Chuck Klosterman, 2011
the fifty-fourth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Matt Andrysiak
Even though I have specifically asked recommenders to submit their own favorites, not books they think might become my favorites, when I start into a new book in this series I often can’t keep myself from speculating why someone might have recommended it to me in particular. Klosterman has described the premise of The Visible Man as “how it would be to be the invisible man’s therapist”. And I have mentioned more than a few times that Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H.F. Saint impressed me quite a bit when I read it in the summer of ’93. What impressed me about Memoirs is that the author had thought through the premise so thoroughly. In its theme song, Mystery Science Theater 3000 scorned the idea of wondering how the protagonist “eats and breathes and other science facts”, but Saint goes into exhaustive detail accounting for how an invisible man would eat (discovering that he must find a source of clear foods or become a floating digestive system), where he would sleep, and so forth. The Visible Man, to its credit, also goes into a reasonably impressive amount of depth as well in exploring its version of invisibility. (No accidents here: the central character is a scientist who creates a suit coated in metamaterials capable of warping light in such a way as to allow the wearer to blend into the background, à la Iron Man’s short-lived “chameleon effect” in the 1980s.) And while Memoirs is just a thought experiment, Klosterman’s book also has the advantage of actually being about something. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it nearly as enjoyable.
I was about to say that Klosterman’s book has the advantage of being about something beneath the surface, but in fact its themes are expressly articulated by the scientist character. Before trying his hand at fiction, H.F. Saint was a securities analyst, and Memoirs goes into just as much depth laying out how an invisible securities analyst with no trusted associates would go about piling up a fortune—a tricky endeavor in the 1980s, without the Internet—as it does laying out how the protagonist deals with the assorted disadvantages of permanent invisibility. Chuck Klosterman, before trying his hand at fiction, was a pop culture pundit. And so much of his book consists of punditry about modern life. As noted, we are theoretically reading transcripts of therapy sessions, but the scientist demands that the therapist keep her mouth shut while he fires monologues at her, so these passages might as well be articles on one of Bill Simmons’s sites. The scientist explains that, in his view, people are always putting on a performance except when they’re alone, so he uses his chameleon suit to follow single people into their homes and observe them for hours on end, believing that in this way he will learn about human nature in a way that no one else ever has. Here’s a sample:
I mean, just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something
insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual
emotions manifest when the fight is over.
It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare
re-create it in a movie.
All the critics would mock it.
They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even
try.
This is why movies have less value than we like to
pretend—movies can’t show reality, because honest
depictions of reality offend intelligent people.
The reality I got to
see was not “movie reality.”
The reality I saw was just reality, without quotes.
You want to know what I really learned?
I learned that people don’t consider time alone as part of their
life.
Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape
from.
I saw a lot of wine-drinking, a lot of compulsive drug use, a lot of
sleeping with the television on.
It was less festive than I anticipated.
My view had always been that I was my most alive when I was totally
alone, because that was the only time I could live without fear of how
my actions were being scrutinized and interpreted.
What I came to realize is that people need their
actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what
they’re doing matters.
Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get
aired.
They don’t count.
This, I think, explains the fundamental urge to get married and have
kids, or even just the need to feel popular and respected.
We’re self-conditioned to require an audience, even if
we’re not doing anything valuable or interesting.
So, yeah, basically a thinkpiece in a narrative wrapper. One caveat here is that the speaker here is a character who starts off extremely unlikeable and becomes an outright villain as the book progresses. Thus, these might not be Klosterman’s opinions. But the point is that Klosterman has written a novel in such a way that long passages of it are opinion delivery devices, whether or not those opinions are actually his own. The one important element that doesn’t get articulated is that the scientist has a recurring pattern: despite his insistence that his goal is to observe, nearly all of his “observations” end with him interfering with the subject, which almost invariably ends in disaster. It was nice of Klosterman not to have the therapist spell this out for us—to, at least in this one respect, provide one of the pleasures of literature rather than of punditry.
Roberto Bolaño, 1996
translation: Chris Andrews, 2008
the fifty-fifth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by someone using the same name as a character in
Ready, Okay!, which is either a remarkable
coincidence or an odd troll
This is not a story. It is a mock reference book offering up capsule biographies of a series of imagined authors. It tracks their peregrinations around the globe (though either the author or the translator gets Arizona and New Mexico confused); it locates them within various literary scenes and movements, some of them real, some imaginary, none interesting; and it provides lifeless summaries of their major works. Despite the title, most of the fictitious authors have very tenuous connections to Nazism. Verdict: mind-numbing. It occurs to me that none of the works that have been recommended to me written by authors from the Southern Cone have really deigned to tell stories. This one’s a mockup of a Who’s Who reference book; the Zambra book was a mockup of a standardized test; the Borges story was a list wrapped in a perfunctory narrative frame; the Cortázar story was an exercise in metalepsis that could have been summed up in a sentence. Apparently this Bolaño fellow once had a character in another work say that “sooner or later I’m bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories”. I sure wish some of these folks would!
The Man in the High Castle (season 2)
Philip K. Dick and Frank Spotnitz, 2016
Speaking of Nazis, I did continue on to the second season of the Man in the High Castle TV series, by which point it had already gone far beyond its source material. I actually came close to giving up after the first few episodes, which were kind of a slog, but about a third of the way through the season the show picked up quite a bit. Juliana playing a wide-eyed innocent, trying to get access to the Nazi leadership by befriending the top officers’ wives, was compelling. Tagomi not only stepping between dimensions but using an artifact from one reality to save the world in another reality was also great—it reminded me of a twist one might see in a really good interactive fiction game. So, yes, it’s kind of weird for this series to bear the title of a book that is rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror, but the spirit of the book is there, and I am much more enthused about watching the third season than I expected to be a couple of episodes into the second.
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