...a work of zealous social critique laced with sexy romantic comedy and a just-in-the-nick-of-time family reconciliation ... With a weirdly nurturing driverless car, a family emergency, a sexy art director, and wrenching and hilarious confrontations and meltdowns, Maum’s incisive, charming, and funny novel ebulliently champions the healing powers of touch, the living world, and love in all its crazy risks, surprises, and sustaining radiance.
Maum’s writing is easy, eager and colloquial, as oxygenated as ad copy. People 'quip' or 'croon' rather than speak, metaphors mix promiscuously, points are made twice, italics tilt madly from every page. Less finished but more lively than Maum’s last novel, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, Touch sometimes reads like an email from a hallucinating brand strategist trapped on a silent retreat ... Maum shines when she writes about creativity, the slow burn and then sudden rush of ideas that lead Sloane to change her life. Having new ideas feels like love. We use the same liquid, luminous metaphors for both: lightning, fire, magma, light bulbs. But while love stories are almost mandatory parts of novels (including this one), good writing about creativity is rare. Maum captures that fragile, gratifying, urgent process.
Ms. Maum’s appealing debut, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, followed a husband’s efforts to win back the love of his wife after being caught in an affair. Like that book, Touch uses antic humor to mask its rather stern traditional message about the importance of nuclear families and the magic of baby-making. The author’s conservative streak occasionally dampens her storytelling. The book’s settings, drably confined to conference rooms and the company car, could have used shaking up, and its ending is too easy to forecast. But it’s impressive that Ms. Maum has managed to make a return to old-fashioned family values—and even commonplace acts of physical intimacy—seem daring and subversive.
In Courtney Maum’s novel, Touch, Sloane Jacobsen returns to the United States from Paris, where she’s been hiding from grief about her father’s death for years ... Sloane’s work allows her to peek inside the minds of the people who create and design tech, and she finds that while technology has made their lives easier, it has made even the tech creators at Mammoth long for old-fashioned physical contact? — ?hand-holding, sex, the embrace of a friend ... Maum excels at depicting the subtleties of human interaction in all its various forms, particularly the different types of tension in the workplace ... One of the best qualities of Touch is how accessible Maum renders esoteric ideas ... Maum’s Touch is the right novel at the right time, but this is not to discount the author’s skill in rendering well-paced scenes attenuated to the human condition.
Maum, who also names products for MAC Cosmetics, has such a incisive grasp of where tech and culture meet that she could add sociologist to her resume. The book also captures the mid-life crisis of a woman at the top of her game, resulting in a perceptive, thought-provoking read.
While the novel is highly engaging in its representation of the confusing and addictive tech-oriented world we live in, the outcome is predictable and obvious and made more quixotic by a last-ditch dive into the mystical. The exploration Maum is conducting in this book, of human vs. machine, is best served not in the overreaching discussion of global trends but in the more nuanced moments in which Sloane aches to sort out her own feelings. An uncomplicated novel about the complicated relationship between humans and the tech-heavy world.
