The Klosterman Files : The Visible Man (2011)
The concept of authorial voice is crucial to Chuck Klosterman’s writing. He writes in the exact same, unique way that he talks and if you’ve ever heard him talk, it’s impossible not to hear his actual voice whenever you read him. It’s like having a bro to discuss pop culture with, except you can’t place a fucking word and sometimes he seems to magically reads into you whatever it is you want to talk about. It’s unsettling in the best possible way.
Klosterman’s all-powerful authorial voice is almost absent from his sophomore novel The Visible Man. A modern retelling (and reimagining) of H.G Wells’ iconic science fiction novel The Invisible Man, it tells the story of an unnamed protagonist who wears an "invisible suit” to walk into people’s homes and observe them while they don’t have to answer of any social imperative whatsoever. Where they are at their so called realest or so he believes.
I was originally disappointed by The Visible Man, because it didn’t provide that eerie sense of companionship Chuck Klosterman’s essay collections did. While I’m comfortable not liking it as much as the others upon a second reading, I had missed a lot of interesting stuff.
Two (In)visibiities
The Visible Man is structured around therapy sessions, transcribed by our protagonist’s psychologist Victoria Vick. She relays what he is telling her and what is simultaneously happening in her life in the meantime, but rarely talks. Vic-Vick is mostly a silent observer of the silent observer. He chooses to be visible to her, which is really crucial to what Klosterman is trying to do in The Visible Man.
That’s why the novel is not called Twenty-First Century Invisible Man or some corny shit like that. It’s a novel about being seen and not the opposite.
But unlike the unnamed protagonist pretends, there are two instances being seen here: the people he chooses to observe and him. The process of him being seen by Victoria Vick is equally important than whatever it is that he believes he’s doing by peeping on lonely people. That’s what makes The Visible Man works narratively. Although the protagonist is convinced he’s doing important work, it can’t make sense until someone else knows about it.
This is a powerful contradiction: if unobserved reality becomes observed, it also becomes automatically interpreted and therefore constructed. Interpretation of hard reality is constructed reality. It makes the intellectual point of the protagonist moot, but it also makes him interesting. Being seen is a fatality. However you decide to occupy your alone time, it is always informed by the time you spend interacting with the world.
The Competition Disorder Club
One of the most interesting passages in The Visible Man was, in my opinion, when the protagonist inadvertently crashed a support group for competition disorder. Every other observation subject dealt with a form of suffering: bulimia, bullying, isolation, etc. But these people unwittingly (or not) made other people suffer because of their stubborn dedication to winning. They were technically not alone, but told stories from their own idiosyncratic perspectives.
Their suffering was different from other suffering depicted: the competitive folks felt like assholes for being unnaturally competitive. I’m interested by that feeling. One of them was a little league baseball instructor who struck out a child on purpose. He said at some point: “And at that moment - just like always - I quit caring about the economic growth of my insurance dealership or my wonderful wife or my own goddamn kids. I just want to be me.”
For me, it was the most profound, relatable and “real” passage of The Visible Man. A heartbreaking instance of complete transparency in the wrong social setting. The competitive drive at the heart of this man is what earned him a suburban life situation that many would envy, but it stifles the very thing that makes him who he is. I thought it best exemplified the tension between hard and constructed realities. The passage that best exemplifies the point.
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Chuck Klosterman flirted with this idea in the last essay of Eating the Dinosaur, where he deconstructs the Unabomber Manifesto and more or less agrees with him on many points. Among others: that living in contemporary society requires series of sacrifices that undercut a significant part of your being. That is true, but one could argue that NOT living in contemporary society wields the same exact results, except it’s physically way more demanding.
I believe that The Visible Man is a direct response to Klosterman’s conflicting feelings about agreeing with a sociopathic killer currently living in supermax prison. A response where he wonders if there is a place for the authentic self in contemporary society. In a way, it’s brilliant and courageous. But it doesn’t really wield a definite answer. We live in a perpetual, self-created state of estrangement from our own selves and it’s everybody and nobody’s fault.
The highest calling of fiction is to explore problems that don’t really have a solution. Although The Visible Man does that in a fun, quirky way… it can’t help but feel a tad unsatisfying, just like real life itself.
