I did visit Mitch Albom’s book site, called “Human Touch”
and read the first chapter, and did a donation to a Detroit charity.
The book seems to comprise maybe eight chapter, with each
chapter having several “weeks”, each rather like a scene in a screenplay.
Readers may return weekly and read the next chapter.
The novel follows the pattern of some Nineteenth Century
English novels that were published in installments in magazines. Many readers got quite captivated in those
days, especially by Dickens, with ordinary people like them as characters, to
find out what happened to each person.
Between each week an illustration will open up, sometimes a
photo. That sort of artistic style was
common in reading texts in grade school back in the 1950s. You wanted the pages to have a lot of
pictures then. I don't know if this was done with Wordpress and a specialized theme for this kind of use.
The narrative centers at first around a little boy, his mother
who is a housekeeper, and various other families and church members they
interact with. In chapter 1, they learn of rumors of a new virus, and of events
being canceled, and don’t have the intellect to process this the way people in
the media would. But close knit families have a culture where they protect one
another from germs (sometimes requiring personal fastidiousness) which is not
as common with educated city people. The text refers to the city of Flint,
which has had the water quality crisis with lead levels, along with official
neglect.
This is certainly a challenging way for a writer to raise
money for charities during a troubling time of need. My own material doesn’t really
lend itself to this. I suppose more
conventional (character based) science fiction could. Say, a story is set in an O’Neill Cylinder in
the future. But how many perspective
readers would know what that is.
Picture: Comerica Park in Detroit, my visit, 2012
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