I enjoyed Chuck Klosterman’s second novel, The Visible Man about as much as his first, Downtown Owl. In a lot of ways, this book more closely resembles his more famous essay collections, as its story is more a loose structure for traditional Klosterman asides and tangents than a fully developed narrative (It certainly doesn’t have the wonderfully specific setting of Downtown Owl). That’s not to say it’s not an incredibly entertaining and occasionally fascinating book. There are a lot of interesting ideas about a typically wide array of subjects, including (most prominently) voyeurism, The Beatles, how people watched LOST, Facebook, and class struggles.
Despite its manic attention span, Klosterman does a good job developing The Visible Man’s central (and, really, sole) relationship between a female psychiatrist and her unusual patient (only referred to as Y___). When the anecdotal elements began to slow down and the book moved toward its end, I found myself invested in both of their struggles.
Klosterman has yet to master fiction like he has essays or long form non fiction (Killing Yourself to Live remains his pinnacle), but The Visible Man is in many ways, a leap forward from Downtown Owl. Where it lacks that book’s sense of setting and mood, it has bigger ideas and utilizes more ambitious narrative devices.
