The Great Gatsby Returns, Homeless in Vermont

Chris Bohjalian’s "The Double Bind" Takes the High Road with a Sequel to the Literary Masterpiece

By Andy Turpin

WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)—When Teddy Roosevelt commissioned an archaeologist to find out whether Custer’s Land Stand at the Little Bighorn could have been avoided if not for Custer’s own hubris, the archaeologist wired back that indeed Roosevelt’s suspicions were correct and that Custer had been a bravado-ridden idiot in his actions.

But Roosevelt’s actual course of action was to allow the true results of the inquest to remain hidden from the American public at large, wiring to his friend, “Don’t destroy America’s heroes.”

I recount this anecdote in the course of making known that New York Times best-selling author Chris Bohjalian was treading a thin line between success and literary pariah abyss when he chose to write his most recent book, The Double Bind (Shaye Areheart Books, February 2007), as a modern-day sequel to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz age classic novel, The Great Gatsby.

After all, thanks in no small part to a devastatingly young and dashing Robert Redford, The Great Gatsby has become as idiosyncratic and sacred an icon to many Americans of both the “Greatest” and “Free Love” generations, as Sherlock Holmes is for your average Briton.

And like his English counterpart Alan Moore did with his nation’s literary legends in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Bohjalian manages to slay the proverbial Grendel of originality and adversity by keeping the pure integrity of the original novel and creating a further story, which without even a single murder in the story manages to keep the reader in a state of constant suspense throughout. No small feat.

The story revolves around an upper-class social worker from Long Island named Laurel. During her college years in Vermont, Laurel was victim to a violent attempted assault, rape and brutal murder whose memory had left her a fragile shell of her former self.

That former self had grown up in luxury on Long Island, in direct proximity to the converted estate that had once been the gala mansion of Jay Gatsby, and nearby the brooding manor of anti-heroine Daisy Buchanan.

The story begins unassumingly, when a much-loved homeless man at Laurel’s NGO shelter dies with only a mysterious box of photographs he guarded fanatically as his surviving possessions.

The photographs are given to Laurel as a PR assignment to create an exhibit, nurture her love of photography and gain public empathy and support for the homeless.

But what Laurel discovers is that the loveable and schizophrenic homeless man, Bobbie Crocker, had once been one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers for Life and Time magazine, and that a family scandal and cover-up had sent him on a downward spiral in life that not only was connected with the torrid love affair of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, but eventually led to his running head on into a life of destitution away from the decadent life he once knew.

Laurel, too, as she investigates the life story of her once favorite homeless client, begins to descend into that intoxicating, deceitful and Gilded Age world, and soon finds herself braced up against Daisy’s powerful old money family that wants the truth Bobbie’s photos could reveal to remain hidden, and will employ a horde of John Grisham-esque lawyers to keep it so.

Readers won’t be disappointed by Bohjalian’s dead-on characterizations of both people akin to the upper crust East Coast world of books like Thomas Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, nor the hardened and scavenging world of the homeless and poverty stricken.

As someone who’s spent time working in homeless shelters and around the mentally ill, I was greatly impressed by the nuance and soulful empathy with which Bohjalian characterized even his minor players to a razor-edged tee. In one passage about single homeless women, he personifies the often-misconstrued perception by many self-righteous people that the homeless who traded “survival sex” for a bed were somehow on the same plane as prostitutes.

As Laurel practices her amateur photography for the amusement of the shelter’s women, Bohjalian writes: “Laurel would photograph them, even though more times than not they would try and sexualize the experience. Sex was their currency and they used it determinedly if inappropriately. They would peel off their tops, unsnap and unzip their jeans, or touch themselves. … They would, as the song said, try to show her their tattoos. It was almost a reflex for them because instinctively they ached for Laurel’s approval, and they knew cold and hunger intimately.”

Quite contrary to the common association many readers make to the hedonistic world of The Great Gatsby and their doubtless recollections of soap-boxed high school English teachers, Bohjalian’s version of the story is biting, visceral and at times even more ingratiating because Gatsby, who deftly is never a direct character but rather an unspoken elephant in the story’s room, becomes more endeared to the reader as we encounter through Laurel characters as real and close to home as our morning Starbucks coffee.

To give more away would distract from the intense joy and feeling of tragic homecoming you get from reading The Double Bind cover to cover.

Admittedly, I’m taking for granted that someone interested in reading the book is already well acquainted and intoxicated with the original work The Great Gatsby. If you fit in the above category, you’re sure to enjoy and be riveted by The Double Bind as much as the images of Redford and Farrow are to the icon.

And if you’re of the other school of mind, perhaps you’ll think of Teddy Roosevelt and chide with gusto and contempt to Bohjalian, “Don’t destroy America’s heroes,” literary or otherwise.