the Loach saga
The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity
Context
The Loach saga turns on a disguise that works too well. To test whether human charity survives, Loach costumes himself as one of the untouchable downtown homeless — the get-up so complete it reclassifies him entirely, and the experiment's whole finding is that once the disguise reads as "homeless," "just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to do was touch him." Then the mask starts to become the man: months in, Loach is "close to forgetting […] what a shower or washing machine or a ligamental manipulation even were," falling in "with the absolute silt at the very bottom of the metro Boston socioeconomic duck-pond," nearly disappearing into the identity for good. A concealment experiment in which the cover consumes the operative — the saga's faith/Mario resolution belongs to fathers-sons, but the disguise-craft, and its danger, is ours.