far from yourself.

I recently finished Chuck Klosterman’s seventh book, and second novel, The Visible Man, and it was a doozy.

I fell in love with Klosterman’s writing with his 2003 essay collection, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. Klosterman’s essays on pop culture, reality, media and the intersection of it all are awesome and super fun to read. They’re the conversations you could have had while sitting around a bong with friends, if everyone weren’t so freakin’ stoned.

Klosterman takes few things – and certainly not reality – at face value. It’s hyper-reality, where things are never inherently meaningful and there are “more things to say about the depiction of reality on MTV than about the depiction of reality in reality.” (Eating the Dinosaur, p. 94).

So when Klosterman wrote his first novel, Downtown Owl, in 2008, I didn’t know what to expect. His essays follow certain themes, structures and tones. But fiction? This was uncharted territory.

I certainly enjoyed Downtown Owl, but was in no way blown away by it. It just didn’t have that cerebral, meta edge that I expect from Klosterman’s nonfiction. But with The Visible Man, Klosterman has integrated a captivating, almost – but not quite – unrealistic plot, with his trademark hyper-conscious critique of reality.

The story of The Visible Man is simple enough. Told from the point of view of Victoria Vick, an Austin, Texas psychiatrist, Vick recounts her work with a patient (named Y____) who claims to own the equivalent of an invisibility cloak. Y_____ bases his story in science (he worked with the U.S. government to develop this technology), and uses the cloak to watch people when they are “alone”. “Alone”, of course, being the premise through which Klosterman imparts his own critique. Are we only ourselves when we are completely alone? Who is the person we become when others are present?

Through the Y____ character, Klosterman posits a variety of other thoughts that must be keeping him up at night, including, but not limited to: the questionable benefits of technology; our unconscious expectations of our environment; the universality of insecurity; symbolism and its role in the therapeutic experience; human nature; how media influences our relationship to the world; et cetera, et cetera.

My only criticism with The Visible Man is the pace of plotting. All of a sudden, you’re 90% through the book and wondering “how in the world is he going to end this thing?” Suddenly you’re left with the final page of text, asking yourself, “why in the world did he end this thing this way?”

Other than that, I say go read The Visible Man right now. It’s a quick read, pretty easy to digest and will leave your head spinning at least a little.