The Visible Man - Chuck Klosterman

The problem with an invisible man story is that it's been done.  There was the original story, a slew of movies, a few Twilight Zone episodes and all of those daydreams everyone has had.  So, what to do if you want to tell an invisible man story?  (Let's ignore the answer "don't tell one" for one) You look for a new way to tell it. The first thing you do is get rid of the invisible part - there's no such thing as invisible, and science will back you up. So, make him visible, in the sense that if you knew what you were looking for you could see him. Add a suit and and a cream and an obsessive type with social skills so poor that he can only understand other humans by observing them for lengths at a time.

But a straight ahead narrative won't do, and neither will a journal type story. Instead, change the focus to a series of conversations between a therapist and the invisible man. But you can't do like that - you need to have it a collection of notes and emails that could be used to create a book, add a letter from the therapist to the editor, and there, now you have something.

What you have is a story that's made more entertaining by the diversions and asides and the observations about culture and people, but lacks a narrative force in the main story.  The structure gets in the way of the first section (an email exchange - literary history question - what was the first novel to use letters as a narrative device? And what was the first novel to use emails? Those authors have some answering to do) but gets out of the way for the remainder, and the book is better off for it.