A Man Not Being Seen in a Good Light

Being Invisible by Thomas Berger (Little, Brown: $16.95; 288 pages)

Fred Wagner--would-be novelist--works in a terrible office, writing mail-order catalogue copy for sleazy products nobody wants to buy. A dreadful man, the office drip, bugs Wagner incessantly, under the delusion that they are “best friends.” Wagner’s direct boss is a thick-waisted middle-aged harridan who makes his life miserable. And, Wagner oversees, as a trainee, a sallow-complexioned, low-personality young woman, the office moron.

Not a promising work life. But Wagner’s existence at home is even worse. His wife has left him and taken all the house plants and art objects with her. His apartment superintendent has free access to Wagner’s domicile and uses it in the afternoon to pursue his own, second, pimp career. Single women in the building either ignore Wagner entirely or engage him in peculiarly hostile and meaningless conversation that he finds unbearable. Perhaps because he has been--so far--unable to make any impression on his life; has been, in the abstract sense, invisible for years, Wagner--alone in his apartment with a bad case of the mopes--discovers that he can make himself absolutely invisible, at will.

Unable to Cope

At first Wagner seems strangely unable to cope with this new skill. We are to understand that he’s always been a scrupulously honest man; hard-working at the office, faithful at home. He has had a little trouble making decisions: He can’t attract the attention of waiters in restaurants, his wife didn’t care for him, never really saw him, whether he was visible or not. Wagner has been a passive man, at the mercy of society. What happens to him, then, is a particular kind of fantasy--the fantasy of the white male as victim.

We don’t see Wagner instantly “taking advantage,” robbing banks or ravishing females. We are treated first to a retrospective of how terrible life was for him before he developed his ability to become invisible, and shown then how terrible it is for him after he learns this skill. No one pays the least attention to poor Fred Wagner, even when he’s turning himself on and off--as it were--like a blinking Christmas light.

Invisibility! In earlier, happier times, it tended to be one metaphor. Harvey, the invisible 7-foot rabbit, trod the theatrical boards of America for years and everyone thought that was funny. Thorne Smith’s fictional character, Topper, got into all kinds of scrapes because of invisibility, and again, it struck America as funny. These days, it’s not so hilarious. To be invisible now is, obviously, to be overlooked, dismissed, of no significance, as, indeed, most of us are, in contemporary society.

Other Metaphors

Thus, readers are given, in this same literary season, “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” by H. F. Saint, another essentially one-metaphor book, and--far more interestingly--Diane Johnson’s “Persian Nights,” in which an American wife in Iran experiments with layers of cultural and sexual invisibility, finally able to stand smack in the middle the rousing shootout clad in a chador, utterly invisible to everyone on every side.

Given this demeaning sense of invisibility, this sense of not being seen by the larger world, the interest in this particular book must come from what, in that world, Thomas Berger protests against. It’s really a disappointing, predictable list: Rude waiters in restaurants. That boring office. People who steal paper clips from your desk. Wives who don’t understand their husbands. Big sisters who nag their brothers. Women who want sex when men don’t. The entire medical profession. Men who are too coarse and vulgar (like the performance artist Wagner’s wife spends time with). Men who are too wimpy. And so on.

Ironically, then, “Being Invisible” ends up becoming a defense of the utter norm, the absolute middle, supreme mediocrity, the totally passive. Be anything , draw attention to yourself in any way, and you’re fair game for Berger. (In fairness, he did leave out attacks on lawyers, mothers-in-law, barking dogs and crying babies.) The only sympathetic characters here are Wagner, the indecisive, untalented, unattractive, invisible man, and Catherine, a woman who comes in late here, and exists in this narrative only to be rescued. She’s very beautiful, plays the piano, has a splendid bosom, unconditionally admires Wagner, and agrees with everything he says.

So much could have been done in this book, and so much wasn’t. But “Being Invisible” might make a nice movie. Forget the cosmic consequences, just go for the boffo laugh when the invisible Wagner makes that rude waiter pour a bottle of wine in that performance artist’s lap.