THE DIMINISHMENT OF CHARLIE CAIN

A man finds invisibility much better and much worse than he could ever have imagined in this literary novel.

Freelance writer Charlie Cain is suffering from a pain in his lower back. He’s reluctant to go to the doctor—both because he has no health insurance and because his girlfriend, Amber Dressing, recently left him for a physician—but the discomfort becomes more than he can bear. On the recommendation of an acquaintance, he sees a very unconventional medic who prescribes him a vial of drops, one to be taken under the tongue with each meal. Charlie starts right away, and, by the next day, the pain has started to disappear. Unfortunately, there is a pretty severe side effect: “It was then that he saw something anomalous about his hands and forearms. They were—almost transparent. They flickered like an old film and seemed lit by a lemony inner light. He shook one and it was flesh and then not-flesh, flesh and then not-flesh.” Charlie immediately starts enjoying his invisibility: running around naked, rooting through his friend’s house, spying on his attractive neighbor while she’s undressed. When he goes back to the doctor to figure out what happened, the office has closed, as if it were never there. Freshly uninhibited, Charlie embarks on a new life as a burglar, prankster, and voyeur. He becomes obsessed with an agoraphobic painter still mourning her dead husband and begins an affair with a New Age priestess who thinks he’s a god. But soon people will start to realize Charlie is missing. And it’s only a matter of time before he decides to use his new ability to try to win Amber back.

The novel is told with a fair bit of ironic distance—the characters have not-quite-real names like Sudie Nimm and Patience Spent—which keeps readers from asking too many questions about the how and why of things. Mesler’s imagery is often surprising, as here in his description of a man at a Neighborhood Watch meeting where Charlie’s crime spree is discussed (Charlie, of course, is present as well): “The police officer who attended was named Peter Natural. He was a large, Aryan fellow, as handsome as a coat of mail. His leather gleamed. His revolver looked as big as canned ham.” The author’s prose can also be a bit too cute, as here where he describes one of Charlie’s lovers’ nether regions: “Her furze bush was black as sloe and thick like a thicket.” It’s an unexpectedly raunchy tale. A startling number of women want to have sex with this unknown invisible man—even on a city bus—and Charlie is more than happy to comply. Disappointingly, the female characters are quite flat and primarily exist as objects of Charlie’s desire. Readers will be left wishing that the story had tried a bit harder to be about something more than male fantasies. Invisibility is a fertile and well-explored concept in fiction, yet Mesler doesn’t actually find much to say about it.

An intriguing but emotionally shallow picaresque about an invisible man.