Chris Bohjalian. Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands. Doubleday, 2014.
I have reviewed another novel by Chris Bohjalian that had connections to F. Scott Fitzgerald. I heard that this one had connections with Emily Dickinson, so I had to check it out.
Like The Double Bind, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is set in Vermont, mostly in the Burlington area. It is clear Bohjalian knows and understands this location well. I could not help think of Infinite Jest at the novel’s outset, however. A nuclear power plant in rural northeastern Vermont (known as the Northeast Kingdom) experiences a meltdown. Many square miles of Vermont and adjacent parts of Canada and New Hampshire become uninhabitable, though not as wide an area as the Great Concavity in the Wallace novel.
Like The Double Bind, this novel is told in the first person, this time by teenager Emily Shepherd. Her parents both work for the power company and are killed in the meltdown. Orphaned, she flees the area along with many other meltdown refugees and ends up in Burlington, the one urban area in the state.
Like The Double Bind, this novel is very raw. In this case, though, Emily hides nothing. News reports blame her father, a nuclear engineer with a drinking problem, for the disaster though no one really knows what happened. He just seems a likely scapegoat. Since her mother is a publicist for the power company, she gets blamed for covering things up. With her parents cast as villains, Emily begins calling herself by a different name.
While described by her teachers as an underachiever, Emily is a fan of literature. She likes Emily Dickinson and frequently quotes her. When she chooses a pseudonym, she calls herself Amy Bliss after one of Dickinson’s close friends.
Like other teen girls on the streets, she gets picked up by a man named Poacher who offers her a warm place and some food. Poacher is a pimp and drug dealer, and soon Emily is prostituting herself and taking drugs. She is direct about her experience, and some readers may be repelled. She also is taught cutting by one of the other girls and uses this as a kind of psychological release. The reader begins to understand that self-harm is an appropriate name for this, and that it is a form of self-punishment.
Still, there is a sense of hope. Emily knows her parents have been unfairly accused. She is not a quitter. She senses there may be a way out of her predicament. She knows, for example, not to leave for a bigger city like Boston or New York the way some of the other street girls have done. That will just be worse.
Eventually, she meets up a with nine-year-old orphaned boy named Cameron who is also on the streets, having fled an abusive foster home. Together they live among the homeless as she knows bringing him to Poacher’s would be a death sentence for him. She divides her story into two parts, B.C. and A.C., before Cameron and after Cameron.
Emily is a survivor. She survived the radiation. She is surviving on the streets. Can she find solace? Can she find a home? Can she endure the disapprobation she experiences when people find out her real identity?
As with The Double Bind, we get a look into the social services that minister to the down and outers in Vermont. Emily/Abby learns when and where to get free food or a shower. She becomes adept at shoplifting. She and Cameron survive a Vermont winter on the streets by making an igloo out of stuffed trash bags.
Interwoven through this are allusions and quotations to Dickinson, famously a recluse who really did have a few friends. The final page (excluding the brief Epilogue) of Emily/Abby’s tale is a fitting tribute to Dickinson and to the power of literature to give us hope and point us to eternity.