Binding Spell

by Elizabeth Arthur

The New Yorker called Elizabeth Arthur’s first novel, Beyond the Mountain, “stunning - stark and subtle,” and described her second, Bad Guys, as “inspired tragicomedy.” Now in her most audacious and accomplished novel yet, Arthur gives the reader a special gift: a comedy set in America’s heartland that evokes with pathos and hilarity the condition in which we as a nation find ourselves on the edge of the century’s final decade.

Howell Bourne believes an international banking conspiracy is causing American farms to fail, and when two professors from Russia visit a nearby college,. he thinks God has encouraged him to kidnap them. His sister Bailey, an aspiring witch, and Maggie Esterhaczy, a beautiful psychologist obsessed with the threat of nuclear war, are two of the characters who get swept up in the ensuing events, which change the lives of all concerned: Ryland Guthrie, the hypochondriacal manager of an elegant furniture store - ”the finest store in Felicity, Indiana”; his brother Peale, whose lifelong run of good luck has recently ended when he won election as the sheriff of Rock County; the ebullient Ada Esterhaczy, an eighty-six- year-old Hungarian herbalist who is determined to get her granddaughter Maggie pregnant; and a large cast of canines with whom the humans’ lives are intertwined. During the sweep of several days in spring, these characters and the two Russians - as unlikely a pair as Laurel and Hardy - discover the beauty of the threads that bind them and their still-lovely planet together.

Wildly funny in her details and deeply loving toward her characters and their foibles, Elizabeth Arthur here again tackles the possibilities of change and the choices we all have to make. Effervescent as mineral water, subtle in its design as a hand-stitched quilt, Binding Spell is a consummate American tale, whose characters wrest fulfillment through a new vision of things that have been there all along - who, in a world fraught with real and imagined danger, find a way to live happily ever after.

Genres: Literature

372 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Elizabeth Arthur was born on November 15, 1953 in New York City. She is the daughter of Robert Arthur, a fantasy, horror and mystery writer and the creator of The Three Investigators mystery book series for young people. She was educated at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Notre Dame University of Nelson, British Columbia, and the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C.

Her first book, Island Sojourn - a memoir about building a house on a wilderness island in northern Canada - was published in 1980 by Harper and Row. A second memoir, Looking For The Klondike Stone, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. She has also published five novels - Beyond the Mountain (Harper and Row, 1983), Bad Guys (Knopf, 1986), Binding Spell (Doubleday 1989), Antarctic Navigation (Knopf, 1995), and Bring Deeps (Bloomsbury U.K., 2003).

Athur's novel Antarctic Navigation - an 800-page epic narrated by an American woman who sets out to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1912 - was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book, received a Critics' Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1995 by A Common Reader. In 1996 the novel received the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction from the Ohioana Library Association.

These awards came on the heels of two NEA Fellowships, as well as an operational support grant from the Division of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation - the first ever given to a fiction writer.

Arthur has taught creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the University of Cincinnati, and Indiana University/Purdue University of Indianapolis - where she directed the creative writing program. She has been married to the writer and editor Steven Bauer since June of 1982, and the two of them have recently completed twenty-six books in a contemporary Three Investigators mystery book series, updated for a new generation of readers.

Reviews

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was nothing particularly unlikeable about this book, but there was nothing particularly standout either. The events are told through the alternating perspectives of six characters, so it goes in a lot of directions and doesn't seem to have much of a point—except maybe to illustrate the variety of different ways everyday people experience the everyday world. There is a great deal of inner monologue, so you might enjoy it if you like getting a window into other people's (and occasionally dogs') minds. These characters are all quite quirky, sometimes to the point of being entirely unrelatable! While it's always worth exploring other people's motivations, I found it a relief when I had finished the book and could return to the comfort of my own, completely comprehensible, thoughts!

[Heidi Bakk-Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is based in Indiana. Lots of amusing quirky small town characters. A surprising strong thread of atheism and anarchism. But my favorite thing about the story is that the author is clearly a dog lover, and dogs are full characters in the book, a book that is not about dogs. Multiple characters. I can't remember ever reading a novel that did that. The dogs brought this book up to perfection.

[Suzan Lemont · Rating 4 out of 5]

I also read it twice (as one of the reviewers before me did) and loved it the first time, somewhat less the second. Still, I think the story is unique and surprising and charming.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that I read over 10 years ago. For some reason, I thought it was a great book and left it on my shelf to reread at some point. Well, I actually did reread it and I cannot figure out why I thought it was so good. There must have been a reason, but after rereading it, I sure can't think of one. It wasn't great and it wasn't awful... just mediocre. Definitely NOT a great read. I'm passing it on to the library. Perhaps someone else will enjoy it more than I did this time.

[Autumn]

Abandoned. I only got 40 pages into this. The writing was dense and I could not find the story. Bummer.