What a rare experience is this beautifully written first novel by Santa Cruz author Thad Nodine. A road trip about a blind protagonist and his ramshackle journey through the deep South, Touch and Go (Unbridled, $16.95) bristles with ingenuity and style. Jack Kerouac meets Huck Finn, with a dash of 21st century Tennessee Williams.
And it has to be ingenious because the entire tale is told in first person by Kevin, a recovered addict who lost his sight when he was 5 years old. He’s made up for the loss, in Nodine’s engaging tale, by being acutely tuned to sensory details and shifting human motivations. Touch and Go is laced with powerful non-visual elements, details of touch and temperature—sounds, textures, flesh, thunder and tears—that grab the reader right off the bat.
Kevin has just lost his job at a California newspaper and agrees to join a family of resourceful losers, led by foster parents Isa and Patrick, as they pile into a funky station wagon. Their goal is to deliver a hand-made coffin to Isa’s cranky-but-dying father. The drive through the deep South is riddled with growing humidity, emotional altercations, at least one accident, a few sexual liaisons (stunningly described) and ultimately hurricane Katrina herself. A Florida native and Ultimate Frisbee champion who worked with recovering addicts for 20 years, Nodine writes about familiar territory. As a result the book carries its improbable plot and cast of characters on waves of authentic dialogue. The writing practically reads itself. Nodine’s style is graceful and almost invisible—there’s no flab in this savvy package.
Touch and Go exerts its magical grasp of inner awareness in much the way that black and white films exert their allure. Freed from the distracting excess of color—or in the case of Nodine’s book, the excess of visual description—the protagonist narrates a world robust with closely felt details. We are invited to “see” the underlying structure of lived life—its crisp edges, its emotional vectors and its painful richness of texture.
Fast and frankly unforgettable, Touch and Go insists upon the urgency of human connection, the sense that we too are among these unlikely comrades, traveling toward one thing and invariably arriving at something completely different.
Thad Nodine reads from Touch and Go
Wednesday, Oct. 19, 5pm
Kresge College Seminar Room 159, UCSC
