At Certain Points We Touch

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Therefore, should you have come upon my little review sent into the void of the inter-webs, please note that my sentiments are purely subjective. I didn’t mind the unlikable protagonist, in love for whatever reason with an even more unlikeable character; I didn’t mind the woe-is-me tone it sometimes took, all those poor decisions that led nowhere, story-wise, but I can’t get over the writing. there in the gallery, i think i finally began to understand that you and Adam really were just what you said you were, just two gay men, just two guys who have sex with guys, that’s all. 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….

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”. And, of course, maybe that was the point: this is, after all, a story Bibby is narrating and better for it to be about her than the two basic cis men in her life, but I think with them never feeling quite real, it impacted the realness of Bibby too.

The book is also a knowing wink towards writing and autofiction, considering what is memory and story even when something is meant to be 'what happened', but this is combined with exploits and community and stumbling into things whilst young in ways that stop it just feeling like a book about writing a book.

Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power play will initiate a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims - and culminate in terrible betrayal.I hope this novel gets all the praise it is due, and I hope the members of Booker Prize selection committee are watching.

I do not think this books is “for everyone” but of those of us who this is a good fit, it feels like we were meant to read it.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. There were only those you esteemed, and those you detested, and I had the dubious luck of being pinched between the two like loose cargo on deck, thrown between prow and stern on turbulent seas.