Ties that bind

Insurance agent Dick Little is also in a bind as he tries to find the driver’s teenage daughter, Cattie, who on hearing of her mom’s death has run away from private school and is living in a squalid house in Montpelier with a traumatized soldier gone AWOL. Their fragile bonding, expedited by their mutual caretaking of a litter of puppies, leads to a bizarre cross-country trip and another story of duty and abandonment. Soon, Catherine in faraway Wichita, Kan., a childhood pal of the dead Misty Mueller, finds herself suddenly yoked to Cattie as her guardian.

Abandonment, adoption, connection, dependence — these themes link Nelson’s relatively plotless novel into a satisfying whole. Sometimes delicately, sometimes a trifle earnestly, Nelson skillfully rings the changes on the idea of being bound.

This idea extends far beyond the connections between people. The author boldly displays her symbolism like a soldier going into battle, flag waving. She employs everything from a dog’s leash to neckties to documents that are “legally binding.” Even the historically real BTK (bind, torture, kill) serial murderer is enlisted, hovering over the novel like a miasma. A veteran storyteller, Nelson nearly gets away with these devices, simultaneously dodging heavy-handedness, cliché, and preciosity.

Misty’s fatal accident reverberates through “Bound,” altering the lives of a dozen characters. The imminent appearance of the bright, sullen Cattie is the spark that sets off a series of domestic detonations in the lives of Catherine and her husband, Oliver, and their odd extended family, whose members suffer bondage in its infinite variety. Catherine’s elderly mother, a formerly loquacious professor, is bound by a stroke that’s left her mute. Oliver is pathetically stuck in his image of a younger self. And his 32-year-old daughter, Miriam, is mired in an angry, endless adolescence.