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Robbie Young is an ordinary twelve-year-old boy about to drop a bombshell that will devastate his small town family. One day he rides his bike home after school, finds his mother in the kitchen making dinner, and speaks aloud the secret he's been keeping for a year, "Jerry Houseman's been touching me." Robbie has been molested and the Young family will never be the same. From that moment on, the novel unfolds with inexorable power. The story is narrated in four parts: first by Robbie's mother, then by Jerry Houseman himself, then by Houseman's wife Linda, and concluded by Robbie himself fifteen years later, when he has returned to town for a high school reunion. Each voice is remarkably persuasive and utterly convincing, and the result is a novel that is impossible to put down as it is impossible to forget.
Quote: I first read "Touched" about 10 years ago, having had similar experiences as Robbie when I was a 12 year old boy. Eventually, the book managed to wend it's way into boxed storage in our cement basement. I decided recently to clean out some of the junk down there when I came across this book again. Suffice it to say that very little work was done as I sat upon a box in a chilly corner and reread remembered passages.
While some of the dynamics of my particular situation were different, I strongly identified with the main character Robbie. How he processed what he was going through - both as a child and later as an adult - resonated deeply with me. Like Robbie, I too confronted my mother as an adult (my father since deceased), and asked why I was not protected from the older boy who was essentially a serial child molester that lived next door to us. Unlike Robbie, I was never put on the stand to publicly relive those whispered moments in dark places, nor were any of the other young victims (mostly girls - I was one of the only boys). And while I was relieved by the hushed dispatch of the situation by a "committee" of neighborhood dads, I see now that perhaps the decision not to prosecute did more harm than good. No one ever spoke of it again, and we were left to quietly deal with our secrets in our own way, within the limitations of our juvenile coping mechanisms.
As he reached adulthood, Robbie's feelings of anger towards his mother, his unresolved confusion about the mixture of powerful conflicting emotions from revulsion to reluctant indulgence to guilt-ridden pleasure, are all things that I wonder if anyone could fully understand having not gone through it. Perhaps my personal perspective detracts a bit from a truly unbiased critique, yet the fact remains that these passages were felt on such a visceral level, in no small part because of the talents of the author and his keen ability to so eloquently paint feelings with words.
Touched was a major touchstone for me as I underwent the difficult journey over a decade ago to emerge from the darkness and isolation of the secrets I was forced to keep. The end of the book was particularly powerful as Robbie realizes he was so busy fielding other people's reactions that there never seemed room enough for his own. Likewise, while society in general seems to suggest how I SHOULD feel about what has happened to me, Touched gave me permission to admit how I actually DO feel - to remember how I DID feel when it was happening to me.
Touched touched me. Ultimately, this book helped me reach out across the years to that little boy that was me - to see him through older, wiser eyes, to understand him, to embrace him, to bring him back into my heart - to be whole again.
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