I wrote this literature review of Chuck Klosterman’s “The Visible Man” for my Phil/Lit course. That’s all that needs to preface it.
The ways in which we construct the overarching narratives in our lives is undoubtedly important. Our narratives provide outward context that lend intelligibility to ultimately absurd and meaningless existences. These narratives, twisted and molded in to one-another become our personalities. Our personalities are post-hoc performative reactions to the people in our lives that variably approve and disapprove of our conduct. But because they’re constructions, they’re a falsity. Because they’re simply reactions to reactions, they’re dishonest. Truly knowing someone requires seeing them in a vacuum—completely alone. Therein lies the only truth in man, only gleaned through witnessing unmediated action. At least, that’s the thesis of Y__, the troubling protagonist of Chuck Klosterman’s novel The Visible Man.
The novel, an excellent example of post-modern tinged literature, can sometimes be a challenging read—conceptually and mechanically—but for Klosterman represents further growth in his career as a writer.
Klosterman is relatively new to the fiction arena, despite having published several non-fiction and collected essay books alongside a prolific columnist career writing for Grantland.com, GQ, Esquire, and recently taking up the mantle of the New York Times’s Editorial Page’s Ethicist. That said, his fictional stylings in his second novel, The Visible Man, display the pop culture and philosophical literacy that has marked the prior works. Much as was the case in his nonfiction works, the influence of media on the discrete individuals in the stories is assessed and dissected.
The plot of the novel follows an Austin, TX area therapist named Victoria Vick. Her life is radically altered when a man who claims to have the ability to render himself completely invisible through complex camouflaging contacts her requiring sessions—at first only through the phone. The man’s problem, essentially is this: he developed the technology and now uses it to observe people when they are completely alone—observing them for hours, days, sometimes even weeks. Victoria is understandably skeptical of this ability, as well as his stated intentions for observing people in a vacuum, but he is charming and interesting (if a bit rehearsed in his delivery). Victoria humors the man, whom she knows the true name of but redacts to Y__ after the fact for her manuscript, but she becomes wary quickly.
After demanding proof in order to determine if he was dangerously delusional, Y__ “reveals” himself to Victoria—terrifying her by appearing at her office in the camouflage suit. After his demonstration, she credulously accepts all of his tales, and begins to “treat” him. The meat of the plotline concerns Y__ reconstructing events from his past that have given him a level of guilt that he believes undue. Cris-crossing America, Y__ has apparently spent his life sneaking in to people’s homes—preferably solitary people who live completely alone—periodically interfering. The interferences, each done with Y__’s stated intention of improving his observational subject’s lives, only make things worse—one subject ending up in the hospital on amphetamine overdose and the other on trial for murder with a legally (and metaphysically) unverifiable alibi.
As the sessions progress, Y__ clearly develops an attraction to Victoria, one that she seems to reciprocate, at least in part. This muted attraction leads to the main climax of the novel, wherein after a spurned advance, Y__ breaks in to Victoria’s house. After a brief confrontation with her naked, hammer-wielding husband, Y__ throws him from the stairway’s landing, breaking his tailbone and rendering him paraplegic. The action peters off after that, Y__ disappearing to Golden, CO and providing one last correspondence with a postcard (according to the postmark, at least; he stated that he was in Montreal). Victoria decides that—in the best interest of her and her husband’s safety—she must make Y__’s story public. Her decision provides the occasion and structure of the novel, as she attempts to tell her side of the story with a post-hoc narration of her episode with Y__.
This clear demonstration of the novel’s structure being determined by the intent of Victoria’s presented narrative, Klosterman forges the events in to a modular plotline. By breaking chronology and using differing media, he makes the book read in a relatively breezy fashion for the density of the topics being bandied about. To wit, Klosterman uses the modular plotline to toy with time itself, freely re-arranging bits of their sessions in order to suit his, and on another level, his character’s whims. The fact that he does so is important, as the re-structuring is essential to conveying the meaning that, in the direct sense, Victoria intended with her arrangement of the manuscript. Her arrangement, in the indirect sense, allows Klosterman to demonstrate her intentions in publishing it, as well as how she wanted readers of her confessional to interpret her and Y__’s relationship. Had the manuscript been arranged in a totally chronological order, in a direct narrative constructed from the taped sessions, the story would have become Y__’s tale: a pedantic sociological examination of the truth of man in isolation leading in to a tale of love spurned.
It is not unreasonable that Klosterman knew that the reader would consider the implications of Victoria’s or Y__’s ordering, considering that Klosterman himself draws attention to the jumping timeline at several points through Victoria’s post-hoc narration. As well, there are plainly, physically obvious modular elements like letters to the publisher and direct manuscripts at chosen points. In one example, the letter to the publisher from Victoria literally details how she re-arranged the chronology of one set of events in order to make her own intentions in what she said more clear. Klosterman is nearly begging the reader to consider the question of whether or not Victoria is a reliable narrator by laying her agenda bare.
Though in any novel this would be an objectively interesting plot element to analyze, because the main focus of Y__’s “studies” are to determine the importance of narrative on our lives—what we do when the necessity of crafting one dissipates in isolation—the selective memory of the novel’s presented narrative causes a recursive reaction in the reader. The recursion doubles-back on the reader’s own assumptions of the “truth” in the plot, leading to a more nuanced tale than the content of the novel—straight-up science-fiction psychological-slasher.
The value in this book probably most concretely lies in this self-aware, tongue-in-cheek treatment of the conventions of literature. Klosterman, with his aforementioned pop cultural and philosophical literacy, can sometimes ask much of his readers. This high burden that he places, though, pays dividends at the end of the story. As was mentioned before, Klosterman tends to like to play with convention in order to investigate many aspects of the human condition—one of the primary investigations being the effect of media. If viewed in this light—The Visible Man as an extension of Klosterman’s career-long study in to the tangible effects of outside narrative on personal narrative—the novel gains a degree of explanatory clout that an essay collection could scarcely mimic. Perhaps, then, that is why Klosterman chose this particular venue to tell this tale, to ask these questions; he desired the freedom to invent the logical extreme of the Visible Man. Though he may disagree with the characterization, it may be the case that Klosterman’s most clear Mary Sue in the novel was Y__—a man with a craving to understand the interior lives of humanity.