Visible Man, The [Hardcover]

Lauren Groff, Glen David Gold, Audrey Niffenegger--the list goes on and on. An author writes an exceptional first novel that rockets them to the top of my favorites list. Then commences that eternal wait for the follow-up; the wait to see if it was a fluke or what.

I LOVED Chuck Klosterman's debut novel, Downtown Owl. I laughed until I had tears in my eyes, and until he genuinely brought me to tears. Awesome. I've been awaiting his sophomore effort and hoping for more of the same. And I was fortunate--not only because I was handed an advance galley of this book by the man himself--but also because he warned me that this second novel is radically different in subject matter and tone than the first.

The Visible Man is a short novel in the form of an unpublished manuscript being submitted to Simon & Schuster, complete with cover letter and parenthetical notes to an editor. The author of the supposedly non-fiction manuscript is a therapist named Vicky Vick. The book she's written details the therapeutic and other interactions she had with the most extraordinary patient she will ever treat. Identified only as Y___, their initial sessions occur over the telephone. Y___ is very reticent to provide personal details, including the issue that has brought him to seek treatment.

Ultimately, the story comes out; supposedly, he's a scientist who designed, on his own, a suit that allows him to remain unseen by others. Effectively, he can become all but invisible. He has issues regarding "the sensation of guilt" brought about by actions he's undertaken when cloaked. Namely, he's been observing strangers alone in their homes without their knowledge. The story of both patient and therapist is relayed through her professional notes and observations, through transcripts of recorded therapy sessions, answering machine messages, and so forth.

On the one level, this is just plain, old-fashioned good story telling. You've got a psych patient who says he can become invisible. Is he delusional? What--if anything--that he says is the truth? Where is this story going to go? On another level, Mr. Klosterman, speaking in the voice of the enigmatic and troubling Y___, gets to engage in all sorts of interesting social and philosophical commentary, and to share the fascinating and bizarre stories of those he spies on:

"My earliest memories all involve staring at people and wondering who they actually were. Staring at my mom, for example, and wondering who she was and what she really felt, and how her mother-centric worldview compared to mine. I didn't know the definition of the word worldview, but I still had one. My mom was a different person around my brother and a different person around my dad and a different person on the telephone--why would I be the one exception who saw the real her?"

Or, "Our world is really backward, Victoria. It's backward. Look what society does. It takes the handful of people who know how to succeed and makes them feel terrible for being different. Everyone is supposed to be mediocre, I guess. Everyone is supposed to be dragged into the middle--either down from their success, or up from their self-imposed malfunction. These people didn't need a support group. These people needed someone to tell them they were okay."

This is not a comic novel as Downtown Owl was, but there is plenty of humor within the pages. "Men who talk about the details of their sex life are not real people. I'm not a rapper. I'm not a Jewish novelist." I don't think Mr. Klosterman knows how to be not funny. He does, however, know how to write. The benefit of having only the two principle characters in this story is that they become fully fleshed, even through this non-traditional narrative. Their relationship is a strange and intimate one.

Ultimately, this novel worked for me on many levels. It wasn't the book that I was hoping for, perhaps, but kudos to Mr. Klosterman for highlighting the diversity of his talent. Sophomore novels are so very often a let-down, but Chuck Klosterman remains near the top of my must-read list.

I don't think Chuck Klosterman has written a book that I didn't read in a single day. His narrative voice is labyrinthine, prone to odd tangents, but (to me, at least) fiercely addictive. I love his essays and I didn't not love his first novel, Downtown Owl. But I'm not sure I ever bought the concept of Downtown Owl as a novel, per se. It had the same aimless, armchair-philosopher feel of his nonfiction, and really struck me as more a handful of essays through the mouths of invented characters.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, by how much The Visible Man IS actually a novel. As other reviewers have noted, there is still some philosophical heft here, revolving mainly around questions of self and whether the person that we are around others is ever in a real sense the person we truly are at our core. The invisible-esque man is convinced that only observations of people when they believe they are alone are valid glimpses at their true self, and whether or not you agree, it's a fascinating conundrum.

But unlike Downtown Owl, I really felt like this was a story, and not an essay with characters in it. The semi-unreliable narrator (or rather, narrator who is very aware of her own shortcomings) is likeable and reads as a character with her own personality, and her nameless client is a wonderfully written balance between charisma and total sociopathy. You can see how our therapist becomes fixated on him and his bizarre worldview, but we never quite lose sight of his disturbing undercurrents, and the ending feels both surprising and inevitable.

I was hooked on this right away, and almost resented the interruptions of daily life that kept me from finishing it in one sitting. I'm pleased that Klosterman has finally made the jump to writing fiction that stands on its own two legs, and I'm excited to see what he'll do next.

I have really liked the work of Chuck Klosterman in the past. He made his name writing pop-culture essays that had fun footnotes. They were also smart, funny, incredibly insightful, and displayed a wide range of knowledge. The last book that made me stay up all night reading so I could finish it was his book _Eating the Dinosaur_. It was several years ago, and a hot summer night.

Lately though, Klosterman has taken to writing fiction. His first novel, _Downtown Owl_, was one of those autobiographical novels that it seems that a beginning fiction writer has to write. Even if he's been writing for years. Heck, even if he's been essentially writing about himself for years. Perhaps it was just too hard a transition. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't memorable. I could pick it up off my shelf and read the dust-jacket to spark my mind, or if you're curious you could click on the link that I am sure is around here somewhere.

With _The Visible Man_, Klosterman is more ambitious. This book must have got caught in the shuffle in the wake of some of the other big names releasing new books in the fall of 2011, since I wasn't aware of it until I saw it on the shelf of my local library. It didn't fully deserve to get lost though. Or maybe it did.

You see, I'm torn. In multiple times of thinking about this book I've thought of separate references to Dostoevsky. I've also thought of bad undergraduate writing: my own. First off, the book isn't told as a straight narrative. The conceit is that the book you are reading is a draft copy of a book that the narrator is submitting to her editor. It is largely in the form of emails and case notes, as she is a therapist explaining this case. It is a creepy echo of a story I wrote years ago and buried that was the case notes of a doctor in a psych ward and I tried to get the reader to question who was sane, the doctor or the patient. Finding these echoes made me think and wonder if I was being cutting-edge, or if Klosterman was being juvenile and derivative here. My vote is against my own creativity.

The thing is, Klosterman does it much better than I ever did or could do. It took me a while to move past the framing device as a reader, but once I was able to accept it, it became fairly transparent. The other problem is that he created a deep, complex, and interesting character - whom I couldn't stand. The action centers around a character identified as Y____, a scientist who comes to the therapist with a story about inventing a suit that renders the wearer almost invisible (but not quite). He uses this power to observe people as they are alone; the time Y_____ claims people are the most themselves. Stuff happens and eventually resolves, but I couldn't get over the character. That's where the references to Dostoevsky fit in. I see Y____ as a new Underground Man, a new Rashkolnokov. He has a bit of Toole's Ignatius Riley in there too. I just didn't like him.

I didn't like him until I realized something. The plot of the book didn't matter. Y_____ is just Klosterman in another world. Klosterman just lacks the suit, which is the dividing line. If you've read his earlier work, you know that Klosterman knows what we're like when we're truly alone. Maybe what I didn't like about Y___ was not the character, but what he showed me about myself.
But really Chuck, please put out more essay anthologies when you get the time.

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