BOOK REVIEW: No Touching by Ketty Rouf
Book Review
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Book Review 👠
Written by: Astrid (Bookside and Events Assistant)
No Touching is an electrifying character study that gets to the heart of how we define womanhood. At the beginning the book’s protagonist, Jo, is hardly a person, much less a woman. “Today, I won’t exist. Tomorrow, I probably won’t, either,” she says, and it’s easy to see why she feels that way. She’s a high school philosophy teacher who’s exploited by her superiors and dismissed by her uncaring students. Not even sleep is an escape from her disillusionment: an insomniac, she spends her nights wandering through Paris trying to find some kind of joy in a life she knows is meaningless.
The only thing that gives her any pleasure is sex: the distant promise of it in her friendship with Martin, another teacher; the snatches of her body she dares to look at in the mirror; and the imagined dancer she peruses each night when she places her stilettos on her nightstand. Fully engaging with her sexuality suffuses Jo with a deep, languid certainty that she is both the seer and the seen, that she is beautiful and therefore entitled to take up space in the world around her. Her audition for a dancer’s spot at her local strip club is an opportunity to show herself that she deserves to have that certainty, and when she’s hired, she feels compelled to accept the job.
In one way, Jo’s transformation is beautiful. Her sexuality becomes deliberate, enveloping: she provokes men into exposing their most vulnerable selves to her and feels a wild thrill as she watches them become helpless and desperate in the face of her nakedness. That, to her, is real power, and for the first time, she feels truly free. But she’s not, really—she’s fallen into an escapist trap. She reassures herself of her beauty by comparing her body to those of the women she feels “sorry for”—and spares some pity for her own body because she knows she’s letting it go. She feels sickened by the women who accommodate the customers who feel entitled in their hedonism, the men who only restrict their grasping hands and mouths because they don’t want to be banned from the club—while she makes herself sound less articulate to keep her customers from respecting her too much to want to see her naked. The pleasure I felt in watching Jo revel in her body became contaminated by my growing knowledge of how precarious her joy was and how little it ultimately empowered her back in the “real” world.
Jo also discovers her bisexuality over the course of the novel; unsurprisingly, her queerness is complicated by her preoccupation with male desire. Her thoughts on other women’s eroticism are so wrapped up in her fixation on her own body that it’s initially difficult to distinguish desire from admiration of a feminine ideal. She develops a connection with another dancer, Fleur, but she can’t stop herself from seeing the two of them through an imagined man’s eyes: Jo is transfixed by Fleur, then describes her as “the animal you want to whip.” She calls Fleur a vixen—then says that she’d like to be a vixen, too. She’s much happier to pursue Thomas, a similarly magnetic and elusive regular, because that kind of attraction is much more familiar and easier to describe. As frustrating as Jo’s sometimes-ugly, sometimes-petty observations could be, they were always comforting. They spoke to the oilier, nastier parts of my own self-image, and as with any philosopher’s work, engaging with her worldview helped me confront and refine my own.
Everything changes when a customer’s newly adult son visits the club. He’s not one of Jo’s students—that would be a bit too on the nose—but the connection is close enough for her to quit dancing immediately. The real world’s lack of regard for her was always too powerful for her to stand against, so I wasn’t surprised to see all her latent fears overtake her; still, it was upsetting to see just how fast (and how thoroughly) fear of discovery made Jo retract into her old, soulless self. But Jo’s inability to escape her old life is what forces her to change it. Her spirit is now too big, too full, to be ground down by the world around her. She can never strip again (which is, admittedly, disappointing), but she can integrate the authenticity and fulfillment dancing gave her into her life. She can let herself be found by Thomas and Fleur. She can engage with her students and colleagues honestly. She can find someone, man or woman, who will love her complete self.
And maybe, for just one night, she can dance.
