Jodi Lundgren’s debut novel is the story of a slow motion freak-out, a young woman’s flailing descent into mental illness. It’s a powerful, even painful read – not only because of Lundgren’s skill at conveying the harrowing rabbit holes that await unbalanced Alices, but because Touched alludes to a larger problem. It suggests that vulnerable young girls are exploited at the best of times. At the worst of times, girls are really, truly at the bottom.

Jade King is a bookish 21-year-old University of Victoria student with a vivid inner life but a numbing, frustrating real life. As her account starts, Jade doesn’t have much: parents who are well meaning but dulled by life, the daily grind of classes and studies, and a sometime boyfriend, a married English professor who is a manipulator and wanker, unwilling to go all the way sexually or emotionally.

Alone with her notebook, Jade obsesses over the things people say, and how they say them. Her recreations of childhood become mixed up with thoughts of touching and being touched. Jade remembers her
father’s sexual attacks on her, and rages against her family’s legacy of propriety. When Jade’s imagination becomes untethered, her body takes on a will of its own, until, she says, “I no longer walk, but gravitate.” In mid-delirium she’s arrested in the act of taking off her clothes in public, and taken into psychiatric custody. From there, the book chronicles the clinical trial and error as drugs are prescribed and attempts made to manage a body and mind touched in all the wrong ways.

As a record of anguish, this book feels unassailably true to life. As a novel, however, Touched is too bottom-heavy. Jade seems to function not as a character but as a poster child for mental health issues. Unbelievably, this educated, middle-class girl has no friends, no acquaintances, no pleasures, and none of a young person’s vanity or lust for a bigger world: she’s so bleak that she’s unreal. Jade loses herself, but Lundgren never endowed her with a self to lose, which is too bad; Jade’s fate should touch us more deeply.