Almost everything about Laurel Estabrook’s life is impacted by a vicious assault while still in college. Attacked while mountain biking in the woods of Vermont, Laurel was lucky to escape alive. Now working as a social worker for a homeless shelter, she is given the task of collating a box of photographs belonging to a former client after his death.
The collection not only contains photographs of famous people and events from the 1950s and 60s, but also many places familiar to Laurel, including a snapshot of a girl on a bicycle on a lonely road. As Laurel becomes increasingly obsessed with the photographs and their owner, readers of The Double Bind join her on a journey of discovery that eventually reaches an astonishing conclusion.
The Double Bind and The Great Gatsby
With a skilful blurring of fact and fiction, Bohjalian includes the characters and places in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the framework of the novel. Laurel grew up in West Egg and her family has some knowledge of the ‘actual’ events that make up the plot of the Great Gatsby.
While many modern novels attempting to reinterpret the classics end up becoming poor shadows of the original, Bohjalian has kept a light touch with his imaginings about the future lives of the Buchanan family. He has maintained many of the themes and imagery that made Fitzgerald’s novel such a literary success, but they blend seamlessly into the larger story of Laurel’s search for meaning.
Homelessness and Mental Illness in The Double Bind
The homeless photographer Bobby Crockett serves not only as a link to the world of Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, but also as a reminder of the humanity of homeless people. In his author’s note at the beginning of the novel, Bohjalian explains how the character of Crockett was inspired by an actual homeless photographer Bob ‘Soupy’ Campbell, and his photographs appear sporadically throughout the text.
This really serves to highlight how easy it can be for one person to reach both the highs and lows of life. Bobby Crockett suffered from schizophrenia, but Lauren learned both from her own dealings with him when he was alive, and from speaking with his friends after his death, that when he was not in the depths of a psychotic episode he was an amiable and likeable man. ‘
About Chris Bohjalian
The Double Bind (Simon and Schuster, 2008) is the tenth of Vermont resident Bohjalian’s eleven novels, with Skeletons at the Feast released by Shaye Areheart Books in May, 2008. His acclaimed 1998 novel Midwives was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Bohjalian won the New England Book Award in 2002.
With The Double Bind, Bohjalian has woven a complex tale that not only keeps the reader guessing, but also provides an insightful study of how people construct their own realities.
