Barry Loach

Arc

The Loach saga is a working model of the novel's central transaction — the plea for real human contact, and the near-impossibility of getting anyone to make it — and the book files it, deliberately, as folklore: not narration but "the saga of Loach," handed down by Big Buddies to Little Buddies as an institutional catechism (1). Its setup is a vocational comedy with real stakes. The enormous Loach family exists, narratively, to be whittled: war, tainted grouper, Atlantic City, the Houston Philharmonic (1, 2), until the mother's clergy-dream balances on exactly two sons — the one with the genuine calling to God, and Barry, whose calling since his first Band-Aid on an X-Men figure has been to tape, wrap, brace, and rub liniment. The joke the arc then runs is that the two vocations turn out to be the same job. When the seminarian's faith in "the innate indwelling goodness of men" spontaneously combusts at twenty-five (3) — killed not by argument but by practicum, by actually serving Boston's ungrateful flocks — it is the trainer, mid-debate and theologically out of his depth, who fixes the hitch in his brother's card-toss: care for the flexor carpi ulnaris standing in for care of the soul.

The Challenge (4) literalizes the brother's despair into an experiment, and the experiment's cruelty is its precision: Barry asks for the one alm that costs nothing and means everything, and Boston pays him handsomely — bullwhip-flinch by bullwhip-flinch — to withdraw the request. The stretch where the data comes in is the arc's pivot in both directions at once. The brother, vindicated, gets bored and goes off to await his walking papers (and the story, pointedly, never resolves him — the man who commissioned the proof isn't around for the result). And Barry starts becoming his own experimental subject: Incompletes, the lost work-study job, warming drinks he's too disillusioned to refuse, his own soul sprouting the same "necrotic" patches he'd set out to disprove. The wager about human nature nearly costs him his own.

What saves him is the book's purest specimen of unstrategic goodness: Mario Incandenza, fourteen, routed to Park Street by a dumpster-fire, constitutionally incapable of the defensive reading every sane commuter applies — who takes "Touch me" to mean touch me, and shakes every outstretched hand in the gauntlet. The novel's grimmest grace-note is that even most of the stemmers recoil from the touch they'd been crying for; only the far-gone drunks, plus Loach, can accept the thing itself (5). The rescue is a hinge in two timelines at once — it is Mario's signature miracle as much as Loach's salvation (Mario's timeline (event 63)) — and its aftermath converts the experiment's failure into an institution: the handshake becomes a job (5), the job becomes Head Trainer within months, via a sauna accident the academy memorializes only in its retrofitted door-locks (6).

The E.T.A. present (7-9) is the wager won in perpetuity, hiding in plain sight as routine. The man nobody would touch now spends every match-day being touched: each player steadying himself with his hands on Loach's shoulders through the shave and wrap — "Everybody's had his hands on Loach's shoulders at one time or another" — a daily, unremarked laying-on of hands that quietly reverses Park Street. His caseload (8) is the ministry his mother wanted rendered in liniment and adhesive: knees injected, ankles taped, reflexes checked, bad news about broken children carried to Avril. He venerates Mario like a saint's relic, all but kissing the kid's ring (9). And the saga itself keeps working on people, in the book's two registers of use: as the lore that binds the academy's generations (1), and — in Orin's Strategy #4, the rented collar and breviary (10) — as one more persona in the repertoire of exactly the calculated, self-interested contact the brother said was all there is. The legend of the one guileless handshake ends up inspiring a seduction routine: the novel's whole argument about sincerity and its counterfeits, run through a single family's bet.