THE DAMAGE DONE

What would the world be like if everyone suddenly lost the capacity to hurt each other?

Sixth grader Dab, caught looking the wrong way at bullying classmate Connor’s hair, tries everything he can to avoid getting beaten up, but the only thing that rescues him is Connor’s mystifying inability to land a single punch. Social worker Ann escapes the latest beating by her abusive husband, Jake, when his fists are magically deflected from her body and face. The plan a pair of antisemites hatch to shoot up a neighborhood synagogue goes awry when their automatic weapons refuse to discharge bullets into their intended victims. Salvadorean refugee sisters Gabriela and Cristela, whose mother has warned them repeatedly about the human wolves who may attack the caravan in which they’re traveling to the States, are saved when the wolves find themselves unable to lay a violent hand on them. The Empty Shell, an underground writer imprisoned for his writing against the Nation and its Dear Leader, finds his torturers utterly stymied. Can they come up with alternative, nonviolent tortures that will be equally effective? If people can no longer be harmed by other people, can they be harmed by the dogs their attackers set on them? Can they die in drownings their adversaries have arranged? And once everyone accepts the new regime, whose arrival is never assigned a cause, how will those freed from the possibility of acting violently and the threat of suffering violent action choose to live their lives? A memorial for the Last Victim to die before the epochal change and an extended epilogue showing the principals 10 years later answers some of these questions, but larger questions quite properly endure.

Landweber pulls off a true rarity, a utopian fantasy that actually feels good.