![]() ![]() Many also are blind or only partially sighted, including the title character, the former Wall Street bond trader who has become the Skulls’ reluctant guru. The city, with its roving bands of predatory wild dogs (and wild humans), is proving entirely too crowded and confining for these would-be rebuilders of civilization, and Arizona is an attractive alternative because so many survivors suffer from wheezing respiratory ailments. In the first of his three leisurely sections, “The Skulls,” Bosse is setting the scene, and he’s very attentive to the characters’ interactions and to the textures of the handmade neo-primitive society they’ve cobbled together in a Manhattan apartment building. To its credit, “Mister Touch” isn’t as plot-fixated as one expects in a novel with such an extreme premise it’s surprisingly gentle and atmospheric, as if Bosse wants to bring this purged, empty America to life and then just live in it for a while. Bosse may be striving to give us more than a fast read, but in the end I think he gives us rather less. Although it’s supposedly an adventure story, “Mister Touch” gives us an awful lot to absorb, and it never gets an easy or compelling rhythm going. The new 502-page Malcolm Bosse novel, “Mister Touch,” is packed with invented words and social concepts, and it comes complete with a 20-page glossary-alphabetical from “Ace” to “Zap”-to help us keep all the eccentric characters straight. We have before us a post-apocalyptic epic about a New York street gang that migrates to Arizona to form the nucleus of a new society. ![]()
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