At Certain Points We Touch by Lauren John Joseph
At Certain Points We Touch (2022) is a roaring yet poignant coming-of-age story of first loves and last rites by Lauren John Joseph, a British-born, American-educated artist who works at the intersection of video, text, and live performance. Their debut novel is at once a testament to the enduring fabric of love and a heart-breaking ode to the many lessons that come with grief – often too late.
In this superbly written, sparklingly smart tale of love, lust, and loss, a transgender narrator is suddenly reminded of Thomas James, a boy they met ten years ago, last spoke to six years ago, and who died four years ago. The rest of the book unfurls as the narrator attempts to commit their life to paper as a form of exorcism – of memories, of places and people, and mostly of the ghost of their lover.
Known by everyone as JJ, but affectionately if somewhat reflexively referred to as Bibby by Thomas James, we are taken stumbling through the narrator’s life. Friendships and cities are devoured on a quest to carve a slice out of the world for themselves, as Bibby struggles to find someplace they belong. Amidst the constant yearning for home, troubles with money, jobs, and the cycles of being an illegal immigrant, Bibby recounts their life and their relationship with the cynical aspiring photographer, Thomas James.
It becomes clear very quickly that Thomas James’ personality leaves a lot to be desired – he’s manipulative, often racist and misogynistic, seemingly incapable of emotional intelligence, and disingenuous about his attraction to Bibby. And yet. Seeing him through the eyes of Bibby, one begins to understand how love doesn’t pick and choose – it’s almost as if, despite everything, Bibby cannot rid themselves of the larger-than-life persona that is Thomas James. In attempting to write it all down, however wonderfully, Bibby acknowledges this themselves:
“I know I’m destroying you, you as you were, by trying to preserve you as I wanted you to be.”
Thomas James’ only redeeming quality is that he’s written by the author through Bibby with so much care and precision that he becomes both ephemeral and ethereal, untouchable by reason. Bibby revisits their love as if for the first time, with the blessings and horrors of hindsight making the story within this story all the more heart-breaking. The way Bibby talks about love, their love, transcends whatever really happens.
“Love is like learning a foreign language, a new tongue every time. You have to study the rules and the grammar, but until they become instinctive in you, you will always be fumbling to conjugate, incomprehensible and confused. Until the language is alive in you and automatic, and you can skip between tenses with ease of motion, you remain nothing but a child whose words cannot be taken seriously. Until the day arrives when you can talk about what you have, what you have had, what you once had, without stopping to run through Yo tengo, Yo tuve, Yo tenía, then you are lost in illiteracy. Love has to be intuitive, second nature, a reflex, but I hadn’t reached that point with you yet. I wasn’t at one with the logic of the language, so I could only feel pained, I couldn't ask what it was that had wounded me. I couldn’t formulate the question, I could only sob and offer more inexpressible groanings.”
In conjuring up the images, reliving the memories, and reassessing their relationship, Bibby becomes more self-aware of the ways in which Thomas James never lived up to what they wanted him to be – and yet, what is cannot be changed. Love is love, and no matter what changes between the pages of their story, Bibby is inexplicably pulled back into grief and all-consuming heartbreak.
“It’s a small sorrow, or a universal jest, that we often don’t have the images we need to help us understand certain situations in our lives, until much later, when the need is gone, and the image can only bring us backwards in a dizzying state of reverie, to a moment we had tried so hard to forget.”
At Certain Points We Touch unfurls in luminous, perspicacious prose, filled to the brim with cultural meta references and a beautiful balancing of the sexy with the melancholy. Lauren John Joseph proves to be an incredible talent when it comes to writing love, identity, trauma, sex and death in a way that transitions from the ribald to the lyrical with perfect ease. The writing sometimes makes you forget why you’re there in the first place: you often get lost in lines so incredibly nuanced and rich that the characters become secondary in comparison. At points it is nihilistic, a countercultural feast with something for everyone, while revelling in ideas both new and old, but always with a very Lauren John Joseph twist on it.
“The past is fixed, we know. That’s the consensus all of us physicists, Catholics, Buddhists and classicists have agreed upon. The real shocker is that the future seems to be so too, and all of these gestures we make, all of these cave paintings are just ways of killing a few hours before bed. All time is here. The dissociation becomes quickly terrifying, when you consider that you maybe aren’t the driver, just the car.”
Ultimately, At Certain Points We Touch touches you at all the right points, pulling you along as Bibby stumbles through their life, adrift in memory and untethered in time, only to arrive at the very painful conclusion we’d known all along: the loss of real love, no matter how much you try to redefine or exorcise it, inconceivably becomes a part of you. This dizzying, sexy, evocative tale is an absolute must-read!
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.