Speak, Memory

Laurel manages to build a low-key life for herself, trading in cycling for photography and working at a Burlington homeless shelter. She’s got a photographer’s eye, so it falls to Laurel to to select the best photographs left behind by a recently deceased homeless man for a memorial exhibit, one that might garner a little publicity for the struggling shelter.

At first, the photographs strike Laurel as merely tragic, evidence of an artist who wound up on the streets. But then she recognizes a pattern in the pictures, beginning with the ones taken in Long Island back in the 1930s. Why would a homeless man have photos of the children of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, that villainous couple from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? Are they clues pointing to some well-kept family secret? “Laurel began to imagine a scenario in which the son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan learns in high school what his parents had done the summer before he was born,” Bohjalian writes. “And then all the bad behavior he has witnessed—the snobbish arrogance, the marital duplicity, and, yes, the petty carelessness—becomes small change when compared with this nightmare.”

Yes, it’s a thicket of a plot, but Bohjalian tempers it nicely by alternately focusing on the workaday lives of his supporting characters, including Laurel’s 20-something housemates and her recently widowed mother. In most books, secondary characters are woefully underwritten, usually because they exist solely to help the main character solve the mystery at hand. But in The Double Bind, these characters wind up working against Laurel, as their concern for her fragility threatens her search for the truth.

Once Laurel’s intrepid quest finds her delving into one of the 20th century’s greatest novels while coming face-to-face with her own attackers, the pages start turning themselves. What results is an incredibly deft exploration of memory, loss and the extraordinary lengths people will go to when they want to hold on to their sense of themselves.

The author appears 7 p.m. March 5 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.