Book review: “Touch” by Elmore Leonard

Lynn Marie Faulkner, a 28-year-old record promoter in Detroit, is more than a little attracted to a guy called Juvenal who works at an alcohol rehab center.

He was easy to talk to, interested, he listened, looking right at her while she told him about Bill Hill and Doug Whaley and KMA Records, Artie, the Cobras, the guy from William Morris; he grinned and was like a little kid. He seemed to know, without having things explained to him, savvy, and yet naïve. God, and he was a very good-looking guy, the first good-looking guy who didn’t come on with a lot of bullshit, working up to a little sack time.

This is about midway through Elmore Leonard’s 1987 novel Touch, and it turns out that Juvenal’s real name is Charlie Lawson, which is a quintessential Elmore Leonard character name. Of course, so is Lynn Marie Faulkner. He’s called Juvenal because, when he went into the Franciscans, he had to pick a name: Brother Juvenal.

He’s been out of the religious order for a while now — he’s 33 — and he’s at Lynn’s apartment while she washes his bloody clothes. While he’s in the shower, she’s put on “tight jeans and a cotton shirt, leaving the two top buttons open…and unbuttoned the third button before Juvie came out.”

Now, he’s wearing a short robe that an old TV anchorman boyfriend left behind. And Lynn has gotten to wondering:

She said, “Do you suppose by any chance you’re a saint?” (Was it all right to fool around with saints? It was getting heavy.)

And that paragraph with its parenthetical thought pretty much sums up Touch.

 

Typical characters?

The bloody clothes that are now in Lynn’s washer?

You might think that, since this is an Elmore Leonard novel, they’re the result of a shoot-out of some sort, with Juvenal on one side or the other of a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson Commando. (Actually, that happens later in the story.)

You might, since this is an Elmore Leonard novel, think that Juvenal is an aimless, good-hearted small-time crook and that Lynn is a somewhat jaded, somewhat tired, probably heart-of-gold con-artist looking for a new angle. There are more than a few characters like that in Leonard’s nearly four dozen novels.

But no.

 

Holiness protocols?

Even though, as a teen, Lynn worked as a baton-twirling cheerleader for a scam-centric Florida church, and she’s been a part of the snake-pit record industry for several years, she’s remained sweet and fresh — able to navigate the sharks of her world while still exuding a love of life.

And Juvenal?  Well, his clothes got bloody because, at a church service, he hugged a boy suffering from cancer and cured the boy of his leukemia and experienced the sudden appearance of the stigmata on his body.

Stigmata, as in Jesus, as in the wounds Jesus suffered on the cross, as in the nail holes in the hands and feet and the spear point slash on his side, the wounds that saints such as Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio also suffered on their bodies.

No wonder Lynn is wondering about the holiness protocols.

 

So vulnerable?

Several other characters in the novel aren’t so worried. Indeed, they’re out to employ Juvenal for their own purposes.

Bill Hill, the former operator of the scam-centric church in Florida, wants to cash Juvenal in for a million dollars.

National TV show host Howard Hart wants to get Juvenal on his show to destroy the young man’s name and reputation and boost his lagging ratings.

And August Murray, an archconservative publicity hound and anti-Vatican Council Catholic, wants to use Juvenal’s stigmata and miracle healings as leverage to push the church back into the Latin Mass and promote himself into a position of religious power.

And Juvenal seems so, well, vulnerable.

 

Running out of blood?

And, yet, he seems to be the only one who takes this stigmata thing in stride.

For instance, when he and Lynn are discussing what to do next, Lynn says:

“You make it sound so simple.”

“Outside of maybe running out of blood.”

“Could that happen?” Like a wide-eyed little girl.

“That’s a stigmatic joke. You don’t hear too many.”

 

The mystical everyday?

Down the centuries, novelists have taken up the challenge of writing about the mystical in the everyday world.

Consider Alice McDermott’s 2017 The Ninth Hour, a story of ghosts that haunt lives down the decades, especially in families, some seeming to appear as visions, some as the ghosts of actions taken, choices made.

Or Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place, published in 2006, a novel about a closely woven community of people, including a 12-year-old girl who has the ability to save someone, human or dog or chick, from death or bring someone back to life — to get to the thin places of existence, moments when the wall between the physical and spiritual worlds is very permeable.

While the mystical is an element of McDermott’s novel, it is the core of The Thin Place, a literary triumph, dealing with the spiritual links of not just the 12-year-old but of every character to each other and to the natural world and, yes, to the spiritual world.

 

Abiding with facts?

Leonard, though, is probably the first to do this in the context of crime fiction although it seems that a great number of publishers weren’t sure that it fit the genre.

As Leonard writes in an introduction, Touch is set in 1977 and was written that year and was rejected by more than a dozen publishers that year. Finally, he found a taker, but that publisher, after accepting the manuscript, sat on it for, literally, years until Leonard could buy it back and, eventually, find Arbor House which brought out the hardback, finally, in 1987.

Unlike Davis, Leonard wasn’t aiming for literary excellence. No, that’s not accurate.

Leonard always aimed to tell a good story well. He didn’t employ the high-fallutin’ approaches of the literati. Instead, in the language and setting of western and crime fiction, he wrote with subtle nuance and sharp observation of the human condition. And, it certainly seems, he had fun.

That’s what happened with Touch:

I had a good time writing Touch, imagining mystical things happening to an ordinary person in a contemporary setting. It’s way off-trail compared to what I usually write, but it shouldn’t be mystifying unless you look for symbols, hidden meanings.

Touch is about accepting what is. Abiding with the facts. Nothing more.

 

Well, what if?

So, at heart, Touch is a what-if story. It’s not likely to show up in a bookstore or website for religious books. There’s no hagiography going on here. In fact, Juvenal has no idea if he has the power to heal and experience the stigmata because he’s saintly or because, well, who knows?

And, because Leonard wrote about people who exist on the edge of respectability and legality, Juvenal crosses paths with a lot of characters afflicted with such vices as greed and wrath and pride.

He’s not greedy or angry or prideful. As for lust — well, that’s for Lynn to find out.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

2.16.26