I don’t know about you, but when I’m deep into a novel, I can’t help picturing how I’d behave if I were one of the characters. Actually, I suspect most readers do that, without even meaning to. It’s part of the fun of immersing ourselves in another world.
And one book that certainly had me wondering what I’d do in a particular situation—a number of times over—was Scott Campbell’s Touched.
The subject matter is both disturbing and, unfortunately, timely, though the circumstances are variable: A 12-year-old boy enters the family kitchen where his mother is preparing dinner and announces that their neighbor’s “been touching me.”
As she says:
You wonder how you’d react. When you see those people on Donahue talking about their messy lives, you wonder how you’d behave if your life all at once turned into a soap opera. I guess I’d always thought I’d know exactly what to say and do and I’d do it without a lot of fuss, crisp and confident as a nurse. But when it really happens to you . . .”
While I don’t recall now how I discovered the book, I had a bit of initial hesitation about purchasing it. Did I really want to read about a pedophile? But in the skilled hands of Scott Campbell, there is so much more to this story.
Here’s part of what I wrote to him:
So one day I step into a calm suburb. Into a normal kitchen, like my own, on a normal evening, until five words change the landscape forever—just five words, sending a seemingly endless circle of ripples into the air and out of doors and into hearts, ripples that pierce and keep widening into ever greater levels of destruction and challenge. I followed them and wondered, with no effort, how in one house I would assess the state of my marriage, in another house, how I would or could shield my children from the side eyes and taunts of their schoolmates; what my next move, next word would be to a trusted husband speaking a confession such as I never could have imagined. If I would or could keep silent, how the pieces of my world would fly apart to ungatherable locations if I didn’t—just as if it were happening to me and not people you invented, but who (I have no doubt, as a fellow writer) were very real to you. I was astonished at how, as a man, you wrote in the voice of a woman . . . in the voice of a man succumbed to a deep, incomprehensible sickness . . . in the voice of a child-now-man still beset by memories, a permanently altered identity. I moved from horror to sympathy to near nausea to disbelief to anger to sympathy again as if it were real and not fiction, as the people inside the heads of both writer and reader become.
Wow. For that masterful demonstration, I thank you.
For more about Scott, and to read an excerpt from and/or purchase Touched, as well as some interesting background on his experience of writing the book, visit his website.
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