O Homem Visível

by Chuck Klosterman, Rodrigo Chia (Translator)

A um só tempo lúcido, tenso e divertido, o romance O Homem Visível, de Chuck Klosterman, trata de diversos temas da modernidade – como a importância da cultura, a influência da mídia, o voyeurismo e a contradição existente em ser uma pessoa considerada “normal”. Quando publicado nos Estados Unidos fez enorme sucesso, sendo aclamado pela crítica e pelos leitores.

A terapeuta Victoria Vick é contatada por um homem que acredita viver uma situação ímpar e exige que suas sessões se deem por telefone. Ela aceita, mas, com o avançar das conversas, ele se revela um homem enigmático, o que a faz se convencer de que ele está delirando.

Y____, como ela decide chamá-lo, é um homem inteligente, bem-educado e culto, e alega ser um cientista que vem utilizando uma tecnologia de camuflagem. Ele afirma que é impossível para qualquer pessoa vê-lo enquanto usa o traje que desenvolveu, mas foge do termo “invisibilidade”.

Mais do que um romance sobre um homem com uma possível habilidade especial, O Homem Visível analisa dois lados de uma mesma história: as atitudes das pessoas quando não estão sendo vistas, e a conduta ética de quem está observando sem ser visto. Klosterman criou um paralelismo entre o voyeurismo e desejo ardente de assistir o sofrimento alheio, ambos presentes tanto no livro quanto na sociedade.

No fim, o livro fará o leitor refletir: é possível alguém se tornar invisível aos olhos de uma sociedade que busca cada vez mais descobrir, neste mundo midiático e repleto de informação, o que se passa na vida alheia?

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Book Club, Fantasy, Psychology

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Charles John Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of twelve books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002.

Reviews

[Scott Rhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have thoroughly enjoyed Chuck Klosterman's cleverly-written and intellectual articles and essays about Pop Culture that he has written for publications as varied as GQ, Esquire, and The Washington Post on topics as varied as movies, sports, religion, politics, 80s glam metal, and breakfast cereal (usually in that precise order of ascending importance), but I was unsure whether he had the wherewithal to attempt a full-length novel.

He does.

It is evident in his second novel, "The Visible Man", a thought-provoking, creepy sci-fi/horror/black comedy about a man who has a cloaking device.

What is it about the thought of an invisible man that terrifies us? Is it simply the thought of an unseen presence standing in the corner of your room, or the thought that someone could be watching you during the moments in which you are most yourself and vulnerable?

Klosterman's re-imagining of H.G. Wells's classic novel "The Invisible Man" is a post-modern parable about voyeurism, exhibitionism, the notion of self, and our fascination (and oftentimes dismissal) of the unseen and the hidden.

[RandomAnthony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chuck Klosterman's Visible Man sneaked up on me. When was this novel released? I read everything Klosterman writes but, honestly, this is probably his weakest work yet. I don't think Visible Man suffers from lack of effort. But Klosterman trying to be a “real” novelist, if you will, is Klosterman trying not to be Klosterman. And Klosterman can't help but be Klosterman.

What do I mean? The book's narrator is a female psychologist but, at best, the character sounds like Chuck Klosterman in drag. I don't want to visualize the author in drag, thank you very much. And the visible man (who seems invisible but isn't, really, long story) sounds like an angry, crazier Klosterman. Both characters engage in the rapid-fire, brain-twisting cultural analysis inherent in the author's catalog, usually in the form of first person essays. I very much admire Klosterman's cultural analysis, don't get me wrong, but I can't pretend the novel's premise (a man in a special suit becomes obsessed with observing people when they're alone, then tells his psychologist all about his observations) is anything but a thinly veiled vehicle for Klostermanesque commentary. The novel has its moments, and appears to pay tribute in PK Dick (both in name and style) but falls way short of PKD territory. I wouldn't start new Klosterman readers on Visible Man. I'd recommend, warily, the book to fans, with a “if you want to be a completist, check it out” message. I didn't hate Visible Man. But I was kind of waiting, honestly, for the book to end.

Sidebar: this is the first book I've ever read that cites goodreads by name. I wish I had copied the reference before I returned the novel to the library, but I remember the passage's gist. When describing a character, the visible man says (near quote), “he doesn't read many books but devotes a lot of time to a site called goodreads.com.” This makes perfect sense. If you would asked, a year ago, “Which author on your goodreads list is most likely to mention goodreads by name?” Klosterman would be a no-brainer response. That's a blessing, because he's good at what he does, but it's a curse, I'm afraid, because he hasn't proved he can do anything else. I get the author probably want to branch out, but The Visible Man doesn't work, kind of like when Bruce Willis tried to sing or models try to act. You know what I mean.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

A therapist tells the story of her most memorable client, ‘Y____’, through notes, transcriptions, emails, etc. At first, when he explains his situation – he has access to ‘cloaking’ technology that renders him virtually invisible; he uses it to spend extended periods of time spying on people who live alone – she believes him delusional, a fantasist. Over time, however, she becomes convinced he is telling the truth, and then she develops an obsession with him that threatens to consume her marriage and career. Aside from a dramatic climax near the end, The Visible Man is a mostly playful novel with some surprisingly incisive things to say about identity and isolation. I was pleasantly carried along by the momentum of the plot. Y____ is written very well as a man who is obnoxious and pretentious but also sometimes comes out with things that have the power to make you sit there, wide-eyed, going ‘omg yes!!!’ just like Victoria does. I could have happily read many more of Y____’s accounts of his observees.

TinyLetter | Linktree

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

So yes, after reading the abysmal Downtown Owl a few years ago, I infamously declared here that I would never read a Chuck Klosterman book again; and indeed, I would've never read this latest of his, The Visible Man, if it had not randomly shown up on the "New Releases" shelf of my neighborhood library on an exact day when I was perusing it. But now that I have, I'm sure glad I did, because the book is something I thought Klosterman incapable of; this is Klosterman quite convincingly reinventing himself, shedding his Postmodernist, Gen-X skin precisely by writing a book that stabs that skin to death, sets the corpse on fire, then sh-ts all over the ashes. And to explain that better, I need to go into a little literary theory of mine, which I've gone over here before but will do again, because I find it naturally interesting; and before I start, let me acknowledge that it's an unproven theory that a lot of people don't agree with…

The basic crux is that I and a lot of others believe that Postmodernism officially died on September 11th; and by "officially" I mean "symbolically," because as with any cultural movement, Postmodernism actually changed only gradually over a period of a few decades, with us as humans making order out of the chaos by arbitrarily picking important dates in those periods to serve as beginnings and endings of such eras. And just like how the last couple of decades of Modernism, the 1950s and '60s which you can also call "Late Modernism," can be further broken up into "Beat" writers, "Pop" painters, "New Wave" filmmakers and more, so too can the last few decades of Postmodernism (or "Late Postmodernism," the 1980s and '90s) also be broken into subdivisions like "Generation X" writers, "Brat Pack" actors, "grunge" musicians, "Deconstructionist" architects, etc. These are the unfortunates of any given era, because the tropes of that era are so well-known by then, the last artists of that movement can only achieve fame through cartoonish exaggerations of them; and although many of them push through to become the groundbreakers of the next era, that group of creatives in general tends to get blamed for driving that era into the ground for good, and for necessitating the cultural shift to the new era in the first place.

And so that means these artists must basically all reinvent themselves in the middle of their careers, or become passé faster than a three-year-old rerun of American Idol. And so some Postmodernists like Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis successfully did so, becoming relevant to a whole new generation by trying to strip all the cool irony and empty pop-culture references of Late Postmodernism from their work, by embracing genre conventions sometimes and wallowing in earnestness others; and then some people like Augusten Burroughs or James Frey simply didn't, and their quasi-true, quasi-BS smartypants '70s-laced gimmicky shtick started getting real old real fast the moment the World Trade Center was destroyed. And this new era too can be given a name, which some call The New Sincerity and some Post-Irony and some simply Post-9/11 Literature or the 21st Century Arts; it's really up to history to determine which terms like these stick, and especially right now when things are so new that no one's in agreement about any of it yet.

And so for a long time did I think Klosterman was going to fall into this latter camp, of essentially gimmicky hacks who were never able to transcend the gimmicks that gave them successes right at the end of the Postmodernist period, much like all those trendily popular "Genteel" writers of the early 20th century, huge in their own time but now nearly forgotten because of the ascendancy of Early Modernism in those same years; and especially after the bitter failure of his full-length fiction debut, Downtown Owl, which had been hyped as his opportunity to break out of the endless clever-but-empty essays about heavy metal and breakfast cereal and celebrity interviews that his entire nonfiction career had so far been based on, but which turned out to be more like a 200-page Chuck Klosterman article but even more quirky and precious than his journalism work, if such a thing is possible. But with The Visible Man, Klosterman has done something very smart indeed, and what a lot of Postmodernists have ended up doing as a transition into Sincerism (see for example Eric Bogosian's Perforated Heart, which has the same device at its core), which is to announce the death of Postmodernism but through a highly original, highly symbolic metaphor, a sideways look at the subject but which ultimately says more about them as '80s and '90s artists than the subject matter might indicate at first.

So in this case, Klosterman wrote a literal psychological horror tale, with a premise that feels very much like it could've been an early David Cronenberg film; basically, an Asberger's-suffering sociopathic genius manages with military resources to invent a suit/gel combination that effectively turns a person invisible (or that is, the cutting-edge micro-lenses contained in the gel that's smeared over the suit has the almost magical ability to bounce back all light to a viewer as the images directly behind the suit itself), then becomes obsessed with silently observing people in their homes for days on end, to back up his nihilistic thoughts about the worst of human behavior, pumping himself full of amphetamines to stay awake and suppress his appetite, slowly turning himself crazier and crazier with each successive experience. And so part of the book is written as a series of direct monologues from this literal mad scientist, polished things that feel the most Klostermanian and I assume were the first parts the author wrote; but then perhaps realizing that he needed something more to hold it all together, part of this is written from the standpoint of the psychologist who our unnamed narrator Y. starts seeing, a highly confrontational relationship where the doctor is able to parlay all the critical things about Y.'s character that Y. himself would never be able to acknowledge through first-person monologues. And that's smart of Klosterman to do, and shows a legitimately profound jump in maturation for him as a writer; because the Klosterman of Fargo Rock City would've been happy with just the polished monologues themselves, and The Visible Man would've again been a clever but ultimately empty book like all his others, and we wouldn't have had a chance to explore this fascinating character in a much more complex way, or for Klosterman to be able to make some really critical comments about Y. himself, for example just how troublingly polished these monologues of his precisely seem, as if the patient had pre-written these glib anecdotes and then memorized them all for the benefit of the doctor during their sessions.

And that gets into what I was talking about before; that on top of this being a literal simple genre tale, it's also easy to argue that on a deeper level, this is an autobiographical novel as well, Klosterman angrily rejecting the over-analytical pop-culture-obsessed celebrity-interviewing cartoon character he had become by the early 2000s, literally by turning that persona into a borderline-psychotic villain. And the reason it's easy to argue this is that Klosterman himself throws all kinds of little clues into the mix that point in this direction; for example, there's the fact that so many of these monologues sound like Klosterman essays in the first place, or the moment that Y. directly compares what he does to the job of the average celebrity interviewer, the aspect that lazy journalists have most picked up on this fall when talking about the book. But there's also a whole series of smaller digs that he gets in, such as when the doctor asks why Y. doesn't just write a book about his experiences instead of relaying them vicariously through combative therapy sessions, and he responds that "everyone seems to hate it when I try writing down my stories," and that he doesn't know what gets lost in the writing process that remains when he's simply talking about it to someone else.

Make no mistake -- The Visible Man's narrator is deliberately designed to be unsympathetic to the point of sometimes being despicable, with the Victorian-style story-framing very early on hinting at a grand tragedy to end it all; and whenever our psychologist hero (not coincidentally the most earnest, sincere character to ever appear in a Chuck Klosterman book) complains about Y's overuse of empty pop-culture references, his haughty intelligence combined with manic bouts of self-loathing, his habit of stilted, one-sided "conversations," and his mocking intolerance for anyone who doesn't agree with his grandiose theorizing, I think it's very safe to assume that Klosterman is not only talking about the worst parts of himself at the same time, but just in general about the aspects of Late Postmodernism that had most turned it into an eye-rolling parody of itself right at the popular height of Klosterman's early career.

Like I said, after Downtown Owl I had thought Klosterman incapable of career-redefining insights like these; so I'm glad to see that I was wrong, and now officially again look forward to his next books down the pike. Although definitely still with its problems, which is why it isn't getting a higher score today, A Visible Man has a lot to teach us about the ways our entire culture is changing here early in the Obamian Age, and it comes strongly recommended to one and all.

Out of 10: 9.1

[Vonia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh, Klosterman. You are one of the few writers today who can be educational, funny, endearing, intelligent, and sentimental. And all at the same time. I have read his nonfictional pieces on pop culture, of course. And this novel is approached with the same wit, candor, and humor that has become his style.

The novel is set in Austin, Texas, with a few nice references, albeit not entirely accurate in the details, including The Texas State Capitol, Lavaca Street, BookPeople, Waterloo Records, etc.

None of the characters are especially likable. Somehow, though, the reader inadvertently finds themselves with a certain affinity for Victoria (Vicky Vicks), the unnervingly inadequate "Psychologist", her distant less-than-great husband, and, of course, "Y_____", the man with an "invisible" cloaking solution (that he insists does not make him "invisible", as people see what they expect to see, but someone really trying to locate him would be able to).

The premise is ingenious to begin with. I am not sure how accurate all the scientific references are, but "Y_____" is able to make himself, for all points and purposes, invisible to the world. How does he utilize this power? He spies on individuals he chooses at random, following them into their homes, watching, observing, noting their everyday actions, taking narcotics in order to stay awake. It is his strongly defended stance that what he is doing is not only alright, but most noble. He is observing individuals to better understand people, as we are only truly ourselves when we believe ourselves to be completely alone. He tells Vicky that he is seeing her to better understand his guilt; his guilt, he is clear to indicate, that he knows for a fact he should not be feeling, as he is doing absolutely nothing wrong.

The novel is told from Vicky's point of view, with her trying to sell this story of "Y_____" to a publisher. Most of the text is in the form of edited transcripts of her sessions with "Y_____", as he tells her various stories of people he has observed.

Needless to say, Vicky & "Y_____" develop a very unprofessional relationship... which can only end badly. In the end, "Y_____"'s motives for... well, pretty much everything are still a little unclear. Vicky's action are also far from understandable. But, it is the journey that counts. And Klosterman made it an intriguing, exciting, hilarious, and fun one.

[Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my. I loved this book. Most of this has to do with the fact that Klosterman's writing strikes such a chord of perfection in my soul. I love his writing.
"He would see the raw ingredients for whatever recipe you use to create the public version of yourself."
"I saw this serious forty-something woman there, all by herself on a Friday afternoon. She didn't look like she was thanking God for anything."
"This is why Facebook caught on with adults: It's designed for people who want to publicize their children without our consent."
It's writing like this that makes my life worth living.

I knew nothing about this book going into it, and I think that's what made it so compelling and awesome. The idea is brilliant, the execution is spectacular. It reminds me of the 1993 movie When A Stranger Calls Back - an awful movie in many ways, but no one will ever convince me that the very beginning and the very end are not really scary. The premise of the movie reminds me of this book, but the book itself isn't scary. It's no horror movie, it's just unsettling. Eerie. Read this and see if you become hyper-aware of the unconscious things you do when you're alone - but I've already said too much!

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Problem With External Internalized Misogyny: About halfway through The Visible Man, one of the characters says, "If an author wants to make a fictional character seem sympathetic, the easiest way to make that happen is to place them in a humiliating scenario." At this point in the book, I was already thoroughly skeeved by the portrayal of Vicky (the female protagonist) so maybe I was primed to find this line meta-gross, but ... yeah. Vicky spends a lot of time in humiliating scenarios. The events of the narrative are frequently humiliating, and if she missed it the first time around, the narrative device (more on that in a second) requires her to reflect on these events and mine them for further embarrassment.

Vicky is weak and professionally flawed and has serious issues. I'm not saying that writing about a female character who has terrible judgement and is bad at her job is inherently misogynistic. But, writing the book in the female character's first person voice, and having part of your narrative device be that her first person voice is directed at a fictional intended audience (basically: it's not just a book that happens to be written in the first-person, it's a book about a person writing a book in the first person, so it's like the fictional character is aware that she's in a book) -- when the point-of-view is that tight, and Vicky is TELLING you that she's weak and flawed and has poor judgement and is bad at her job, that feels creepy to me. It was off-putting from when I first started reading the book. Part of the problem is that I bought this book because I generally love Chuck Klosterman, so there is no way for me to not be hyper-aware that this character was written by a dude, a dude who once wrote a book that was supposed to be about the sites of famous rock star deaths that turned into a memoir about women who had rejected him.

It's awkward -- it's sort of like when people complain that movies like Juno send a pro-life message and it's like, "Yeah, but the movie is about the adoption, so if she had an abortion, there'd be no movie." The story Chuck Klosterman wants to tell requires Vicky to be the kind of therapist who will get inappropriately, overly attached to one of her clients, without those characteristics there'd be no story. But I guess I didn't enjoy spending so much time trapped in the head of a fictional character who is so aware that she's been created to fail.

Nitpicking the Narrative Device: Chuck Klosterman read an excerpt from this book at the Boston Book Festival, and his rambling, manic attempts to frame, disclaim and explain the excerpt he was about to read took about as long as the amount of time he spend reading from the actual text. Which perhaps should have been indicative of the problems Klosterman had framing his narrative. It seems like he wanted to write a book where two unreliable narrators just monologued at each other for two hundred pages, but he couldn't do that, so he frames it with an epistolary device, THREE different kinds of textual annotations, with a tape-recorded conversations device, etc. etc. etc. This feels like a lot of window dressing for what is actually a pretty short story (closer to a novella than a novel), and the fact that Klosterman has more experience writing essays than long-form narrative shows.

(And this is disappointing, because one of the reasons why I was excited about The Visible Man is that when I finally read Downtown Owl it was so, so, so much better than I expected and I really incredibly loved it. But Downtown Owl switched between three different main narrators and had a handful of guest narrator chapters, so it was much more like a series of coincidentally interconnected short stories than anything else.)

As a particularly nitpicked aside: one of the textual annotations involves comments made by Vicky (directed at her book editor) [bracketed and set in italics]. Something about the bracketed text drove me crazy. It was probably my least favorite thing about the entire book. Bracketed italicized text reads to me like something that's been formatted that way on the internet because it's the only way to differentiate thoughts while using a shitty blog platform. This is a book. A book with incredibly generous margins and line spacing to help inch it up to that 250-page mark. He really could have just put those asides in italics and gotten his point across.

Chuck Klosterman: He Proof-Read My Novel: Despite having seen him speak on several book tours, and following his professional writing pretty closely, I have no idea why Chuck Klosterman decided he wanted to start writing novels. I wonder if part of the appeal is the ability to present pop cultural insight in a different medium. Chuck Klosterman really cannot ever write another essay about reality television. Starting with the Real World essay in Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, he's pretty much covered everything there is to say. But he can write about a fictional character who has an opinion about reality television (and Y____'s opinions on the different levels of realness in reality television were straight out of that Real World essay, and the idea that the San Francisco season was a war between Puck and Pedro to define the concept of reality as we know it).

This isn't a bad thing, even. Some of my favorite parts of Downtown Owl were the pop culture time capsule character nicknames, and their opinions on movies and music. It reminds me a little of my relationship with Kevin Smith movies: I loved Kevin Smith's early movies when I was high school, but loved them significantly less in retrospect the older I got. There are a bunch of different reasons why those movies didn't age very well that are not unique to my experience, but one reason they didn't age well for me was that when I was in high school, I wanted to have friends who had conversations like Kevin Smith movies, and once I was an adult I had conversations like that and watching people have those conversations in movies became less interesting. So Chuck Klosterman spends a good part of his career writing essays analyzing pop cultural ephemera, and in some way he contributes to a reality where people actually sit around and discuss things like metaphysics and "Saved By the Bell." Why wouldn't he want to dive into a fictional world where everyone talks like they've read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs? At this point, it doesn't even come across as unrealistic.

But ... I'm not sure Chuck Klosterman actually knows that much about writing fiction.

[christa · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s obvious where Chuck Klosterman came up with the premise for his to-be released novel “The Visible Man.” Old Red Beard’s 2009 book of essays “Eating the Dinosaur” includes a chapter about watching through the window a twentysomething woman who lived in an efficiency apartment similar to his own in Fargo. Making dinner, working out on a NordicTrack, cooking an elaborate dinner, then fighting with her boyfriend.

Did she watch him, too? He suspects she did. Maybe even watched him barf one night. Or maybe that was a dream.

“For two years I watched a revolving door of nonevents that never stopped intriguing me,” he wrote.

Thus the invention of the character with the alias Y__. Victoria Vick is a therapist who has begun sessions with Y__, who reveals that he was involved with a government project that resulted in the creation of a series of sprays and creams that make it possible through light refraction to travel through the world unseen. He’s not invisible, per se. He’s just deeply camouflaged.

He takes advantage of this invention -- a project that was abandoned by his fellow creators and forgotten by the government -- to slip into people’s homes and observe them. He is fueled by the belief that you can never really know someone unless you see them when they are alone. That their public self is merely an adaptation that shifts depending upon who they are with.

Y__ doesn’t necessarily want a therapist. He wants to unburden himself of a secret. The nights spent silently watching a woman go for a run, come home and go nuts on a bong, binge and run some more. Eventually he feels he has to intervene. He believes that if he throws off this cycle, she will find some relief from her addictions.

Then Victoria becomes a little too interested in Y__ and his unique lot.

The novel is played as a series of meetings with Y__ that have been compiled for publication. It includes summations of sessions and emails that she wrote to herself afterward, the standard note-taking of professionals who have to record inane details about your life so that the next time you get a cavity filled you can resume a conversation about pets and vacations.

“The Visible Man” suits Klosterman’s strengths as a writer, debater, and pop culture expert in a way that his debut novel “Downtown Owl” did not. His forte is the hypothetical scenario that includes a wild card element -- then giving it fan fiction treatment. With “Downtown Owl,” the wild card was merely a looming storm. The end result was Klosterman squeezing himself into some sort of mold of what a novel should look, feel and sound like. It was better than okay, but it felt like Klosterman wearing Jon Hassler face paint.

Chuck Klosterman has a very distinct and powerful voice. Like, if you spent too long with him or read his entire canon, you would be in danger of catching it. This is a pro when it comes to his essays; a detriment to his work as a novelist. The three main characters in “Downtown Owl” sounded like incarnations of the same person, all saddled with the burden of a Klostermanian accent. Almost all of “The Visible Man” is the in the words of Y__. So when he leans Klostermanian, it works because he isn’t pitted against another version of himself. (Adversely, with the character Victoria Vick, Klosterman seems to have over-corrected and written a woman who is pretty dim and seems like an unlikely candidate for a career in therapy).

Klosterman still makes a better essayist than a fiction writer, but with “The Visible Man” he gets pretty damn close. This is a super fun read that leaves you watching yourself a little more closely in those alone moments, wondering “What would Y__ see?”

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you can't understand immediately, you will never understand eventually. Why should I tell you something you will never understand? p15

Professionally, it's the kind of problem that can't be solved by reading a book. p87
She has body issues because she has a body. p215

If you are looking for characters to love, a thrilling plot or a book to cuddle up with in bed, maybe skip this one. Chuck Klosterman tucks all his favourite pet peeves into this rather dry account of something just short of the miraculous, the ability to appear invisible. It's a study in delusion and CK is adept at pointing out just how deluded we allow ourselves to become.

Television is a one way form of entertainment, but that's not how people want to think. They want to think they're somehow involved. P169

People don't consider alone time as as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch...they want to escape from. p156

These people need someone to tell them they're okay. They need to be told that the morality that they've been forced to accept is manufactured and fake....p147

Not everybody is ready to hear that. Especially if a person is heavily invested in their ego identity.

Money doesn't guarantee happiness, but poverty doesn't even come close. p157
A lot of rich people are unhappy, but sometimes they don't even notice....They're too busy shopping. p158

No use kicking and screaming. Best just to settle down and chuckle.

Specificity is overrated. p135
The process is always the problem. p114
Sometimes things happen and we never know why. That's the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Only fictional stories require explanations. p162

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I like absurdist and Klosterman just sort of scratches that itch. He is intelligent and funny and the metaphor and absurdism are just at the right level (not to obvious, but not subtle either). So this is almost a 5 star book. But....his characterization of the therapist (even acknowledging that she is a BAD therapist...although I am not sure she is bad in the ways that he recognizes, I think she is bad in many other ways that he does not) was just so cringy that he gets dropped a star.

The story is fantastical, but the human elements are mostly real...I have some of his many observations below:
"He was doing nothing, but he was doing it for real. No pretense. No self-awareness. I was seeing him as he really was."

"One of the most meaningful things I've learned from this is that people barely see what's openly in front of them, much less things that are camouflaged. We all have a fixed perspective on how the world looks, and that perspective generates itself. We mentally change what we see to fit our unconscious perception of order."

"Because humans live finite lives, all technological advances immediately feel banal to whatever generation inherits their benefits."

"The creation of expectation is its own independent process. If I expect anything at all, it will change my perception."

"A steadfast state of beintg we have no English word for: It's some kind of triangulation of boredom, regret, and dignity. Maybe the Germans have a word for it."

"Not counting slaves, there were only four types, really: people who didn't think Europe was religious enough, people who thought they could make a lot of money, antisocial failures with no other option, and fruitcakes who thought risking their lives on an alien shore might make for an interesting adventrue. Those are the four components of the American gene pool, and those are the four explanations behind everything good and everything bad that's ever happened here."

Overall it reminds me of Vonnegut's stuff; I will read more of Klosterman.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's rarer now that I finish a book in what amounts to one sitting than it was when I was a kid, so when a book captures my attention so completely that I put aside all distractions to finish it, I know there's something unique about its style and substance. Chuck Klosterman is one of those writers whose work captivates me directly and significantly, and his latest novel is no different. The Visible Man is a psychologically-oriented science-fiction story, but it's as much about giving Klosterman a vehicle for his philosophical meanderings as it is about having a plot driving the action. His wanderings are more than interesting enough to sustain my attention, and he has provided a structure that allows him to transverse diverse territory and digress often from the plot, which could itself be summarized in a short paragraph. To accomplish his ends, he focuses simultaneously on two narrators, the therapist Victoria Vick (the protagonist) and the subject of her writing, the enigmatic Y_____, a man who has invented a suit that renders him non-visible to humans and whose story Vick is recalling to the publisher. In some ways, the construct is more ingenious than the content (which is not to diminish the content), as it allows Klosterman to indulge the kind of parenthetical tangents and bombastic blatherskyte that makes his writing so entertaining. The Visible Man is an interesting idea executed well, though it may be inaccessible to anyone who finds Klosterman's brand of post-modern meta-media analysis aggravating, incomprehensible, or otherwise emotionally draining. It's the kind of book, like any of Klosterman's, that I feel I could re-read every six months and have it still feel fresh.

[Todd Drager · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I've enjoyed other work by Klosterman and enjoy his perspective, but ultimately this novel just felt cluttered and unfinished. It felt a little like coffee house filler, a cluster of topics that are interesting to discuss but ultimately dont make for a very good composed narrative. The book is told from the perspective of Victoria Vick, a therapist. The book in itself is supposedly her package of information she put together for her publicist in order to turn her adventure with the invisible man into a novel. So the work isnt supposed to be complete. This is how Klosterman attempts to avoid many basic storytelling techniques, by simply having this novel be the work before the actual novel. It makes me wonder if there will ever actually be a real novel written, and maybe it would be a more enjoyable read. That said, the book does make for an entertaining read and warrants some thought after reading certain segments. The book is told through a series of recorded therapy session recordings, notes, and ramblings from her patient, the invisble man. I didnt really have an attachment to any of the characters, but certain ideas discussed throughout are entertaining at face value. It's worth a look, but not if you value a structural storyline arch.

[Blixen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Carina l’idea, insulsa la storia.

[JD · Rating 3 out of 5]

i’m so scared n uncomfy<3

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems like it’s been a while since I’ve added a book to my favorites shelf.

I thought that the characters were so well written.

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing premise of an invisible man who seeks out the help of a therapist as a witness to his lonely life, rich only with its naked observations of others, similar to a writer’s life in a sense.

Told in a series of e-mails, recorded phone conversations, letters to her publisher, and transcripts of their therapy sessions, the therapist, Victoria, constructs the bizarre case of her patient known only as Y___. While this narrative device is inventive and probes deep into the patient’s character, it takes until page 83 to set up the premise and prove it. In today’s hurried world of “give me the plot on the first page,” I wonder how much more interesting this novel would have been if we had opened with, “Y___ donned his camouflage suit, applied the special cream that would render him invisible to the eye, and stepped out into the night...”

Y___ is not a nice person. He spends his “invisible time” invading the homes of ordinary citizens and spying on their activities. Like a writer who has intimate knowledge of his characters, he observes his “subjects” at their most vulnerable moments, especially when they are alone, to form and replay his judgements on society to his shrink. And the scary thing is that all of his subjects seem to be living empty lives themselves: the jogger, Valerie, who binge-exercises and binge-eats to keep her external and internal lives in balance; the philosophic band of musicians that discuss heavy subjects, eat mushrooms and drink schooners of beer; the young man, Bruce, who takes days to compose an e-mail to a girlfriend, watches endless You Tube videos, reads reviews on Goodreads, posts comments on political blogs and ‘likes’ on Facebook, watches entire series on Netflix, posts reviews on Amazon, and masturbates routinely and unemotionally—“like taking out the trash,” comments Y___.

Occasionally Y___ runs into a problem, or into one of his subjects, like the time when one guy being “observed” goes crazy and starts shooting up his apartment, yelling, “Come on out, I know you’re there!” Therefore Y___ is extra vigilant even when crossing the road in traffic, even at a cross walk!

Things get more complicated when Y___ steps out of his incognito role and tries to help his subjects—people die! This further fuels his isolation from his fellow man, even when he has the most intimate grandstand view into their lives.

The therapy sessions take a turn for the worse when a romantic attraction develops between therapist and patient. We are also told at this point that Victoria is having some marital troubles with her much older and highly opinionated black husband, John. Therapist and patient begin to meet outside the consulting room, emotions are let loose, and the sparks fly, with some unpleasant consequences for everyone.

Y___’s invisible peregrinations raise some interesting questions:
a) Are we all Valeries and Bruces in one way or another?
b) Do we have an innate curiosity to spy on our fellow beings?
c) If granted the power of invisibility, would we take advantage of it?
d) Are Social Media and the Selfie already benign manifestations of this Peeping-Tom curiosity?
e) Does the gap that exists between who we are and who we want to be the cause of human dissatisfaction and the resulting “life unlived?”
f) Does this statement hold true: “Society works best when everyone plays within their allotted box. Step out of it and chaos ensues”?

A thought-provoking read, topical for these times.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book! Klosterman uses the differing formats of each chapter (notes from a visit, personal emails, transcriptions, recollections) in engaging ways. No one here is a "good person," and I fear that the main focus of the work, Y___, could easily be interpreted by angry white bois as some sort of misunderstood hero when really he just is a bad/troubled dude. While not as enjoyable as Downtown Owl, still an enjoyable (and disturbing) read.

[Hayley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I understand that Y__ is supposed to be unlikeable but holy shit reading that characters dialogue was the equivalent of every conversation I’ve ever had with a guy in his mid 20s who thinks he is the most interesting and intelligent person in the room and I want to read books to escape that Jesus Christ

[Alec · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a kid, I feel like it was protocol to have a stock answer chambered just in case someone (possibly a genie with Robin Williams' voice) asked you what your three wishes would be. Setting aside the inane "I'd wish for a million wishes!" response that always generated playground controversy, I vividly recall my official list of three wishes. It went as follows:

1. The ability to fly
2. The ability to turn invisible on command
3. The ability to eat leaves (and be nourished by them, I guess?)

In retrospect, the third wish is an embarrassing waste, but apparently the act of sitting unseen high in a tree while munching on scrumptious Oak leaves (full flavor in autumn) had huge appeal to young Alec. Weird. (Side note: even invisibility is a bit odd to me, since this would have been well before the "I'd sneak into the ladies locker room!" aspect would hold much, if any, appeal.)

Anyway, I bring this up because The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman is about a man who is able to, for all intents and purposes, become invisible to the naked eye. He is identified only as Y____ (names changed to protect the innocent and whatnot) and the narrative is written from the point of view of his therapist, Vicky. The book is basically a thought experiment (in classic Klosterman fashion) of what would happen if a certain kind of person was capable of going unseen and undetected by those around him.

I absolutely loved the premise, which should be no surprise given the above wish list. The idea of being "invisible" has obviously been around for quite some time in literature, but in this manifestation, all (well, almost all) predatory or sexual avenues are ignored and the situation is approached from a strictly voyeuristic and pseudo-scientific angle. I suppose this is, in a way, what reminded me of my childhood wishes -- might I have wanted the same things as Y____? Actually no, I think I just wanted to eat leaves in peace. Duh.

The subject matter also fit Klosterman's writing strengths perfectly. I have always been impressed (in both his writing and his work on the Simmons podcast) with his powers of objective observation as it pertains to the people around him, and when speaking as a man whose freedom to observe is limitless (Y_____'s dialogue is clearly written in Klosterman's voice), his observations are insightful and incredibly entertaining. I laughed out loud many times in the book at both the language and the absurdity of the situation. If anyone reads it, the "Heavy Dudes" section was especially fun.

The actual story-arc was much less interesting to me, and the only thing preventing The Visible Man from a 5-star rating. The "only" in that sentence seems very much out of place, but if you read the book, the story really does seem secondary. The characters (other than Y_____) did not interest me and I didn't find much of the action to be surprising; it didn't matter. It's almost like some publisher said, "Listen, Chuck, essays don't sell. Write a novel." So he wrote a novel that very much resembles a collection of essays squeezed into a narrative...but in, like, the best way possible. For any Klosterman fans out there, this is a must-read.

(Note: I'm embarrassed by the length of time since my last review. I blame television. Seriously. There are way too many good shows on right now...and I might or might not be referring to the fact that How I Met Your Mother is syndicated.)

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man, I really want to give this book five stars. I really do. Even as I write this, I'm trying to figure out exactly what it was about the book that is keeping me from throwing that last star up there. Those descriptions, however, have got me hung up because, in fact, it did really like it, but I can't in good faith say that I loved it.

Let's start with the good.

1) It's Chuck Klosterman. I've read all his books, nonfiction and fiction alike. I pretty much love his writing.
2) He has finally branched out. My main knock on Downtown Owl was that I couldn't shake the feeling that he was essentially creating a fictional story in his own adolescence. This book, however, is a fantastic turn from that precedent.
3) The story grabs you from an early point, and really does hold you.

There are certainly more high points, but at the fear of giving away spoilers, I will keep it quiet.

The only thing I'm not completely sold on is the ending. It just seemed like Klosterman knew he'd reached a logical point of conclusion and said "okay, I'm done." It's not that the story doesn't resolve, I just wasn't satisfied with the resolution. It could be my own personal hangup, it could be that I'm critical of Klosterman because I believe he really is an incredibly talented writer. Whatever the reason, I just wanted a little more out of the last ten to twenty pages. And despite being really into the first 210 pages, I can't help but knock this review down to four stars.

[Paolo Latini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una riscrittura del tema ormai classico "uomo invisibile" nel quale l'autore cerca di mostrare come il nuovo secolo del nuovo millennio abbia rimodellato la realtà in modo consistente. Alla fine osservare senza essere osservati non cambia l'oggetto che si osserva, ma racconta molte cose più sull'osservatore che sull'oggetto. Chuck Klosterman è forse più famoso come commentatore di feticci pop, da Van Halen a Star Trek alla musica emo, e qui inserisce in modo anche piuttosto intelligente delle considerazioni sui mass media, sulla televisione in particolare, e su come proprio la televisione che ha messo in primo piano lo spettatore con reality, talent e affini, abbia creato una perversa aspettativa di poter modificare una realtà che invece resta immodificabile e indifferente.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel concerns a therapist, Victoria Vick, who becomes overly involved with an unusual patient, Y___,someone who has developed a suit that makes him essentially invisible to others. He spends his time following people into their homes and observing them while they are alone. These observations progress from simple surveillance to intervening in their lives leading to dire consequences.
Told through Y___’s narrative along with the therapist’s notes, correspondence and transcriptions which document the course of therapy and the cataclysmic end.
An entertaining sometimes disturbing read I give it four stars.

[Sarah Schmale · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know why I enjoy this book so much but I do. I read it for the first time as a high schooler and I remember it changing the way I viewed people and who they are around others and how they probably are alone. Rereading it as an adult it’s by no means a perfect book and probably doesn’t deserve the 5 stars I always give it. All of the characters are unlikable and deeply flawed but I appreciate that we aren’t really supposed to like them or even agree with their decisions. Either way, it’s an interesting read every time I reread it and I will probably always love it.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Klosterman is a weirdo......I enjoy weirdos....

[Comrade Doge · Rating 3 out of 5]

evil don't look like anything.

[Marika Salvatori · Rating 3 out of 5]

La mia opinione qui: https://youtu.be/j6mdj6-iDm0

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Storyline is very creative, but I found myself skimming because the writing wasn't as engaging as I normally expect with Klosterman.

[Madelyn Helton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting book. It makes you think about how you behave when you are by yourself and no one is around. It makes you analyze your own behaviors.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the singer who decides to record a solo album or the marquee actor who wants to direct a vanity project, it always makes me a little nervous when an author primarily known for one genre decides to try something new. This is doubly true of Chuck Klosterman, a fellow who belongs to that little coterie of unlucky authors and journalists with whom I identify to a probably unhealthy degree (see also: Nick Hornby, Jonathan Tropper, Rob Sheffield). He’s known primarily for penning pop culture-obsessed essays whose train of thought runs so closely parallel to my own that in rare moments of self-confidence I find myself thinking, “See, I could do that.” His nonfiction collections, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto and Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, are clever and perceptive and often laugh-out-loud funny, and they’ve sort of served as a bellwether for my own thinking about music, media, and celebrity. In his book Writing with Passion, Tom Romano talks about “distant teachers,” those people from whom we learn even when separated by geographical distance. For a dozen years, Chuck Klosterman has been one of my distant teachers.

So I was a little nervous when, in 2008, he published his first novel, Downtown Owl. I still haven’t read it. If it sucked, if fiction was a poor fit for his talent, I wasn’t sure how it might tarnish my view of his other work. Then he published The Visible Man in 2011, and it somehow ended up on my shelf, which meant I was obligated to read it as part of the 21st Century Bookshelf Deprivation Project. (There’s a slash in blue magic marker along the bottom of the pages, which makes me think I must’ve picked it up in Barnes & Noble’s clearance bin, to be read at some distant point in the future when I was emotionally and intellectually prepared for disappointment.)

Here’s the verdict on The Visible Man: It’s delightful. I use that word rarely, but it fits in this case. It was blast from start to finish, a breezy (but at times deceptively sophisticated) treatise on identity, human nature, motivation, and The Beatles. I devoured it in two 90-minute sittings.

Written in the form of a book draft written by therapist Victoria Vick and submitted to her editor, The Visible Man details her run-in and subsequent sessions with a patient who claims to have invented a suit that essentially renders him invisible (Klosterman describes the science, but I’m not sure I understand it, and even if I did it’s too complicated to relate here). Victoria is understandably skeptical, and she treats their first several sessions (the synthesized transcripts of which make up the narrative) as the rantings of a delusional individual who’s suffered a break from reality. Then Y__ (as he’s referred throughout the book) shows up at her office in the suit, and Victoria realizes he’s telling the truth.

As he explains it to her, Y__ is using this tremendous invention to conduct an experiment on humanity. He simply sneaks into people’s homes (hoping to find that alone; multiple residents present too many logistical complications) and watches them. He stays for several days, seeing how they act when they think no one else is watching. This, he believes, will give him insight into the true nature of humanity, for it’s only when no one else is around that we’re truly being ourselves.

The Visible Man, at this point, shifts into what reads almost like a series of short stories, as Y__ tells Victoria several of his most memorable interactions with those he observes. There’s Valerie, an obsessive-compulsive who works out with fanatical zeal only so she can spend her evenings smoking massive amounts of pot and eating ungodly amounts of junk food. There’s Bruce, the Internet multitasker who’s mainly concerned with drafting the perfect email to a woman. There’s “The Half-Mexican Ladies Man,” who somehow divines that Y__ is watching him. And most disturbingly for Victoria, there’s the tale of the Heavy Dudes, an interaction that ends in death and incarceration. All through these sessions, it becomes clear that the relationship between Victoria and Y__ is developing into something beyond therapist and patient, and the implications of that evolution push the book into his final suspenseful chapters.

Because this is a Chuck Klosterman book, there are passages that are undeniably funny, such as when Y__ describes one 74-day-long relationship as “like having sex with the Falkland Island War.” And of course there are references to music throughout that are entertaining but read more like Klosterman inserting his voice into the story than growing organically from the characters. At one point Victoria and Y__ have an argument about the ubiquity of The Beatles, and one of Y__’s first experiences watching another person centers on the band Rush. This didn’t particularly bother me, but I could see narrative purists crying foul.

The most interesting thing, to which I alluded above, is how The Visible Man actually has some sophisticated things to say about human identity. There’s Y__’s central thesis, which is the importance of viewing people unobserved when they’re alone, but there’s a section later in the book where Y__ talks about how at some point an individual’s identity is fixed, and that person will largely stay true to that personality, even if circumstances change:

"The first time I realized I could enter someone’s home, there was this predictable rush of power. There was an immediate recognition that I could do anything I wanted. I could kill a man and never be captured. I could rape a woman and she’d assume it was just a horrific nightmare . . . But the fact of the matter is that I’m not a rapist, and the fact that I suddenly had the means to become a world-class rapist wasn’t going to change that. We always end up being ourselves, somehow. I was who I was long before I consciously became the person I am."

And that’s really the question Klosterman is interested in exploring: Who are any of us, really? The Visible Man is better than I expected and, even more importantly, better than I hoped, and it immediately marks Klosterman as not just a first-class essayist, but a first-class writer in any genre.