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Invisible
By Pete Hautman
Simon and Schuster, 2005. 149 pages.
A seventeen-year-old boy who thinks of himself as “pretty much invisible”; who has a fondness for matches and works obsessively on an elaborate model train set left to him by his grandfather; who stares at the prettiest girl in school from across cafeteria and classroom, much to her dismay; whose best friend seems to be nearly his polar opposite and whose presence is oddly sporadic; who is a math whiz and an artistic and engineering prodigy: These are some of the elements that make the reader ill-at-ease from the beginning of Pete Hautman’s Invisible. They are also the elements that pull you in, keep you reading, and make you care about the fate of this young man.
Douglas MacArthur Hanson is the narrator of this appealing and ultimately breathtaking novel. He speaks of his passions, his quirks, his “invisibility,” his best friend Andy Morrow, with reasonable self-assurance. He seems to be a self-aware geek who is satisfied with himself and his interests, even if a little distracted by the natural hormonal obsessions and eruptions every one of us has at some point been subject to.
My ability to focus on one thing at a time is the secret to my success. Other people do not have this talent. Let me tell you: I once peeled an entire bag of tangerines — seventeen of them — using only my fingernails, without losing one drop of juice. I lined up the peeled tangerines on the kitchen counter and they were as beautiful as any work of art. Mrs. Felko, my art teacher, would not agree with that. She and I have very different tastes. But I thought they were quite beautiful.
As the novel progresses, Douglas’s behavior grows increasingly edgy, and despite his ability to tell his story as if there is nothing unusual about it, we begin to sense that underneath his outward behavior something very profound and perhaps dangerous is going on. He is, after all, seventeen. What boy of that age could experience the rejection and scorn that he does without being somehow injured despite his outward show of confidence?
It is the very nature of this injury that is at the heart of the novel. Invisible carries a secret the likes of which I could only discuss if I first placed a “spoiler warning” at the top of this page. I won’t chance that — this is too good a book to risk impeding your or anyone else’s reading experience. But I will say that Pete Hautman has followed his National Book Award-winning Godless with another impressive effort that explores the inner world of a young person who just doesn’t “fit” and whose mind and psyche must work overtime to compensate for the imbalance. In a quiet and even cinematic way, Invisible is a high-quality psychological thriller, on the order of films like Memento, American Beauty, and The Sixth Sense. It is highly recommended.
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