. The tragic figure of Gatsby and the exhausted appeal of Nick's voice, at once so corrupted and so disappointed, have long cast a powerful spell over writers and readers.

Chris Bohjalian's new novel, The Double Bind, is a kind of reply to Gatsby, both its place as a monument on the literary horizon and its message about human destiny, but it is not easy to say what sort of reply it is. Indeed, The Double Bind is a difficult novel to describe because at every turn there is the risk of spoiling the story by divulging its surprise ending. Fitzgerald set Gatsby in 1922 (and published it in 1925), and the novel's events and characters -- Gatsby himself, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, even many of the minor characters -- form the background to the present-day events of Bohjalian's The Double Bind. Yet that background is chimerical; Bohjalian has dropped a veil between fiction and reality -- the two seem to merge in this novel in disturbing ways -- and he does not lift that veil until the story's final pages.

The author of nine other novels, Bohjalian is a master of literary suspense. He does it so well, it's as if he simply can't help himself; convolutions of plot and a perfect instinct for timing are characteristic of his work, including the bestseller Midwives. They are the sorts of books people stay awake all night to finish, and The Double Bind exerts that same hypnotic tug, even if the reader is sometimes more bewildered than intrigued.

Here, at least superficially, is the story's plot: The main character, Laurel Estabrook, is a college sophomore in Vermont when she is viciously attacked by two masked men late one fall afternoon while bicycling alone on a country road. It takes her months to recover and return to college life, and even then she is withdrawn and careful, her social circle drastically diminished.

A few years later, and by now employed at the local homeless shelter in Burlington, Laurel comes into possession of a trove of photographs belonging to a homeless man; Bobbie Crocker has died and left no trace about his past except the tantalizing trail suggested by his photographs, including images of a girl on a bicycle on the very road where Laurel was assaulted.

The coincidence is as unsettling as it is intriguing, and the novel follows Laurel as she pursues the truth about the identity of the man who left behind this rich store of images and his role in the events of that autumn day when she was assaulted. Many of his photos are of well-known figures from the 1950s and '60s, including Chuck Berry, Robert Frost and Martin Luther King. (These images, Bohjalian explains in an author's note, are actual photographs taken by a real homeless man whose work was brought to Bohjalian's attention; a few of them are reproduced in the book.) There's an additional, important complication: Some of Bobbie Crocker's photographs are of West Egg, the fictional setting of The Great Gatsby and the place where Laurel happened to grow up. In fact, the descendants of Gatsby's main characters -- Tom and Daisy Buchanan's unfortunate children -- roam the novel's pages as if the world from which they sprang were entirely real.

The idea of the invented self hovers over Gatsby. Jay Gatsby, we remember, begins an unpromising life as James Gatz and is murdered for a crime he does not commit. Bohjalian, too, is interested in the gray area between hope and delusion, in how people are shaped by the events of their lives and the efforts they make to hold the self inviolable against fate and harm. As Nick Carraway concludes, the past is powerfully present in the future, and Laurel's investigations into Bobbie Crocker's life lead her inevitably into her own history. Some readers may reach the end and feel blindsided rather than enlightened, but The Double Bind describes just how circuitous that inescapable journey can be.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

0bsessive Reading With Creative Twists
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.

Read the book, but not too much about it...
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.

great disappointment
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.