Chuck Klosterman writes cultural criticism like the guy you want to watch TV with, the buzzed wit who improvises sharp, irreverent, sometimes specious sermonettes during commercials and after missed shots. With his second novel, "The Visible Man," he's created a superficially Klosterman-like monologist who watches a lot of TV with strangers, except they don't know he's there. Sometimes, with a crackpot's noble intentions, he laces their marijuana.
The book is presented as a draft of a memoir by Victoria Vick, a likable therapist full of self-deprecations and stiff appositives such as "the computer application iTunes." In the spring of 2008, she gets a call from a cagey scientist, dubbed Y__ in her manuscript. Something of a pushover, Vick complies with Y__'s bullying demands and is drawn to his probable genius and supposed eloquence, which we get a lot of, since she devotes most of her book to distillations of his stimulant-fueled spiels.
Y__ claims to have been the lead in a government-funded effort to apply "epidermal refraction theory" toward a "cloaking initiative." Basically, he invented a suit and some crazy cream that renders one invisible, as well as hot and slimy. He may be delusional, but the suit, he demonstrates, is legit.
Since childhood, Y__ has been convinced that people are inherently inauthentic with other people, that we're our true selves only in solitude. Hungry for this truth, he invades people's homes for extended, cloaked observations of their dull, embarrassing and poignant private lives, and sometimes feels an intimacy with his subjects that has otherwise eluded him.
The fly-on-the-wall depiction of private life is, of course, one of fiction's prime tasks, and Y__'s field reports let Klosterman fuse a sci-fi standby with slice-of-life short stories, usually climaxing when Y__ interferes recklessly and ineptly with his subjects' lives. Klosterman cannily renders Y__'s mixture of empathy and amorality, especially in a first tender, then tense section about a binge eater.
The book as a whole, though, struggles as its action accelerates. Vick spends most of the book as a comic straight woman; an attempt to more seriously portray her inner life comes too late. And while there are great jokes and descriptions here (Y__, for instance, is calm and smug "like a high school senior in the final days of May"), the steadfastly conversational prose can be monotonous, sometimes frustratingly (if deliberately) clumsy. "I am not a writer," says Vick, and indeed, just one sentence after she misuses "credulity," she's recalling what she was "thinking internally."
These complaints would matter less if Y__ were more consistently interesting, his "force of personality" more apparent. He may be a mad scientist of vast intelligence, but as a talker he's, of necessity, about as smart as Chuck Klosterman, only much meaner and more convinced of his often half-baked theories. He shares his creator's abiding interests in pop culture and hunchy anthropology, and some of his musings are funny and perceptive. Others are silly, or take forever to reach obvious conclusions. I trust that much of this is intentional, but I also trust that Y__'s scary allure is meant to be as palpable as his grating foolishness. We glimpse his dark charm and charisma, but just as often we feel like a restless sounding board for the sort of bus-stop Socrates who makes us wish we were invisible.
