In Close Enough to Touch, Peck's use of first-person narration largely in the present tense gives a confessional tone and engaging immediacy to Matt's story. The technique does much to make Matt what Peck has called a "surrogate" for the reader. Such narration is a common literary characteristic of the young adult novel, deriving according to some critics, from Holden Caulfield's striking narrative style in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Peck creates a unity in Matt's story sometimes using allusion, symbolism, and most consistently, a meaningful structuring of setting. The action shifts between the often empty activity of the suburb and the healthy isolation of the cottage on Juniper Lake where loss can be adjusted to things that do not seem to change. At the lake the past becomes part of the present, not a memory that threatens to arrest Matt's development.

When Matt meets...