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For you, any person who can't be seen is invisible. But there are invisible people in plain sigh, Victoria. Most of the world is invisible. I wanted to see the visible man. That's what's happening here. That's really all it is.
My long time readers know the influence of Chuck Klosterman's writings on this blog. It is immense. No thinker in the post-David Foster Wallace era has been more democratic and more pertinent than him. Unlike Wallace, who branched out in essayism, Klosterman is branching out from essayism to fiction. His first attempt DOWNTOWN OWL was a great success, yet it was barely a novel. It was more like a fictionalized essay. A 273 pages metaphor on small town folklore and the mechanics of working class America. THE VISIBLE MAN, with its wild premise, promised to venture further away from Klosterman's comfort zones and delivered in that regards.
THE VISIBLE MAN takes form of a tell-all book from a visibly tortured psychotherapist named Victoria Vick, who claims to be doing it for the money. Her story is about a patient she named Y____, who claims to possess a technology that can make him invisible. Y___'s obsession is observing people when they're alone. A firm believer in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle *, he likes to sneak into people's home wearing his cloaking suit and observe how they are when absolutely free from social pressure. Despite his beliefs in what he does, observing people drove Y___ in a psychotherapist's office, trying to make sense of these strange , new feelings about his occupation.
Reading THE VISIBLE MAN was awkward and uncomfortable, but not unpleasant. It was a bit like going on an adventure with no preparation whatsoever. The strangest thing about it is that it feels artificially empty. Chuck Klosterman is an expert at drawing meaning from our most casual interaction with our environment. For example, what does it mean to be a Slayer fan? THE VISIBLE MAN is (partly) about the absence of meaning. About those gestures we do to cover up the emptiness of our lives. Amongst others, Y____ observes a classmate with an infatuation with a Rush album, a woman with food orgies rituals and a motley crew of heavy dudes practicing empty intellectual chatter. It's fascinating (and very much pertinent), yet it's disquieting to have these behaviors thrown back at your face, as a reader.
''There was this woman I dated in college - Alejandra Llewellyn. She was half Argentinian and half British. She had beautiful, condescening eyes. She listened to techno and cooked a lot of steaks. We were only together for seventy-four days. It was like having sex with the Falkland Island war.''
''Come on,'' I said. ''Be real with me.''
''Men who talk about the details of their sex life are not real people, '' he said. '' I'm not a rapper. I'm not a Jewish novelist.''
The engineered emptiness can also be explain by the fact that THE VISIBLE MAN isn't really about the observed subject, but about the act of observing. Voyeurism. A very modern condition. When discussing his novel, Klosterman didn't hide that he took his inspiration from H.G Wells' classic THE INVISIBLE MAN and it shows in content as much as in the style. The bulk of Klosterman's effort is put around drawing what kind of solitude Y___ walled himself in and what were the effects of his physical disconnection with reality on personality. That's trademark Chuck Klosterman right there. Better enjoyed when not taken at face value.
I'm telling you right now, the classic, engaging Chuck Klosterman style is absent from this book. He made a noble effort at camouflaging himself with the cloak of fiction (fuck, that was a corny line). But the questionning is still there. The peculiar, charming vision of the world. The exposition of small things that matter in everyday life. THE VISIBLE MAN really is a complete, layered and challenging novel about loneliness and observation. Klosterman keeps pushing the boundaries of his writings and exploring storytelling possibilities through his fiction and his essays. He is one of the most dynamic, important thinkers of our hypermediatized society.
* The mere fact of observing a phenomenon changes its nature.