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Bound

2.98 of 5 stars 2.98 · rating details · 647 ratings · 186 reviews

Antonya Nelson is known for her razor-sharp depictions of contemporary family life in all of its sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious complexity. Her latest novel has roots in her own youth in Wichita, in the neighborhood stalked by the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). A story of wayward love and lost memory, of public and private lives twisting out of c

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Hardcover, 231 pages

Published September 28th 2010 by Bloomsbury USA (first published August 24th 2010)

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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010

76th out of 100 books — 567 voters

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Sep 15, 2011 Jodi rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-read, rock-roll-bookclub

I’m a proud and vocal book abandoner. If, after giving it the official John Irving try (reading 100 pages in hopes the story gets going named after Irving because A Prayer for Owen Meany takes forever to get going), I’m not enjoying a book I set it aside without a second thought. This is why I don’t often write negative book reviews. Sometimes, though, I will struggle through a book because of some other obligation. Usually that means Rock & Roll Bookclub, and still even then I’ve been known...more

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Aug 23, 2010 Kendra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

I was so excited when I won this book from goodreads. Bound is a character-driven drama that keeps you reading even though it doesn't have much of a story line. Antonya Nelson is a very talented author that describes everything in such detail that you find yourself visualizing it. Nelson's characters were so vivid and unique. The beginning of the book was particularly well written and intense. This book followed the characters in their journeys through life, but the problem is none of the charac...more

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Oct 11, 2010 Susan Kavanagh rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

This was my first introduction to the work of Antonya Nelson. She is an excellent writer with sharply honed descriptive powers. I thought that parts of the book, particularly the beginning, were excellent set pieces. I subsequently discovered that the author is a well known short story writer. I will be looking for her collections of stories. Although this novel did not have the strongest narrative, I did not find the disjunctiveness to be a problem. It is always a pleasure to be introduced to n...more

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Nov 17, 2011 John Frazier rated it 1 of 5 stars

Had I not won this in a Goodreads giveaway, I would not have made it to the end, at which point the only conclusion I could reach was that sometimes life goes in full circles. This is a story largely about a Catherine--the third wife of a philandering entrepreneur--who essentially inherits the lone surviving child of friend who dies in an auto accident (suicide?), a friend from whom she hadn't heard in decades. On the road to fill in the blanks, we're asked to believe that this was a result of a...more

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Mar 14, 2011 Maggie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, read-in-11

I've lost an afternoon in worse ways than I did reading this book, but I have a feeling I'll never think about these characters ever again once I take it back to the library. Line by line, the writing is smooth and technically precise, as I've come to expect from Antonya Nelson, but, as other reviewers have mentioned, the narrative distance is so far away that all of the characters come across as sad and cold and sort of doomed to never break out of the patterns we see them in. Nelson used to be...more

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Feb 14, 2011 Hope Baugh rated it 5 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I received this book as a gift (not from GoodReads) but I almost didn't read it because I thought it was going to be something dreary and/or gory about a serial killer and a missing teen and I was just not in the mood for that.

However, the opening (told from a dog's point of view) pulled me in and I eventually discovered that this is a cleverly layered, beautifully written, and richly satisfying story told from the points of view of many interesting characters. It is "literary" so I found mysel...more

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Nov 09, 2010 Carolyn Kellogg rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

Reviewed in the LA Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/...

One pleasure of reading Antonya Nelson is that she brings the careful language and control of literary fiction to uncontrolled, rough-and-tumble lives. Mixing the admittedly bourgeois undertaking of meticulously crafted prose with working class grit is risky — it can devolve into condescension or cartoonishness — but Nelson, like Raymond Carver, strikes a remarkable balance.

In "Bound," she turns her talents to a character study of t...more

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Dec 02, 2010 Katherine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

“Cattie didn’t have friends, really. It seemed like so much work, having friends. From the moment she’d weighed the costs and benefits, Cattie had not consciously sought out the companionship of others” (22).
"Snowflakes had begun falling outside in festive complicity, covering the ugly, muting the unpleasant" (51).
"That would have been right up her very vengeful, extravagant ally" (88).
"Genetically, she'd be inclined to addiction; socially, toward unenlightened attitudes. Her mother's sympathy w...more “Cattie didn’t have friends, really. It seemed like so much work, having friends. From the moment she’d weighed the costs and benefits, Cattie had not consciously sought out the companionship of others” (22).
"Snowflakes had begun falling outside in festive complicity, covering the ugly, muting the unpleasant" (51).
"That would have been right up her very vengeful, extravagant ally" (88).
"Genetically, she'd be inclined to addiction; socially, toward unenlightened attitudes. Her mother's sympathy would not be for the girl herself, but for the larger doomed demographic the girl represented" (119).
"'I don't fell like I react the way other pdople do,' he confessed to her. 'I never have.'
'Me either,' she said.
'That'll cost you,' he said" (161).
"...the car's front end slanted decidedly downward as if disappointed or exhausted, resting on its chin" (162).
"Teenage girls required the full attention of everyone in the house; they entered rooms as if strutting onto a stage, the eye-catching star with the biggest coflict in the production that was All About Me" (177).
"...this was age, his enemy, now disallowing him the ability to quickly adapt, to sync up on thing with another, to rise from a deep sleep into sudden chaos without suffering the slow machinery of mind and body refusing to fire at command. Napping synapses, sluggish muscles" (180).
"The moon shone relentlessly on everything, a cold gleaming landscape that looked as if it were all made of glass and could be shattered" (181).
“ ‘And Misty kept flunking PE, so she ended up in Pregnant PE one semester. All they did was walk around the football field for an hour. Her and a bunch of fat black girls.’ Catherine slapped both hands over her mouth, looking around the empty hall in case there were fat black girls anywhere nearby to take offense” (197).
“She’d greeted Dr. Harding by putting her cheek to either side of the woman’s face, a strange gesture suggesting both Europe and felines” (210).
“Like Oliver, she’d been raised in the years following the Great Depression, back when ‘depression’ meant a national economic crisis, rather than a personal psychological one” (210).
“People of their generation, people who’d been raised on the prairie or in the Dust Bowl, who’d performed their jobs in service of the greater good, did not require a public airing of, or praise for, their feelings. A lot could be said for saying nothing” (212).
“Unlike most teenage girls, Cattie didn’t seem to think of herself as the star of the show so much as an audience member. Or maybe reviewer. She seemed to be taking notes” (218).
“Did all villains depend on the confidence that nobody else was as duplicitous as they?” (223).
“…treetops waving in the evening wind, limber trees in summer, leaves making the noise of water” (225).
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Dec 09, 2010 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: jan-feb-2011

Both humorous and heartbreaking, Nelson's in-depth character study explores the fragile ties that bind and their capacity to strengthen, change, and dissolve completely. While several critics heaped praise on Nelson for her memorable characters and carefully crafted prose, others had misgivings about confusing shifts in perspective, a lack of plot development, stereotyped males, unresolved loose ends, and the use of the BTK serial killer as a metaphor linking the past to the present. However, th...more

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Oct 10, 2010 Brian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Like everything else Antonya Nelson's done, this novel is built on strong characterization. By an exact phrase or one tiny action, a character is born, and a reader can begin to understand the people who populate Nelson's story. Sure, Nelson has mined this sort of world before--there are cheating spouses, troubled females, jaded youth--but she still manages to bring them to life on the page. And just because characters are familiar doesn't always mean that they're stale. Nelson sticks to a real...more

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Dec 26, 2010 Cassandra rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Bound is a story that takes its name from the BTK Killer, and much of the story’s action takes place in Wichita, Kansas, the killer’s hunting ground in the late 1970s. Fast forward 30 years, and he is assumed dead. To prove that he’s still there, he starts releasing information to the media, proof that he went dormant but did not disappear. The citizens of Wichita are not alone in their fascination with the tale, watching the events closely until the killer’s identity is revealed, and he is arre...more Bound is a story that takes its name from the BTK Killer, and much of the story’s action takes place in Wichita, Kansas, the killer’s hunting ground in the late 1970s. Fast forward 30 years, and he is assumed dead. To prove that he’s still there, he starts releasing information to the media, proof that he went dormant but did not disappear. The citizens of Wichita are not alone in their fascination with the tale, watching the events closely until the killer’s identity is revealed, and he is arrested. It’s an interesting story. However, it doesn’t do a lot to move along the plot of the story, so it’s not entirely clear why it’s such a recurrent theme in the story. In fact, Nelson’s attempts to keep his narrative going throughout her own seem forced. Her story is about being “bound” by the ties of friendship, by shared experiences, and by obligation. It has very little to do with a serial killer.

The story focuses on the ties that bind Catherine to Cattie, her namesake and the daughter of her best childhood friend. When Cattie's mother dies in a car accident while she is away at boarding school, Cattie thinks that she is all alone in the world. She "disappears" to avoid ending up in foster care. Meanwhile, Catherine learns that she has been named the girl's guardian and must decide how she is going to proceed. Their paths finally cross when Cattie decides to return to Houston and is found by the police a on the road not far from Wichita. Catherine, in Houston to handle Misty's estate, has her husband pick Cattie up and bring her home. The two Catherine's quickly bond. The emptiness that Cattie knew she was feeling is somewhat alleviated, and the hole that Catherine does not even know she has her in her life is filled by teenager's presence. Through their bond, they are both able to reconnect with Misty in a way that neither would have ever been able to do had she lived.

The most interesting, and most poignant, bond that forged in this story, however, has very little to do with Catherine or Cattie. When Catherine makes her trip to Houston, her husban, Oliver, agrees to visit her mother in the nursing home where she has lived since having a stroke. The two have never gotten along; Oliver is just a few years younger than Dr. Grace Harding, and she has always felt that he married her daughter so that he could have a "trophy". On this particular visit, however, they are able to bond over a virtual trip to Rome. The two adversaries are able to realize they have more in common than they would have expected.

The story is very well-written; Nelson's command of the language is unquestioned. She is more known for her short fiction, and her skill in that area is made apparent throughout the novel. Each chapter is told almost as a story in and of itself. This approach can work very effectively when the stories are only thematically related and not meant to be telling an on-going story about a set group of characters (see Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles). It is not as effective here; the different threads are meant to be woven together, but she leaves too many dangling. The beauty of the individual stories is diminished by the attempt to make them all work together.

Overall, it is a very pleasant read. In this case, however, the parts outshine the whole.(less)

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Feb 15, 2011 Mark rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Antonya Nelson is not a bad writer, but this is a bad book. I stayed with it out of a perverse fascination to see how it finished. As I should have known, it finished disappointingly. The plot, such as it is, goes something like this: a woman dies in a car crash and is survived by a daughter who is at boarding school. The dead woman has named her childhood friend as the girl's guardian. The friend has mother in a nursing home and a philandering husband and they all live in Wichita, where the BTK...more

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Mar 08, 2012 Diane rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-a-z, free-or-bargain-kindle, beach-read, character-driven, 2012-read, 4-star

I actually really liked this. If there was an option for half-stars, I'd give this 3.5 but since there is not, I'm going to round up.

You will not be interested in this book if you are looking for a plot-driven novel. This is a character-driven novel and the plot is almost secondary, really. I personally really like character-drive novels if the writing is done well and I would be hard pressed to say that Antonya Nelson does not do the writing well in this novel. I could see where her writing mig...more

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Oct 01, 2010 Jesse Baker rated it 4 of 5 stars

Nelson, predominately known for her short fiction, has returned to the novel form for the first time in ten years. And though she isn’t getting as much attention as ahem, another writer coming out with his first novel in ten years, her last novel, Living To Tell, was actually quite similar to The Corrections stylistically and thematically, and in my humble estimation, it was every bit as good: in fact, in many ways, it’s a superior, more claustrophobic mediation on the familial microcosm. Her ne...more

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Aug 11, 2010 Joline Pruitt rated it 3 of 5 stars

Frankly, as I read this book my mind would wander to imagining the author sitting in front of her laptop tapping her fingers on her coffee cup, stuck with writer's block, trying to bide time with wordiness to avoid making progress on the story and then finally, reaching the minimum amount of words to surpass being classified as a novella, hastily sending it to her publisher and then drowning out the anxiety of failure with a big glass of wine. I could be totally wrong.

One reviewer said this book...more

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Aug 03, 2010 Cindi rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

I won this from FirstReads. The novel begins with a fascinating scene featuring the surviving dog (several dogs play into the novel) in a major car accident. This scene immediately captured my attention and curiosity. However, the following story is not nearly as interesting.

It is primarily a character-driven novel and it is a good thing that Nelson is a good writer. Her characters in this original family drama are fully developed and she clearly understands human nature. One brief paragraph abo...more

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Feb 05, 2011 Scott rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: current-fiction

I enjoyed Antonya Nelson's interplay between the wild and the domesticated in her characters. She also had one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a phlandering husband that I have read recently. My issue with the book is its length. I find myself saying this often about the books I have read recently, but just as I was getting into the book she stopped it. The main action of the book revolved around Catherine who has unknowingly been named guardian of 15 year old Cattie. When Cattie's mother...more

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Jan 21, 2011 Miles Kelly rated it 2 of 5 stars

I was surprised to read that Antonya Nelson had written nine works of fiction but not surprised to find out that she teaches creative writing. "Bound" is full of great writing about character and background, but never seems to develop any story or characters. Incidents happen, characters interact. Their personal habits and behavior is laboriously described but it is difficult to feel any empathy for them. There is a theme here of people being bound together, and to their animals, but none of the...more

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Dec 25, 2010 Debra rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is my first Antonya Nelson authored read. The perspective on characters is not so much how each relates to the other but how each character finds clarification of self through relationship. One woman only can listen now that she lives with the outcome of a stroke. Another woman finds clarity in a past friendship when caring for the friend's teenage daughter. A father/husband avoiding aging recognizes his age. There is tragedy, BTK serial killer is in the backdrop as reflection and perhaps t...more

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Oct 11, 2010 Ruth Conrad rated it 3 of 5 stars

I found this a well-written novel about an interesting situation, with Wichita as the setting. I felt impatient as Nelson constructed the story. It seemed to take too long for the main event in the plot to happen, when Catherine becomes guardian to and finally meets her deceased best friend's daughter. Leading up to this event, many other characters and a creepy serial killer wind in and out of the story. This linking of people, as theme of the novel, suddenly happened for me as I neared the end...more

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Oct 23, 2010 Tom rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

This is the story of two Catherines, one named for the other. When Misty Mueller, estranged college buddy of the elder Catherine and mother of Cattie – the younger Catherine – ,dies in a car accident, the elder Catherine discovers that a sixteen-year-old promise has come home to roost. The orphaned Cattie has been left in her care. While Catherine decides whether she will keep her promise, Cattie, who’s been attending a private school in Vermont, disappears. Catherine leaves her home in Wichita...more

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May 12, 2013 Uwe Hook rated it 1 of 5 stars

This book had no plot, no climax, no character development.... nothing happens in the book at all that even makes it remotely interesting. I stuck with it since I expected something to happen that would sort of bring it together and make it worth the time, but nothing happens. I just finished it and had a hard time getting through the last half. I think it's supposed to be redemptive in the end with a few things that sort of come together, but the characters are so poorly developed that I didn't...more

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Jul 29, 2012 Chris Spirer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Antonya Nelson's characters are very well described with brilliant language. Your eally get to know this very vaired group. The plot however was odd at times with 2 plots co-mingling (which I usually quite enjoy).
The story speaks of a May-December married couple where the husband is cheating with an even younger woman. This is going on at the same time as the wife learns that an old friend of hers (who she hasn't seen in 20 years) has died and asked her to raise her 15 year old daughter.
To furth...more

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Oct 24, 2010 Amy Palmer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads, to-buy

In "Bound", Catherine Desplaines is married to a cheating husband, going innocently about life, when she learns that her high school best friend has been killed in a car accident and has given custody of her teenage daughter to Catherine. My expectation was that the story would center on the relationship between Catherine and this new child in her life, but that relationship didn't begin until there were about 40 pages left in the book. Instead, the book focuses on Catherine and her memories of...more

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Nov 01, 2010 Margarette rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Bound" was written in clear narrative style. That's the first thing that came to mind. Lately it has been all about authors trying to pass off their unique writing styles to make themselves and their books distinguishable. However, Antonya Nelson tried to steer away from that and stuck with the classic narration. I loved how the events, at first, didn't coincide with each other. But as the plot moved on, things started to fall into place. The story ran the entire course of a year (thus the chan...more

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Nov 29, 2010 Brent marked it as to-read

The fifteen books from the NYT 100 notable books of 2010 list that I picked to add to my reading list:

Bound -- Antonya Nelson
Mr. Peanut -- Adam Ross
The Spot -- David Means
The Privileges -- Jonathan Dee
Fun With Problems -- Robert Stone
The Ask -- Sam Lipsyte
The Tenth Parallel -- Eliza Griswold
The Promise -- Jonathan Alter
Empire Of The Summer Moon -- S. C. Gwynne
Secret Historian -- Justin Spring
The Mind's Eye -- Oliver Sacks
Finishing The Hat -- Stephen Sondheim
The Honor Code -- Kwame Anthony Appiah...more

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Nov 12, 2010 eva rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

The language of this book was beautiful. The author handles the prose wonderfully, makes it very very powerful.
I was iffy about this one because to be honest its not my type of book, and I had heard nothing about the author but I was pleasantly surprised.
The story is very real and very developed, the ending fitted quite nice with what life is all about. Perhaps my only complains stems that I would have wished to see more from some of the stories she develops throughout the novel, but at the same...more

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Nov 01, 2010 Letha rated it 2 of 5 stars

I was quite pleased to have received a copy of this book...and even though I can't say that I loved it I'm still glad the book showed up in my mailbox via First Reads and I had a chance to read it.

Opening scene/passage: like others have said in their reviews, quite good. I wish so much intense and heartrending focus hadn't been put on that dog in the opening though because after those very connected moments the dog passes out of the book with barely another mention. Quite frustrating as that dog...more

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Jan 27, 2012 Angela rated it 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book more than I did. The writing was superb, the characters compelling, but something I can't put my finger on was missing. I didn't feel any real connection to any of the characters. They all seemed so remote and held at arm's distance from the reader. I found myself feeling frustrated at any lack of desire to pick up the book during the day. When I did, I found myself skimming and not reading closely. I felt as if I was reading a very long short story. Perhaps I should h...more

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Jun 21, 2011 Jen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, literary-fiction

The book was well-written, but it seemed as though Nelson didn't know what to do with her characters. Examples: the dog stuff at the beginning and the end, how Oliver's daughter Miriam was included in the story (she added nothing), the grave scene for Yasmin, etc.

The ending was a HUGE letdown, too. The story just fizzled out. I really enjoyed the book, too, but felt as though I missed something or wasn't paying attention, because I was left with so much unresolved.

However, the narration by Cass...more

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About Antonya Nelson

Antonya Nelson is the author of nine books of fiction, including Nothing Right and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell. Nelson’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA...more

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