Antonya Nelson: Bound by the Past
In Bound, Antonya Nelson’s latest novel, Nelson continues her work of discovering and distilling the common and yet profound framework of human relationships. Through deceptively simple writing, Nelson illuminates the stuff and clutter, ideas, hopes, and dreams, that bind us together, one to another. Mother to daughter, wife to husband, master to dog, killer to victim: Nelson understands them all. Of all the relationships we have throughout our lives, Nelson illuminates the most important one, our only truly lifelong kinship, which is the understanding we have with ourselves. How we see and understand our own selves, inside and out, is the tie that binds us the most, and the one binding we rarely unwind and rewrap. We cut off relationships with others, redefine status from married to ex, beloved to barely tolerated, but rarely do we redefine ourselves, and restart our lives and our possibilities all over again.
Set in Wichita during the 2004 -2005 final resurgence of the BTK killer, Nelson uses the methods of the killer and the city’s obsession with him as a backdrop to the changing marriage of Catherine and Oliver Desplaines. Running parallel to their story is the story of Cattie, a teenage girl orphaned by the accidental death of her mother, on the run from her loss and her future, and trying to reach back to her mother. When Catherine is named guardian of Cattie, the stories connect and relationships collide. Oliver’s ex-wives, his daughters, Catherine’s aging mother, an AWOL teenage soldier, various dogs, and the BTK killer himself will all have their role to play in the changing relationships that Catherine and Oliver have, the one they share and the ones they hide from each other. The biggest change will be their own internal awareness of who they are, and what they still want out of the lives that remain to them, their own lives and the lives they have been entrusted with.
Nelson’s writing is, as always, provocative and insightful, genuine and beautiful. There is no trick or style to her writing, which makes what she does look so much easier than it is. She tells the truth, flat-out and plain, but with reverence for who and what we are, which is trying. We are all just trying. To connect, to fulfill, to attract, to be understood. And to be accepted into the fold of love and security. Against that pull of everything we need, to change ourselves to start over again andtry all over again, is not easy. Cattie’s mother had the courage to start over, far from Wichita. Can Catherine change? Can Oliver? It is too late for the BTK killer: now that he is caught, he will be only one thing, for the rest of his life. A serial killer. For the rest of the characters in Bound, change is still and always possible, as long as they have the will to try.
