The Double Bind
The Age
Saturday April 5, 2008
The Double Bind
Chris Bohjalian Simon & Schuster, $21.95YOU KNOW YOU'VE made it in American fiction when Oprah Winfrey throws her ever yo-yoing weight behind your book. To be fair, she chooses the occasional masterpiece. Once, stung after being rebuffed by Jonathan Franzen, she recommended the complete works of William Faulkner for casual summer reading. More typically, Winfrey picks the good but not great, such as Chris Bohjalian's Midwives. Bohjalian writes novels inspired by social issues and his latest is no exception. The Double Bind explores poverty and mental illness. Laurel Estabrook, viciously assaulted as a college student, is now a social worker. When a disturbed elderly man dies at the homeless shelter where she works, she becomes obsessed by his box of photographs - clues to his former life that take her back unexpectedly into the dark recesses of her own trauma. There's some bad writing and the final twist is naff, but Bohjalian's conflation of fact and fiction, using characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, is beguiling.
© 2008 The Age