Bound, by Antonya Nelson

Bound begins with a woman and her dog, driving cross country. She has already had two accidents that day--she's about to have her third (and final) accident. When she dies, her dog takes off and we spend considerable time with him until he is found by an unhappy couple camping. Why Antonya Nelson spent so much time on the dog (to whom she finally returns in the last couple pages of the book) is unclear, as is the reason the woman is on the road trip.

We do, however, learn that the woman, whose name is Misty, has a daughter Cattie, who has been sent from her home in Houston to a boarding school in the Northeast, where she has only one friend, Ito. We also learn that Misty has left a will naming her best friend from high school, Catherine, to be Misty's guardian. Since Misty and Catherine have not seen each other in 20 years, Catherine is surprised, to say the least. She is also surprised to learn that Cattie has gone missing from the boarding school. Readers know that she is hiding out in a house also occupied by Ito's cousin Joanne and a bizarre AWOL serviceman named Randall, with whom she will save a dog and her pups and head out on a road trip to Houston. We also know that Catherine's husband, who has a habit of abandoning his wives for younger models (Catherine is his third wife) is having an affair with one of his employees and is thinking of leaving Catherine. And the BTK killer has reemerged in Wichita, where Catherine lives and where she and Misty grew up.

Does this sound jumbled? For me, that's exactly how reading Bound felt, and I never really found any coherence, even when the stories of Catherine and Cattie came together.

Favorite passages:

She sat wedged in a wing chair, her brow creased, her heavy lips down-turned, looking for all the world like the chastising high priestess of a disappointing African tribe.

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 off, or praise for, their feelings. A lot could be said for not saying anything.