Spoilers!
Is anyone ever quite seen despite our relentless need to be seen? That tension is what often drives discomfort with our day-to-day existence. Is the reality of who I am and purport to be in front of others the reality, or who am I when nobody’s watching? Is there a facade even among those who live together to where you’re still not seeing the true person, only the reality they’ve conjured? In that sense, being able to truly see someone — contrasted with what you know the public persona is and the attending issues therein — would be one heck of a sociological, and highly unethical, scientific experiment. Indeed, if you were to run this scientific experiment, maybe you’d call it, Chuck Klosterman’s 2011 book, The Visible Man. Because the study isn’t so much about the scientific breakthrough of being an invisible man wearing a quasi-invisibility cloak so as to observe people in their true form, but rather, about the “visible man,” as it were, owing to the power of invisibility. Klosterman’s fictional novel, told through the man known as Y___’s therapist, Victoria, is a richly layered, psychologically compelling observational book about the nexus between who we are and who we want to be.
Y___ comes to Victoria seeking therapy because he has guilt about what he’s done, but not guilt in the traditional sense. He thinks he’s been wholly justified in his scientific experiment of observing people by being “invisible” and watching them in their homes for hours, even days, at a time — he certainly comes across throughout the book as narcissistic and amoral, and of course, criminal — but he feels guilt about those few times he intervened and stopped being an observer. Like with a woman named Valerie, he spiked her marijuana so she would stop binge-eating, only for it to nearly kill her. Or the time he intervened to accost a bully and the bully fell backward through a glass table to his death, resulting in the victim of the bully being found culpable for his murder. See, it wasn’t enough for Y___ to be an observer; he also wanted to play God, in my estimation, which goes hand-in-hand with his narcissism and the power at his disposal.
Victoria, meanwhile, went from trying to transpose all that she was hearing onto mappable mental conditions and medical issues Y___ may have because, obviously, she didn’t think he was actually the “invisible man.” She thought that was a projection of his voyeuristic fantasies, among other issues. Then, he came to one of the therapy sessions and well, didn’t show himself to her to prove the veracity of everything. Later, though, Vicky rightly still wonders if some of the stories, like the bully one, are true. Was he really “not there”? Or is he mapping himself onto an existing story for his own narrative reasons? It is suspect, for example, that he has the power of such narrative recall of these observational sessions, if you want to call it that, with his “subjects” since certainly he wasn’t in a position to take notes or record anything. But that also brings into question Victoria’s own veracity. Klosterman’s book is stylized as Victoria’s book: a retelling of her experience with her patient, Y___. She even readily admits near the end of the book the need to make money from the sell of such a story because of what transpires with Y___ (more on that in a second). So, Victoria is an admitted unreliable narrator. Yes, she claims to have taken copious, onerous contemporaneous notes via emails to herself about her recall of her sessions with Y___, but his invisibility abilities would also be a sensational story to sell, too!
The revelatory part about Klosterman’s book is that from the get-go, Y___ made Victoria his subject (although, as readers, we don’t realize it until much later, despite Victoria’s repeated ominous foreshadowing). He was never her subject. Y___ was always observing her at home and in their sessions. Such that, in the end, he decided to do one of his interventions in what he felt was the betterment of Victoria’s life in the similar way it was with Valerie and the victim of the bully. He tried to get Victoria away from her husband, John. John didn’t appreciate Victoria, in his estimation (to be fair, John was a jerk), but the attempt fails in the climactic moment of the book because John is paralyzed by a fall and Victoria stays with him (hence the aforementioned need for money to pay for his medical care). But … her relationship with John and their marriage improves thereafter. Was Victoria Y___’s first successful observation and subsequent intervention, even though he didn’t ultimately get what he wanted, which was her? You could even argue John was the paradigm of the “visible man” in Victoria’s life and the one Y___ sought to observe and understand throughout his life. John became the “visible, but invisible” man Victoria overlooked, especially once Y___ came into the picture.
What a fascinating, albeit creepy, book. After all, Y___ was creepy, and there is no deeper humiliation most of can imagine than being observed in our most vulnerable moments (like defecating, as Y___ observed many a time, for example) without our consent. He likened him observing others as being like a gynecologist; he was getting no sexual arousal from what he was seeing or that he was seeing without consent, like a voyeur would. But that’s dependent upon if you believe him and/or Victoria’s retelling in her book. Even if you did, though, I don’t see how that absolves the wrongness of it all, including Victoria’s own culpability once she learned of his crimes.
If you want a book that feels like putting your head through a funhouse mirror meat grinder in the best possible way, then I highly recommend Klosterman’s book. As someone who has pondered, and written extensively about the desire we all have to be social animals, to be truly seen by others, and the dichotomy between the mask we put on in order to, paradoxically, not be seen, I found Klosterman’s book an insightful ode to this aching feeling.
Milam's Musings 