I was disappointed by The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian. I have been awed by the strength of several of his past novels — Midwives, of course, but also Trans-Sister Radio and Buffalo Soldier — but I don’t find the quality of the stories to be consistent. I’m sure that’s more a reflection of me and which types of narratives I enjoy. Nonetheless, I have this sense with Bohjalian that when he’s on, he’s a narrative genius, and when he’s not, he’s Wally Lamb.

In this book, he wasn’t on. I’m going to veer from my general path of not spoiling books for future readers and talk about the plot. All of Bohjalian’s books hinge on tragedy, and frequently violence. In each, The Truth is contested, and in early books, this uncertainty is highlighted through the use of shifting first person narrative. It’s precisely because there is no single version of key events that the violence is usually not described in lurid detail, and this makes his books more readable for me. I probably should have put The Double Bind to the side when it became clear that the tragedy involved was a violent rape, which would have been when the jacket flap informed me that the main character rode her bike into the woods, had a terrible experience, and retreated from her friends and family, using photography as her only solace. Hmm, I wonder what the terrible experience could have been? Still, despite my distaste for violence against women as the hook on which to hang novels, I expected that Bohjalian was unlikely to treat the events in a graphic or voyeuristic fashion, and that aspect is true.

Nonetheless, I again should have stopped reading when Daisy Buchanan appeared in the narrative. Here I feel obligated to say: I don’t find The Great Gatsby to be the pinnacle of American literary achievement of the 20th century. I don’t even like the book very much. At all. I find the characterizations flat, the plot preposterous, and the ‘social commentary’ not witty or cutting or poignant or anything much at all. To revert 17 years in my analysis for a moment, the whole novel strikes me as boring and stupid. So, reading a novel that hinges inextricably on The Great Gatsby, was, for lack of a more sophisticated word, annoying. It’s true that The Double Bind is not a novel about The Great Gatsby: like Bohjalian’s other works, it’s a novel about loss, grief, dissociation, and healing. It just happens to use The Great Gatsby as the major lens through which these themes are explored.

So, what can I say? The novel is beautifully executed, as are all of his novels. I just wasn’t the audience, which I was too stubborn to accept as a reason to just take the book back to the library unread.