Viral Marketing with the Human Touch!

We're told never to judge a book by its cover. But it's clear from the front of Mitch Albom's new work in progress that it is designed by a master crowd-pleaser.

The image of a meeting of exquisitely manicured fingertips  as symbolic of the Coronavirus pandemic speaks volumes about what readers may find inside.

I am among those invited by the ChateBooks Live Book Club Facebook group to read the first two chapters of Human Touch, a novel Albom is writing in tandem with the pandemic's course and  whose eventual sale proceeds will benefit the needy in Detroit, Michigan, where he lives.

As a 'teaser', these chapters do their work of introducing the characters, their setting, any conflicts and implications for the plot's eventual resolution.

As a British-born woman now living in Israel, am I unqualified to discuss American mores? Or should being equal citizens of our virtual, technologically driven global village allow us all to think and feel the same? 

Just as Albom's character of Chinese heritage is unwontedly abused and attacked by a stranger, so  the Mail Online has reported an alleged racial attack against celebrity London Chinese restaurateur, Geoffrey Leong. 

Even as interdenominational faith leaders have struggled with the notion of virtual rather than real-time religious services and social gatherings,  so Albom's Christian minister tussles with the pros and cons affecting his flock's temporal needs versus their spiritual welfare.

It is difficult to guess how a story being researched and written on the hoof will unravel.  

I ask, for example, as Albom and I are both Jewish, how much the creation of 'Little Moses' - found abandoned in a wood - owes to his biblical namesake. Further, why, with a noted 18% spike in international antisemitism since the pandemic began and a history of Jewish-African American tensions in Detroit, has this important strand thus far been omitted from the narrative? 

Moreover, Albom is a US star sports columnist turned all-round writer and broadcaster who found lasting international fame with his book, Tuesdays with Morrie. 

This was based on his relationship with sociology Professor Morris Schwartz, who had been his tutor at Brandeis University and whom he later discovered via a televised interview to be dying from Lou Gehrig's Disease.

I suggest that a similar format, interviewing real people about their experiences would be a far more effective and honourable exercise as it would have the permanence that this well-intentioned but fundamentally flimsy money-spinner can never achieve.


© Natalie Wood (03 May 2020)