Living with Ghosts
Antonya Nelson, author of Bound, is living out her midlife fantasy of buying a ghost town, one property at a time. She writes about it in today’s NYT “Home and Garden” section, noting that she and her husband,
… could be sitting in front of a HD screen watching a great movie. But instead we’re out here, filthy with splinters in our hands and bats flying out of our attic, eating hot dogs and drinking wine from aluminum cups. It’s not for everybody, but it appears to be for us.
Bound is Nelson’s fourth novel; it’s received a many positive reviews, including,
Los Angeles Times, by Carolyn Kellogg (October 17, 2010);
Nelson’s skills have been on display in her many short stories published by the New Yorker; Bound is her first novel in nine years. It is a work that resists the novelistic convention of having a climax, instead it eddies and returns. A year passes, and nothing much happens, other than the lines of these women’s lives drawing together. But maybe sometimes a quiet understanding is enough.
New York Times, by Liesl Schillinger (October 3, 2010)
It’s a liberation to read Nelson here in the long form. There’s no question of her superlative gifts for the short story…. In Bound, Nelson makes her story as big as it should be, and gives her characters room to run.
And, one negative,
Minneapolis Star Tribune, by Susan Comninos (September 26, 2010)
Bound is an ironic name for a novel that wants to intertwine the fates of its characters — including two from a town stalked by the serial killer known as BTK (bind, torture, kill) — but without tying up loose threads.
 |
|
Audio; Tantor; 9781400118649