Discoveries

THE title of the artfully crafted, terrifying new novel “The Double Bind” comes from an expression coined by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, a reference to his “theory that a particular brand of bad parenting could inadvertently spawn schizophrenia,” explains Laurel Estabrook, the main character. “Essentially, it meant consistently offering a child a series of contradictory messages: telling him you loved him while turning away in disgust.... Over a long period of time, Bateson hypothesized, a child would realize that he couldn’t possibly win in the real world, and as a coping mechanism would develop an unreal world of his own.”

This is a clue in a book full of clues. Indeed, author Chris Bohjalian has, in the course of writing 10 novels in the last 18 years, learned a thing or two about self-deception and the smoke screens we design to avoid connecting the dots. Book by book, he has taken on issues that confront us personally but also socially and culturally. Homelessness is the issue in “The Double Bind” -- in particular, the assumption we often make: that street people were born homeless and could not possibly have achieved any kind of success in a life and that therefore it could not possibly happen to us.

The novel’s first sentence is “Laurel Estabrook was nearly raped the fall of her sophomore year of college.” The traumatic image it evokes creates a protective, sympathetic feeling for Laurel, who goes on to finish college in Burlington, Vt., and take a job as a social worker in a city homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, who is 56 years older than Laurel.

When he dies early in the novel, Laurel’s boss gives her a box of professional photographs Crocker claimed to have taken. The first time she shuffles through the photos, she recognizes not only the tony Long Island neighborhood where she grew up (West Egg, the fictional home of Jay Gatsby -- the first hint that the author is weaving in places and characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”) but also a shot of the wooded road she was biking on when she was assaulted. (The two men who attacked her have long since been apprehended.) The other photos are of such famous figures as Coretta Scott King, Paul Newman and Bob Dylan.

When her boss asks her to create a fundraising event -- a show of Crocker’s photographs -- Laurel is caught in a maze of mysteries. She becomes obsessed with the photographer’s identity, suspecting that he was the son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. (In the Fitzgerald novel, Daisy has an affair with Gatsby and Tom has one with Myrtle Wilson; when Myrtle is run over by a car and left for dead, her husband kills Gatsby and turns the gun on himself.)

Laurel thinks she’s being followed by people hired by Crocker’s eightysomething-year-old sister, Pamela Buchanan Marshfield, who wants the pictures back. Laurel believes they are proof that the Buchanans’ son did not die in a car crash at 16 (the family’s story) but was rejected by his wealthy relatives and that it was Daisy, not Gatsby, who killed Myrtle Wilson.

Bohjalian has written a literary thriller. He builds his characters around his story, which means that every so often a reader sees the scaffolding of the story in their skeletons; most of them could not exist independent of the intricate and fast-paced plot. Laurel is an unforgettable, vulnerable, complicated character, as is Crocker. This is because the author has imagined them more fully than the others and because we, as readers, must decide whether we trust them.

Interspersed throughout the book are italicized patient reports written by Kenneth Pierce, the attending psychiatrist at Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury. There are also several photographs given (in real life) to Bohjalian by the director of the Committee on Temporary Shelter in Burlington. They were taken, he writes in the author’s note, by a “once-homeless man who had died in the studio apartment [the] organization had found for him. His name was Bob ‘Soupy’ Campbell.”

The pictures blur the line between reality and fiction, as photos so often do, making reality seem an even more precarious and dizzying height from which to read a work of fiction.