At Certain Points We Touch

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I acknowledge that some of these earlier encounters were pertinent to the book—I suppose one could say that each scene was pertinent given whom we know JJ to be—yet, once again, I found myself reading something that I would not have selected for myself had I known that sexual encounters were to be described with such specific detail. I’m not sure what I ever did to earn your desire or deserve your contempt, but I took comfort in knowing that this was how you acted with any number of people. Each of these phrases binds together a story that is about both reality and what we imagine to be real (about ourselves and others). However, upon reaching the 30 percent mark I began to lose interest in what the author was presenting; I simply did not care.

It’s as strung out as our narrator tends to be in those young years at times, but always a pleasure. I don’t mean that, as a compliment, only a thought that comes to mind when I think of the world where left to deal with now”.

JJ is someone who is incredibly naive while being willfully ignorant, almost seeking to place themselves into situations wherein they are tumbled like dry leaves. The old avant-garde never dies, apparently and thank goodness, it just continues the quest to love, to be heard, and to really live.

Bambi Lake, Penny Arcade, Maggie Nelson, Kathy Acker, Burroughs and also establishment darlings Joan Didion and Ocean Vuong all make appearances and exist as anchors for a subcultural scene that knows from whence it comes. But these aren’t things that are most pronounced when you are in love, they are truths, which reveal themselves over time, like the bones of a skeleton as the flesh rots away.In a story about a dead man, everyone becomes a ghost, and the title of the book does reflect its self-conscious ephemerality. Thank you to the publisher for providing me an advanced e-copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York - a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent. At Certain Points We Touch is an unflinching roman à clef about what it means to love someone and be devastated by their loss, without looking away from the fact that much of that person's character was unseemly. I found this so fascinating and so powerfully articulated: the often unacknowledged division between those in our community for whom complicated queerness is as incomprehensible as its opposite is to others.

This epic, but immensely personal, eulogy for their lost but haunting lover is not quite like anything I have ever read. And at another point, addressing the lost Leapling: “I wonder if you would have come to hate me if I had left the final residuals of maleness behind me during your lifetime, during our love affair? The flamboyance of life is not lost on JJ, they take full advantage of the freedoms of youth yet, in all the time that has passed since the introductory paragraphs, leading us to the moment we encounter this written eulogy to a dead lover, JJ has made zero progress in developing a sense of self. It’s overshadowed by the mysterious death of Thomas James - the reality of which you only find out in the epilogue.Overall, I appreciated what the author was trying to do, and I wish that the indulgence of the writing style didn’t bring me out of the story as much. They more than compensate for sections when the pacing lags, the faint sense of awkwardness of essentially hanging around in a narrative waiting for a character to die, the times when the writing buckles under its own ambitions and falls apart. My days are long past of days I’d be found in bar in San Francisco to a packed house of filled with ‘dress-to-kill’ people…. particular scenes, such as a Barbra Streisand act whilst high on Vicodin - were fun and well observed but like I say, the individual passages could not add up to a cohesive whole. I did like this book for the most part but this did have some moments that just dragged and it made it harder for me to read.

Luckily, Joseph has chosen a medium sturdier than flea-market film to accomplish the same goal in this excellent debut novel. It's four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realize the date is February 29th-the birthday of the man who was something like their first love.With an almost haunting sense of the recent past and grief, At Certain Points We Touch is a novel that really paints a portrait, not just of the narrator's lover, but of the narrator themselves, of cities and bad rooms, and of growing up as a millennial and traversing different kinds of culture and community. The poetic pros, the intense (at times graphic) imagery, the commitment to memorialized past, and even the narrative structure. I’ve been performing, and so I’m dressed as some sort of nymphomaniac Christ; I have on a pink bra and a crown of gold laurels, strappy high-heeled sandals, and a burgundy sash which I’ve fashioned from a bedspread, or a curtain. In one of those “queer circles are too small” moments, it turns out I’m actually reasonably familiar with the work of this author, having seen them in performance several times over the years. Perhaps TOO gay for the Booker then, given the judge of a previous year saying Shuggie Bain was gay but not too gay.