“What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. China’s sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. It’s quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn’t. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (FEB 8, 2014)

This bighearted, voluptuous, riveting book – one of my favorites of the decade – is filled with contradictions. It tells an apocalyptic and ancient tale but its topic is fresh and timely. It is told without any pretensions yet it’s lyrical and bracing. It focuses on the microcosm of a family under pressure yet its theme is universal and its messages integrate age-old mythologies.

As the book opens, China – the pure white pit bull – is turning on herself, trying to eat her paws. The winds of Hurricane Katrina are gathering force. And the narrator, a young precocious and sensitive teenager named Esch, is realizing that she is pregnant. These forces and situations add up to classic tragedy, but Jesmyn Ward has other things in mind. Esch and her brothers – Skeetah, whose life and passions revolve around his prized dog and her puppies; Randall, whose dream is to get a basketball camp scholarship; and, Junior, the youngest – are a unit who support each other.

As Katrina closes in — as the internal storms play out — we view a world that is steeped with violence and tenderness. Nothing is as expected. Let me interject that I share my home with two dogs and every cell of my body abhors pit bull fighting. Yet when the inevitable scene arrived, it shattered every single one of my expectations. Skeetah massages and speaks to China like a lover; his rival coaches Kilo, the other dog, calling him “son.” Some of it is written in love language: “China flings her head back into the air as if eating oxygen, gaining strength, and burns back down to Kilo and takes his neck in her teeth. She bears down, curling to him, a loving flame, and licks.” This is a book that dares you to confront yourself at an elemental level.

As an added level, Jesmyn Ward weaves in the Medea and Jason story and other Greek myths. Esch is young in years, but old in wisdom: she already knows that “There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in the ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it.” While she is tethered to earth – her father’s hands are “like gravel,” her brother’s blood “smells like wet hot earth,” her mind is unleashed and floats to the sky.

The tenderness – yes, tenderness! – between Skeetah and China, the bond between China and Esch (“China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a waiting silence…”), and the desperation and love of this family elevates it far beyond most other contemporary books I have read. A day after reading it, I am still in its thrall.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 285 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (April 24, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official blog for Jesmyn Ward Wikipedia page on Jesmyn Ward
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other National Book Award Winners: Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Bibliography:

• Where the Line Bleeds (2008)
• Salvage the Bones (2011) 

Nonfiction:

• Men We Reap: Memoir (September 2013)

“How can anyone who does not know their history truly know who they are.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (DEC 29, 2013)

Oscar Kortico might be living in the slums of Havana now but the story he narrates is one of voluptuous plenty — populated by a vast array of colorful characters in a seemingly idyllic setting. “In the 1800s Pata de Puerco was just one small corner of a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra mountains of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre,” Kortico says, as he describes the Cuban village where his grandparents settled. Oscar has never actually been to Pata de Puerco (translated as Pig’s Foot) but instead relies on memories handed down over generations to paint a picture of the town and the events that eventually lead to his beaten down existence in a shantytown. Nostalgia invariably wears rose-colored glasses so it is that the small town with its slow pace of daily life casts a delightful shadow and creates a sense of longing — even if the events that transpired there were often riven by violence and vengeance.

The author Carlos Acosta, is a world-famous dancer, and in fact bears a great deal of resemblance to the polymath, Melecio, in the book, one of Oscar’s relatives. Acosta nimbly weaves threads of magic realism in his novel and the able translation makes the story come alive. The old-fashioned “once upon a time” narration dispenses with gimmicks (at least in the beginning) and makes for an arresting and page-turning read.

Acosta sets his story from the early 1800s and sprinkles peeks into the country’s history as he goes along. We get brief (very brief) glimpses into the war of independence in 1868; the USS Maine incident in Havana harbor (in 1898) all the way to more contemporary times. An occasional jab at Cuba’s political climate is thrown around: “An island the size of a sardine can’t govern itself, that one way or another it is dependent on the whale in order to thrive,” but Acosta doesn’t really stray too far from the script. Sometimes one wishes for a more intimate working of these political events into the story but perhaps Acosta’s point is precisely that political events often serve only as a backdrop against which the theater of life unfolds.

The end is intentionally ambiguous — one wonders whether it is meant to cast a shadow over the verity of the narrated events or to question the place of history in our lives. “My grandfather said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that for all its faults Cuba was much better today than it had been, that young people these days knew nothing about history and spent their lives complaining, not realizing how much worse things used to be,” Oscar says towards the end. It seems for all the talk of history, not much is easily remembered or its lessons at least, seem to be appropriately diluted, ready for easy consumption. It is perhaps true, Acosta seems to say in his compelling novel, that as Napoleon once said, history is but a set of lies people have agreed upon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carlos Acosta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Cuba: Adios, Happy Homeland by Ana Menendez

Bibliography:

• Pig’s Foot (January 2014)

Nonfiction:

• No Way Home: A Dancer’s Journey from the Streets of Havana to the Stages of the World (2008)

Related:

• The Reluctant Dancer by Margaret Willis (2011)

“Copper wire is bought, sold, chopped, and sorted until it reaches a new place–and a stage–where somebody can afford to make it into something new. The chain is commonplace: refrigerators, plastic bottles, and old textbooks follow the same path, the only difference being the processes used to turn the used-up goods into raw materials, and the locations of the people and companies who want to buy the results.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (DEC 13, 2014)

It was probably just a coincidence that we put up our holiday lights today. The setting up of the twinkling bulbs is probably as much of an annual tradition as its other unfortunate side-effect: practically every year, we discover some strands that just don’t work. Now imagine the same scene being played out in every American household. That’s a lot of unwanted strands of Christmas lights. As it happens bales upon bales of these get exported to China, where workers set upon them stripping the wires free of insulation to get at the copper that is one of the most valuable raw commodities a booming China needs. The demand for raw goods — copper, steel, aluminum — in rapidly growing countries like China is fueling a global demand for all kinds of scrap be it metal, plastic and even rags (white rags can be turned into paper).

Adam Minter’s lively account of these peregrinations of our discards around the world make for fascinating reading. He visits scrapyards in China, India and countries in Africa, emphasizing the point that goods will flow to places where it can be shipped most cheaply and for the most net profit. So it is that India imports scrap not from the United States, but from Dubai. Why? Because India exports a lot of foodstuffs to Dubai and when those containers return, they come loaded with scrap from the middle-eastern country. It’s the same method that works for China and the United States. Minter adroitly points out the symbiotic relationship between these two large economies. American consumption of cheap Chinese goods means huge shipping containers departing for American shores from China. Scrap left over after all that consumption is then shipped to China in these same (now) empty containers. For those who worry about American scrap being shipped “all the way to China,” — Minter points out that these containers would be moving back and forth anyway. It’s just that now on the return journey, they get filled with scrap culled from multiple American outlets.

Each chapter is devoted to a particular kind of scrap — copper metal/wires, steel, plastics, even e-waste. Along the way we get to meet all kinds of interesting players and learn fun facts (trivia lovers, rejoice!). For example, did you know that in the scrap industry, Talk is shorthand for “aluminium copper radiators,” Lake for “Brass arms and rifle shells, clean fired,” and Taboo for “mixed low copper aluminum clippings and solids?” Even if it could have used some more detail into the hows of the various kinds of recycling, Junkyard Planet is still a great read. Excellent pictures complement an already powerful story.

Junkyard Planet is especially good at painting a complex picture of recycling, the morality behind doing the right thing (with respect to recycling) and our consumption. It should be noted that this is not a preachy book. The son of scrap metal dealers, Minter has a fondness for the industry that any regular outsider might not, and as a journalist, he lends interesting insights while painting a picture that’s more grey than black and white. For example, when he visits Wen’an County in China where a plastics recycling industry was in full force, and where environmental standards and workers’ safety issues were blatantly disregarded, Minter is quick to add that for many workers here, these jobs were actually a step up. While this might indeed be the case, Minter is sometimes too ready to condone some of these more atrocious acts of violations. His “who are we to judge especially because we are such eager consumers” attitude might be a worthy journalistic outlook but it washes over the crimes too easily sometimes.

The true problems can really be solved only when living standards rise, he points out, and when more pressing issues that face every developing country–food safety, proper nutrition, and clean water–are solved first. No one can really argue with that thesis. But this list fails to overlook the fact that workers’ safety and environmental standards on the one hand and the attainment of these other “must-dos” on the other, need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re quite interdependent.

One of the most sobering lessons that Junkyard Planet delivers with precision (and with excellent bedside manners) is that recycling is not really a get-out-of-jail-free card for consumption. “Boosting recycling rates is far less important than reducing the overall volume of waste generated–recyclable or otherwise,” Minter writes. Amen to that!

A couple of days ago, we received a card in the mail that advertised the services of a company that would take away our metal scrap for free. Old and rusted appliances were their friends, they said. Thanks to Junkyard Planet, we now know what fate these appliances actually meet. Adam Minter’s journalistic account is an intriguing and eye-opening account of one of the many gears that keeps the world economy going.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury Press; 1 edition (November 12, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Personal Blog of Adam Minter
EXTRAS:	NPR interview with Adam Minter
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on China: Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang

Bibliography:

• Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade (November 2013)

“He will rub at his eyes, rub away the unsatisfactory aspect of the world. Then he will blink at me. He blinks until I am back in focus… He sits up straighter, moves himself into the edge of the table. He is back to wishing there was more of me, more of me to see.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (SEP 28, 2011)

Who is Ines, the illegal African migrant who embarks on a hazardous sea crossing to Italy and Germany in search of her stolen son? At first, she is a total enigma; we keep wishing there was, indeed, more of her to see. Slowly and painstakingly, her inner identity is revealed in this haunting new book by Lloyd Jones, author of the acclaimed Mister Pip.

When we first meet her, Ines is working as a maid in a tony Tunisian resort, where women routinely supplement their wages with “hotel sex.” In the first few pages, we learn that she is seduced and impregnated by a callous black German guest, Jermayne, who tricks her into signing adoption papers for him and his wife. What Jermayne does not anticipate is that Ines will put herself in the hands of people-traffickers who launch her on a journey to the Sicilian coast, where she is arrives “bitten as a sodden sea cucumber.” From there, she makes her way to Berlin.

This story is revealed in bits and dabs, through successive narrations of an unscrupulous truck driver, a group of mostly benevolent alpine hunters, a British film researcher, a selfless French poet, and finally, a blind German man whose father may have been complicit in the war horrors. It is only after the first 120 pages that we meet the three key narrators: Ralf (the blind man), Defoe (his other lodger) and finally, Ines herself.

It’s an intriguing way to reveal Ines, a woman who is driven by motherly love and who will do anything and everything to spend time with her stolen son, Daniel, including betraying the trust of those who give her shelter and devotion. Like an old-fashioned detective story – in modern and sparse prose – we discover the contradictions between the narratives, what is real and what isn’t, and who Ines really is, deep down inside.

There is a beautiful symmetry about this book. In the first few pages, Lloyd Jones reveals the stuff that Ines is made of. She buys a parrot, that she quickly tires of, and tries to sell it. When that proves impossible she places the parrot on a skiff as it “rolled its eye up to her, to look as though it possibly understood her decision and had decided it would choose dignity over fear.” Much later on, Ines’s constant harping to see her son is described as parrot-like; she, too, chooses dignity as the best way to go.

The sparseness of the prose – the distance from Ines – places the reader at a bit of a distance. At times the narrative sags under the weight with a sense of inertia. Yet every time it slows down to a snail’s pace, something – some action, some decision, some revelation – creates more forward momentum. As a reader, I felt as if I were on a slow-moving train that suddenly picked up speed and oh, look at the view!

Lloyd Jones reveals a sense of daring and experimentation that shows he has come quite a way since Mister Pip – a book I enjoyed greatly. This subtle book is, in turn, riveting, disquieting, and haunting as we follow Ines’s odyssey to become reunited with her son. It reminded me a little bit of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee in its tautness and ability to summon up emotion. Lloyd Jones is definitely a writer to watch… and it does makes me curious about the many books still unpublished in the U.S. Maybe it is time that they share some of his short story collections.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lloyd Jones
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Nalo Hopkinson

Bibliography:

• Gilmore’s Diary (1985)
• Splinter (1988)
• Swimming to Australia, and Other Stories (1991)
• Biofrafi: An Albanian Quest (1993)
• This House Has Three Walls (1997)
• Choo Woo (1998)
• Book of Fame (2000)
• Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002)
• Paint Your Wife (2004)
• Mr. Pip (2006; 2007 in US)
• The Man in the Shed: Stories (2009)
• Hand Me Down World (2010; September 2011 in US)

“Normally you can’t get a proper look at your own conscience because it only ever comes out to gash you with its beak and you just want to do whatever you can to push it away; but put your conscience in the cage of this paradox, where it can slither and bark but it can’t hurt you, and you can study it for as long as you wish. Most people don’t truly know how they feel about the Holocaust because they’re worried that if they think about it too hard, they’ll find out they don’t feel sad enough about the 6 million dead, but I’m an expert in my own soul.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  SEP 13, 2011)

First-time author Ned Beauman really lays it out there in the first chapter of this extraordinary novel, which begins with an imaginary surprise birthday party thrown by Hitler for Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It is an exhilarating, outrageous opening to a book that will in fact take a quite different course. But it is important as a way of establishing the moral parameters (and this IS a moral book) and freeing up an imaginative space in which Beauman can explore some ideas that are normally unapproachable.

Actually, Beauman reminds me of nobody so much as Evelyn Waugh. He writes about the same period (England in the 1930s), he inhabits some of the same milieux (a house party in some noble pile), he shares or even tops Waugh in his outrageous use of absurd humor, and he writes about serious subjects at heart. His debut novel explores the world of British Fascism in the years before WWII. Despite the opening, the German Nazis never make an appearance other than as tutelary deities. In its place is a gaggle of mostly well-connected amateurs, a sort of lunatic fringe of the upper class, pursuing theories of eugenics and a universal world language. Yes, they had their real-life counterparts; Lord Claramore’s family is in the book, the Erskines, somewhat resembles the Mitfords; Evelyn Erskine, the daughter who shows her independence by becoming an atonal composer, is virtually identical to Elizabeth Lutyens; and Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists, makes a cameo appearance, but his 1936 march of supremacy through the largely-Jewish London East End is shown as the farcical debacle it really was.

This period background is viewed from a modern frame. Kevin Broom, the narrator and a collector of Nazi memorabilia, gets caught up in a rivalry which leaves two other collectors dead and Kevin himself in danger of his life. The goal of the rivalry is not at first clear, but it turns upon a letter from Hitler to British scientist Philip Erskine thanking him for an unusual gift, and some as-yet-unspecified connection between Erskine and a diminutive London Jewish boxer named “Sinner” Roach.

Do not look to the story for any great plausibility, though. It propels the plot with exhilarating efficiency, but it is more in tune with the popular adventure stories of the earlier part of the century than with modern expectations of verisimilitude; Kevin’s role model, for instance, is Batman. Waugh used such devices also, but Beauman is very much of his own time in translating Waugh’s absurdity into shock or even disgust. Kevin, for instance, has trimethylaminuria, a genetic disease that makes his bodily secretions smell of rotting fish; there is also strong undercurrent of homosexual violence, which may turn some readers off the book.

Which would be a pity, because the best parts are very good indeed. I am thinking especially of a dinner conversation in New York involving Sinner, two Rabbis, and an American architect, showing how easily some humanitarian endeavors such as mid-century town planning may be perverted into crypto-fascism. Or a brilliant discursion on the quest for a universal language that would unite mankind, discussing real attempts such as Esperanto and Volapük together with the fictional Pangaean, invented by an Erskine ancestor. Or Philip Erskine’s own work with beetles, breeding them for extraordinary aggression and strength, an obvious parallel to the human Eugenics programs of the Nazis for the enhancement the Master Race — though the principle had earlier advocates in both Britain and America. This is a valuable and serious subject for a novelist (it is also examined in Simon Mawer’s excellent Mendel’s Dwarf), and though Beauman chooses an absurd and at times offensive vehicle in which to present it, his obvious intelligence and meticulous linking of his story to real events makes this a far better book than a mere summary might suggest.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 39 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ned Beauman blog  and website
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon Second Glance by Jody Picoult

Bibliography:

• Boxer, Beetle (2010; September 2011 in US)
• The Teleportation Accident (February 2013)

“Gilgamesh, whither rovest thou? The life you seek you shall not find.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (MAR 01, 2011)

In his fantastic and insightful book, On Writing, the prolific writer Stephen King once said: “People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.”

But what if that work is especially mind-numbing and unfulfilling and involves plodding away at an outfit called the Tank—chatting, shuffling papers, composing reports, sending e-mails and wondering where things went wrong? Would that still make for a readable story? As Thomas Kennedy’s new book, Falling Sideways shows, the answer is yes.

It’s probably because most readers will be able to relate to the book’s central protagonist, Fred Breathwaite. Breathwaite is an American expat living in Denmark, his adopted country, and works as an international liaison at the Tank—he is its “eyes in the greater world outside of Denmark” which means he is also responsible for bringing in international clients and accounts. Breathwaite has no great fascination for his job—as the book opens, he is dreading the Wednesday morning meeting at the “Mumble Club” a weekly meeting of department heads—but knows that the job affords him material comforts and a comfortable life he otherwise would not have had.

Breathwaite has older children comfortably settled and leading their own lives but it his youngest, Jes, who “gave him cause for concern and hope.” The teenaged Jes is convinced he does not want his life to turn out like his Dad’s. It seemed to Jes that “almost nobody in Denmark actually did anything anymore; they all just sat in offices sending e-mails to one another or went to meetings where they sat around a table and talked about the e-mails…Meanwhile, there were a million truly important things that needed doing in the world, things that were a matter of life and death for people who lived in poverty and misery. Jes wanted a foot into that door. And meanwhile, he wanted to do something concrete,” Kennedy writes. This “something concrete” is work at a key shop owned by an Afghani immigrant—Jes works here with his hands duplicating keys and reading Rilke is his spare time.

The elder Breathwaite can’t stand to see his son throw away his life. “The boy had all the right ideas and not a chance of realizing them,” he thinks. It is this conflict between father and son that forms one of the two central theses in the novel.

The other of course, is Breathwaite’s own job. Early in the book, he finds out he is being laid off and replaced by a younger executive Harald Jaeger, a skirt-chasing insecure worker with personal problems of his own. Breathwaite uses this career turn to question what the net sum of his life has really amounted to.

Falling Sideways is populated by a whole host of other characters including Martin Kampman, CEO of the Tank, and professional downsizer; Martin’s son, Adam, who also rebels against his father; and Birgitte Somers, the company’s CFO.

Falling Sideways is the second book in Kennedy’s “Copenhagen Quartet” to be released in the United States. The city comes alive in these pages and Kennedy does a fantastic job of portraying the city in the beautiful season of fall. The problem with Falling Sideways is that it does not meet the high expectations set by the first book in the quartet, In the Company of Angels. Compared to that earlier work, this one seems much more ordinary, its conclusion and narrative path foretold well before the end. In addition, quite a few of the characters seem clichéd and flat—probably because Kennedy never gets a chance to realize them fully. Nevertheless if the point of the quartet is to show Kennedy’s “range,” this book does that task well.

Together, the Copenhagen quartet is meant to encompass the four enduring seasons and if the first two books are any indication, the quartet is on its way to achieve this objective very effectively. In The Company of Angels embodies the spirit of spring. It is possible, after all, to view that book as a ray of hope despite horrific events in the characters’ past. In Falling Sideways, it is the melancholic allure of fall that beautifully permeates the novel. The season of decay and slow death is a perfect metaphor for the downward spiral many of the characters face. And just like the season, there are brief and spectacular splashes of color before it all ends.

It is fitting that Gilgamesh makes a brief appearance in the book. The moral of the story, if there is any, is that one could do no worse than to follow the timeless advice given to Gilgamesh:

Make thou merry by day and by night.
Of each day make thou a feast or rejoicing,
Pay heed to the little one that holds thy hand,
Let thy spouse delight in thy bosom,
For this is the task of mankind.

But as many of the characters in Falling Sideways realize, sometimes the best advice is the hardest to follow.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Thomas E. Kennedy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In The Company of Angels And another book all about office work: And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Bibliography:

• Crossing Borders (1990)
• A Weather of the Eye (1996)
• Unreal City: Stories (1996)
• The Book of Angels (1997)
• Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight: Stories (1997)
• A Passion in the Desert (2007)
• Cast Upon the Day: Stories (2007)

The Copenhagen Quartet:

• Bluett’s Blue Hours (2002)
• Danish Fall (2003) To be published as Falling Sideways (March 2011 US and UK)
• Greene’s Summer (2004) Published as In the Company of Angels (March 2010 US and UK)
• Kerrigan’s Copenhagen: A Love Story (2005)

Nonfiction:

• Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction (1988)
• The American Short Story Today (1991) (with Henrik Specht)
• Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992)
• Index to American Short Story Award Collections (1993)
• Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction (2002)
• The Literary Traveler (2005) (with Walter Cummins)
• Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America (2008)

“To realize how lucky she was to have survived her own incautious past always sent a shudder through Catherine—one run red light, one inexplicable pill, one bad man, one unforgivable decision, and everything would have turned out otherwise.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 25, 2010)

Set mostly in Wichita, Kansas, Antonya Nelson’s Bound drops us right into the lives of a handful of characters. These characters are mostly connected by familial or marital bonds, and yet there are other bonds here too–the bonds of loyalty and friendship. At the centre of the story is Catherine Desplaines, married to a successful, wealthy, and much older businessman husband, Oliver.

Childless Catherine leads a sterile, but even existence as Oliver’s trophy wife #3. Her life is built around Oliver’s wishes and social obligations, and she’s got the sort of rosy, undemanding temperament that accepts all of Oliver’s unspoken expectations. Oliver, a strange, emotionally disconnected man, already had children from his previous wives, and those relationships have turned out to be disastrous. Catherine, always keeping Oliver’s needs to the forefront, seems oblivious to the fact that in many ways she’s paying for the “mistakes” of Oliver’s ex-wives. Catherine’s life changes, however, when she receives a letter informing her that due to the death of a childhood friend, Misty Mueller, she’s now the guardian of a teenage girl.

It’s a savage twist of fate that Catherine now feels morally obligated to raise her former friend’s child as the intrusion of a damaged teenage girl will challenge the tranquility of Oliver’s home life and his calculating selfishness. After all, Catherine’s other major relationship is with her mother, Grace, a former professor and a stroke victim, who’s been shuffled off to the “grim” nursing home, Green Acres:

“Only the most modest of efforts had been made to hide its institutional aspects—standing lamps in some rooms to take the place of the overhead fluorescents; a volunteer harpist who arrived on Tuesdays to roll her battered instrument out of its closet, ready to play for whomever requested it; and the three fat cats who lived in the television lounge, leaping lazily from lap to lap, heavy staticky creatures who’d been rescued from their Alzheimer’s-afflicted owners.”

Grace never approved of Catherine’s marriage to Oliver, and a silent war of disapproval has been waged for almost twenty years. While Oliver has the money to provide better for Grace, he doesn’t, and he refuses to even visit as Grace vegetates in the stink of an understaffed nursing home:

“How was Green Acres?” her husband would ask, when Catherine came home. He never joined her. He preferred to treat the place like a joke. He was only a few years younger than his mother-in-law.

Catherine’s sudden unexpected guardianship of a girl she didn’t even know existed doesn’t exactly test the Desplaines’ marriage as Oliver is already mired in an affair that he fully expects to evolve into marriage #4. But the death of Misty Mueller does have some unexpected ramifications on the characters: Catherine remembers her youthful, unlikely friendship with Misty–a “white trash” girl who came from a poor neighbourhood. As Catherine becomes embroiled in the past, she begins to understand that she opted for a life of no risk while Misty ran headlong into disaster. Meanwhile, Oliver is faced with some painful, long overdue truths about aging.

All this unfolds against the back story of the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) serial killer. Catherine remembers the murders that terrified Wichita in the 70s, and the nursing home residents are fascinated by the case which resurfaces as the BTK killer makes a “comeback” and begins taunting the police about his crimes.

Bound is not a perfect novel. It’s strongest when examining Catherine’s marriage to Oliver, Oliver’s tangled relationships with his ex-wives, and Catherine’s past relationship with Misty. Tiny clues are subtly dropped through the book to hint at unexplored depths of Oliver and Catherine’s relationship. In one instance, for example, Oliver advises Catherine to take a valium, and he conveniently keeps a supply on hand–no wonder she’s so mellow and pliant. These glimpses into the marriage aren’t overworked–they’re just dropped as clues to the deeper problems in this relationship.

There were a couple of extraneous story threads that didn’t add much to the tale, and they could have been surgically removed with very little damage. Oliver’s constant references to “the sweetheart” were irritating, Catherine Mueller is an unsatisfactory, shallow figure, and the episodes involving Misty Mueller’s dog were distracting. That said, I liked Bound a great deal. I liked the mostly sharp characterizations, and I liked the way in which the author drew parallels between her characters. Catherine, for example, really doesn’t know her husband well at all even though she directs their lives towards what she thinks are his comforts and his desires. She thinks he loves their Corgis, for example, but Oliver doesn’t allow them in his bedroom. Oliver’s relationship with his dogs isn’t much better than his other relationships: everyone is a replaceable accoutrement when they get old, tiresome or ill. To Oliver everything is a transaction: his relationships with his children, his relationships with his ex-wives, and even his relationship with his mistress are all founded on money. At one point, he very coldly assesses Catherine while noting that her shelf life has more or less expired.

There’s a coldness and a secretiveness to Oliver which parallels the double life of the BTK killer. The true characters of these men remain unknown to their families–although Oliver’s secret life is not uncommon and is considered socially acceptable while the BTK killer’s secret life is, of course, far more deadly. As the story unfolds, and the various characters respond to the tragedy of Misty’s death, Bound explores the idea that our relationships with other people reveal a great deal about who we really are. Some of my favourite scenes involved Oliver at Green Acres visiting his mother-in-law; he’s an intriguing, although repellent character, and an excellent example of how one man can be so successful and yet be completely devoid of any self-evaluation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page Antonya Nelson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide Publisher page on Bound
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:

Bibliography:

• The Expendables: Stories (1990)
• In the Land of Men: Stories (1992)
• Family Terrorists: Stories (1996)
• Talking in Bed (1998)
• Nobody’s Girl (1999)
• Living to Tell (2000)
• Female Trouble: Stories (2002)
• Some Fun: Stories and a Novella (2006)
• Nothing Right: Short Stories (2009)
• Bound (2010)
• Funny Once: Stories (May 2014)