Chris Bohjalian’s “The Double Bind” is unlike this author’s other best-selling novels for several reasons. For one, it is more of a plot-driven psychological mystery than his other work – the story of a young women recovering from a brutal attack, who discovers a potential link to her own past through the photographs left behind by a homeless man.
That last bit of plot description leads to the other reason why the book is unusual. One of Bohjalian’s inspirations for the book was just such a cache of photographs, which were one of the few earthly possessions of a man named Bob Campbell.
Earlier in his life, during the 1960s and ‘70s, Campbell and his camera had been a part of the New York City arts scene, capturing images of musicians in performance and at leisure, of actors, of street scenes. Campbell’s life ended in a Vermont facility for the homeless, and the director there shared Campbell’s photographs with Bohjalian.
So a major character – or, at least, a major presence – in “The Double Bind” is that of a photographer and the work he left behind.
It is in these images that Laurel Estabrook, the book’s main character, sees a bit of her past – places that she knows from childhood as being private mansions where something tragic took place, and that were converted into the country club Laurel would occasionally visit.
The familiarity of these places, and the murky history she recalls about them – a history that includes infidelity, accidental death, murder – set Laurel on a path to retrace the photographer’s life, even though it seems everyone she meets, friends and strangers alike, are determined to get the photographs away from her.
Bohjalian’s book includes a number of photographs – the ones made by Bob Campbell. Some are of familiar subjects, such as the actor Paul Sorvino and his daughter Mira, Chuck Berry and guitar on some stage. Others are portraits (the frontspiece portrait of a young woman, who is tantalizingly familiar, but I can’t summon up a name for her), some are life-on-the-street shots, such as one of men playing chess in New York City park.
Many novels over the years have incorporated photographs into their texts. These range from W.S. Sebald’s densely and beautifully written books, such as “Austerlitz,” to the Ed McBain police novels that feature a recurring criminal character known as “The Deaf Man,” who likes to tease the detectives of the 87th Precinct with cryptic, visual clues as to the next step in his cunning criminal plan.
Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” took the idea further, which the author’s own illustrations of various characters and scenes in the story, purportedly drawn by the book’s main character.
In all these instances, the photographs (or drawings) are an integral part of the story. In “Austerlitz,” the images are presented as talismans, physical evidence of the narrator’s efforts to make concrete sense out of the nebulous search for identity and meaning. In “Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man,” the photos are yet another clue in the case, something the reader can puzzle over with the detectives of the story.
But in “The Double Bind,” the photographs that punctuate these pages are random. The specific images that drive Laurel Estabrook on her journey to discover the truth about the photographer and the connection to her own life are not shown.
Rather than pull you into the story, the photographs in “The Double Bind” knock you out of the story – if only for a moment.
It is the same effect that is produced in the first few pages of Bohjalian’s novel, when you come across the names “George Wilson” and “Jay Gatsby” in a list of famous killers and their victims.
The incongruity of the photographs used in “The Double Bind” to the story being told is, I think, one of Bohjalian’s own clues as to what is going on under the surface of the story he’s telling, setting up one aspect of the novel’s plot (we don’t want to say more, out of deference to those who have not finished the book).
What do you think about the photographs in “The Double Bind,” and about the way Bohjalian has structured the novel?
