The Double Bind – Chris Bohjalian
When she was a college student at the University of Vermont, Laurel Estabrook was attacked by two men while cycling on a quiet back road. She escaped, but the trauma changed her life, leading her to withdraw from the world for years. Now in her late twenties, Laurel works at a homeless shelter in Burlington, Vermont, and has found some peace through her job and her photography.
Then Bobbie Crocker, an elderly homeless man with a history of mental illness, dies, leaving behind a box of photographs. As Laurel looks through them, she discovers that Bobbie was once a talented photographer who captured famous musicians and celebrities of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as scenes of everyday life. Among the pictures, however, is one that stuns her: an image that seems to show her as a teenager, on her bicycle, on the very road where she was attacked.
The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian, follows Laurel as she becomes obsessed with discovering who Bobbie was and how he came to have that photograph. Her search leads her into the past of a wealthy Long Island family, and, in an inventive literary twist, toward characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, whose world Bohjalian imagines extending into later decades.
As Laurel’s quest intensifies, her grip on reality is tested, and the novel builds toward a surprising conclusion that changes everything readers thought they knew.
Suspenseful and haunting, The Double Bind explores trauma, homelessness, mental illness and memory. It contains descriptions of sexual assault and violence.
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