At Certain Points We Touch

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Thomas’s character is ghoul-like, haunting over the story from past to present, as the narrator attempts to find closure through their writing.

There was no narrative drive to speak of - the story just seemed an interminable stream of pages with no ebb or flow or discernible structure - and the central axis (that two people who had no common ground whatsoever but some kind of intoxicating sexual chemistry in a brief open relationship for a couple of months) had no believability whatsoever.Entwining the arc of their lives with her own sometimes feels forced, but an awkward beginning gives way to vivid storytelling, and while drawing out commonalities – migration and belonging, racism and resilience are threaded throughout – Ramaswamy reflects with dreamlike clarity on memory and transience. But while the affair with Leapling gives the book its structure, the beating heart of At Certain Points We Touch is the first-person narrator’s journey — an epic exploration of the world, the self, and the coming-into-being of an artist.

The first-person narrator — unnamed but addressed throughout the book alternately as JJ, Bibby, and Liza Minnelli — has just picked up a handsome American at a house party. Chillingly, there’s a mention of him probably having voted for Brexit, had he had the opportunity even. The narrator describes Leapling’s photography as “an experiment in seeing the world,” carried out with old cameras and even older film, such that the images might either come out beautifully or result in a series of completely black frames, streaked with red. 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. Even so, it takes a decade to run its course, providing moments of dizzy intoxication and wild abandon before cruel betrayal kicks in.But he’s brought to life so three-dimensionally that — even as a reader who knows as well as the narrator does that it would be better to stay away from this “handsome bastard” — it’s hard not to see his deadpan appeal. Would it insult your pride to know that I began to entertain your advances because I wanted you to replace Lulu with me; so that I could, in a way, become her, even if only in my mind and in your arms?