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Book Review: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

October 11, 2013 By Jessica Filed Under: Book Review 20 Comments

The Invisible Man

This masterpiece of science fiction is the fascinating story of Griffin, a scientist who creates a serum to render himself invisible, and his descent into madness that follows.

I really liked the writing in The Invisible Man , but I thought the storytelling was awful.  H. G. Wells has a way with words and I really enjoyed his turn of phrase.  Phrases like “the inhuman bludgeoning of all tentative advances of curiosity (p. 19),”violently firing out its humanity (p. 33)” and “The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action (p. 28).”  And he uses the word “hobbledehoy” which had the Downton Abbey fangirl in me grinning.  But the story itself moved at a snail pace.  It took me a week to read 30 pages.  I thought it was told from the least interesting perspective possible –from the outside observers instead of the invisible man’s view and what he was struggling with.  These outsiders noticed something was not quite right (“Look how much time he spends alone!”) but not to the point that I found it very interesting. When the plot finally picked up, instead of some much needed action the cool stuff  was recapped in a conversation where he just describes all the action in the most dull way imaginable.  I had to make myself finish this book and keep pencils far, far away from my eyes.

The science behind the invisibility was pretty interesting.  It was based on the idea that our world is an illusion of light.  I thought that was a fascinating way to look at the world.  (See I didn’t hate everything about it).

I found the main character interesting if not likable. He’s an anti-hero. I’m pretty sure his antagonist was all the stupid people in the whole world. He was kind of arrogant.  Obviously he learns the bad things about invisibility.  I was surprised about the little things that he struggles with, though.  I could tell a lot of thought went into what it would really be like.  For example, the fact that he can’t sleep because his eyelids are invisible.  The crappy thing about being invisible is that it’s easy to get things, but hard to enjoy them.  And you get kind of lonely.  H. G. Wells did have a good point that the only really good use for invisibility is murder.

I’m not sure if I was supposed to get something out of this book.   At the end I felt like the moral was “Mean people suck but it’s better than being alone.”

Overall , I found it tedious but the writing was good.  I enjoyed  War of the Worlds  so much more.

Content Rating : None.

About H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was the third son of a shopkeeper. After two years' apprenticeship in a draper's shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist.

Wells is most famous today for his science fiction novels, of which the best known are: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon and The Island of Dr. Moreau. He was a prolific writer, writing more than a hundred books of both fiction and non-fiction, and works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, essays, histories, programmes for world regeneration, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are still widely read today. Wells and Jules Verne are each sometimes referred to as "The Fathers of Science Fiction".

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Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• Dusty Bookshelf 2013
• eBook Challenge 2013

October 11, 2013 at 9:54 am

It has been a while since I’ve tackled an H.G. Wells book. I feel like all those old school classic horror stories, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man, etc., are told from an outside source. I don’t know why they did it that way, but I’d like a better POV as well!

October 11, 2013 at 5:07 pm

I am disappointed to hear that The Invisible Man wasn’t very good. I have read other books by him that I had enjoyed. It sounds like I would share your frustrations, if I read it. Great review.

February 2, 2018 at 12:36 am

yes it is clearly a frustrations. :)

July 19, 2015 at 7:07 am

I felt very happy after reading the book of INVISIBLE MAN by “H.G WELL”

October 30, 2015 at 7:48 am

I enjoyed reading Invisible Man. I found the plot intresting. But I didn’t like the hero having a tragic end.

June 19, 2016 at 12:14 pm

The book is quite interesting. I enjoyed i as I like reading science fiction.

June 20, 2016 at 1:28 am

June 21, 2016 at 3:05 am

yeah, what a story !! one must read this story ones in his life

June 22, 2016 at 7:21 am

Its suprlerb book it was in my course of class 12 by CBSE when I starting reading I felt I am watching a suspense movie…. Awsm novel

September 15, 2016 at 2:17 am

Yaeh !!!!!!!!Courteous contribution by Wells,isn’t it?It was on my english book when I thought It was bewildering one in my course book.

November 1, 2016 at 10:56 am

It was a mystery story

May 21, 2017 at 12:14 pm

It has very interesting story It really enjoyed this FANTABOLOUS👍👍👍👍👍👍 It is very easy to understand😇😇

May 27, 2017 at 7:38 am

Wanna Nice Book!!! This is thee most wonderful book I have ever read!! All Hail HG Wells!! This book is the most wonderful science friction.

June 9, 2017 at 8:16 am

It was a wonderful story by H. G. Wells. I really liked it. And I think everyone should read this story

February 3, 2018 at 12:44 am

I really enjoyed The Invisible Man.. It was fantastic ….👍👍

February 26, 2018 at 12:43 pm

hate this novel I want to be a scientist and novels which depict scientist as an arrogant man is completely baseless. i liked griffin very much ,no one has noticed his reason why he was killing people .

before having an idea for reign of terror he claimed that he would be working with kemp so as to find solution to his invisibility problem. but the betrayal from his college professor and peole he encountered has made him wild. he hated when people didnt understand him as a criminal rather than a person

December 22, 2018 at 1:46 pm

Wow, I liked your comment. ‘Cause it is sad that people sometimes don’t even want to try understand the perspectives of all the characters. And you really put yourself in really Griffin place.

June 13, 2019 at 12:54 am

I like your review

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The Invisible Man

By h.g. wells.

'The Invisible Man' by H.G. Wells is about one man, his intelligence, and how he uses science as a means to his own ends, without regard for who he harms along the way. 

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The Invisible Man was H.G. Wells’ fourth novel. It was followed by the equally well-known (albeit for slightly different reasons) The War of the Worlds. The novel blends science, fantasy, and reality into what is considered to be one of the early masterpieces of science fiction novel writing. Without a doubt, the short novel is an exciting accomplishment, one that has entranced and entertained readers of all ages for over 100 years. 

But, there are some areas where it’s lacking. Most clearly in its few characters and limited setting. Rather than see Griffin’s invisibility play out, readers are left with memories of the past and a very limited timeline of events.  

Characterization and Setting

Throughout the novel, Wells’ narrator does not shy away from mentioning how brilliant Griffin, the Invisible Man is. He’s the smartest physicist of his age, Wells writes at the end of the book, something that went to waste when mixed with Griffin’s narcissism and self-destructive actions. He is a multi-dimensional character in what I’ve always found to be a two-dimensional world. 

Unlike depictions of the “Invisible Man” in film and television, in H.G. Wells’ original novella, Griffin is an ill-intentioned person from the start. His invisibility and loneliness do not bring out his worst qualities. In fact, these qualities are his defining features prior to his accomplishing the impossible. Once invisible, Griffin’s personality gets worse. His loneliness exacerbates his lack of empathy.

The Invisible Man is a short novel that spends the majority of its time discussing Griffin’s eccentricities, actions, and the reactions of the townspeople (although it can also be argued that more time should be spent on Griffin, his past, his family, and how he came to be the person he is today). 

Everyone in the novel is relevant only because of their connection to Griffin. It’s his actions that drive how much one finds out about the minor characters, such as Mr. and Mrs. Hall, who own the inn Griffin stays at initially. 

Iping is a real place, and while Wells does mention a vast array of men and women in the novel, the only ones to whom he dedicates any amount of detail are Griffin and, secondarily, Thomas Marvel and Dr. Kemp. Some readers may think that a broader world of characters and places would take this novel to the next level, showing readers what it would be like to see Griffin operating as the invisible man on a larger scale and with more diverse characters. 

The Novel’s Ending 

The novel ends in what I find to be a rather predictable way. Rather than all his plans coming to fruition, or even part of them, Griffin meets a gruesome end, beaten to death by the villagers of Iping. While it’s unusual for novels to kill off the main characters, the fact that Griffin was such a clear antagonist makes his death feel like the obvious ending for the novel. 

There is a moment at the end of the novel that’s worth mentioning, which is the narrator’s description of Griffin after death. H.G. Wells wrote: 

And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.

There is an amount of pity, or at least disappointment, in these lines that suggest the narrator feels readers should understand Griffin’s death as a waste. He was incredibly talented and could’ve put those talents to use in a better manner, but he didn’t.

Although short and less impactful than the end of the final chapter, there is an epilogue to discuss. In this section of the novella, Thomas Marvel is described as going every night to the three notebooks he stole from Griffin and seeking out the secrets that Griffin used to make himself invisible. The books are  “Full of secrets,” he says. “Wonderful secrets!”

The final line of the novel does indicate that there could be more to come in the future from Griffin’s secrets. Wells wrote, “And none other will know of them until [Marvel] dies.” Perhaps, the notebooks will come into more competent hands in the future, and another story similar to Griffin’s will unfold. Readers are left feeling uncertain about the necessity or wisdom of hanging onto a scientific discovery like that which Griffin made. It may be for the greater good to get rid of such knowledge, as men like Griffin are only going to use it to nefarious ends. 

Scientific Advancement and Its Dangers 

This gets at one of the most important themes of the novel, the dangers of scientific advancement. Wells asks readers to consider how dangerous jumping before one looks into scientific achievements can be. 

In an age when technology is becoming more and more prevalent, The Invisible Man is a clever, entertaining reminder that new advancements aren’t necessarily going to make the world a better place. This is seen to no greater degree than in contrast between science and wealth-consumed Griffin and the simple villagers who live without the benefits of technological advancement. They form a strong community full of supportive and kind people, attributes that Griffin (as a symbol of technological advancement) lacks. 

The Invisible Man Review: H.G. Wells Early Masterpiece

Book Title: The Invisible Man

Book Description: The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella that answers the question of what would happen if someone with terrible intentions achieved an incredible, belief-defying power.

Book Author: H.G. Wells

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: George Allen & Sons

Date published: April 18, 1897

ISBN: 978-0140437094

Number Of Pages: 317

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

The Invisible Man Review

The Invisible Man  is one of H.G. Wells’ first novels. It’s been adapted into numerous television shows and films, with literary and film allusions scattered throughout modern literature. The book asks readers to suspend their disbelief and accept that one man achieved the impossible–he turned himself invisible. Rather than using his new-found power to make the world a better place, he sought out invisibility, and used it, in order to create chaos and benefit himself.

• Creative plot
• Griffin is an interesting character
• Still relevant today
• Characters are limited
• Setting barely changes
• The ending is expected

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About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance by H. G. Wells

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Invisible Man

Ralph ellison, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Invisible Man: Introduction

Invisible man: plot summary, invisible man: detailed summary & analysis, invisible man: themes, invisible man: quotes, invisible man: characters, invisible man: symbols, invisible man: theme wheel, brief biography of ralph ellison.

Historical Context of Invisible Man

Other books related to invisible man.

• Full Title: Invisible Man
• When Written: Begun in 1945, finished in 1952.
• Where Written: Several locations on the East Coast, including Vermont and New York City
• When Published: 1952
• Literary Period: Modernism, postwar American fiction
• Genre: Modernist novel
• Setting: First, an unnamed black university in the south. Later, New York City, especially the area of Harlem.
• Climax: The massive race riot that nearly destroys Harlem.
• Antagonist: Dr. Bledsoe, Brother Jack, Ras the Exhorter
• Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for Invisible Man

Radio Days: Ellison was known to be a tinker, capable of repairing both automobiles and electronic devices. He had a particular passion for high quality audio equipment, and found a hobby in building and customizing stereo systems.

Tough Act to Follow: Ellison found it difficult to replicate the success of Invisible Man , which immediately was considered a classic. He spent the rest of his life trying to write his second novel. Two different versions of Ellison’s incomplete manuscript have been published since his death, Juneteenth (1999) and Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)

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T Book Club

Surreal Encounters in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’

Breaking with the dominant literary styles among Black writers at the time, the author expanded the limits of realism to create a world that was, and remains, all too familiar.

The American author and educator Ralph Ellison sits at a typewriter in Rome in June 1957. He was there on a fellowship, awarded to him by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Credit... James Whitmore/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

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By Adam Bradley

• Published June 3, 2021 Updated June 13, 2021

This essay is part of T’s Book Club , a series of articles and events dedicated to classic works of American literature. Click here to R.S.V.P. to a virtual conversation about “Invisible Man,” to be led by Adam Bradley and held on June 17.

I first saw Ralph Ellison when I was 19 years old and he had already passed away. On a summer evening in 1994, he appeared to me in the attic of an old manor house on the campus of a small college in the Pacific Northwest. I had encountered him — just as I had Langston Hughes and Jane Austen and Geoffrey Chaucer — by more conventional means the year prior, as an attentive reader of his published work. I read Ellison’s 1952 novel, “ Invisible Man ,” for the first time as part of a class on African American literature and was drawn to his wise-foolish protagonist with whom, looking back now, I shared more than a passing resemblance: a young Black college student with vague aspirations for leadership who stumbles upon writing as a means of illuminating his identity. Nonetheless, Ellison — like Hughes and Austen and Chaucer — remained intangible to me, aloof, distanced both by time and by achievement.

That could have been the end of it. But, as Ellison was fond of saying, “it’s a crazy country” — by which he meant that the diversity of the American experience often occasions unexpected confluences of people and circumstance. Soon after Ellison’s death , on April 16, 1994, at the age of 80, or perhaps 81 (evidence uncovered after his passing suggests he was born in 1913, not 1914, as he always claimed), Ellison’s wife, Fanny, called on their longtime friend John F. Callahan, my professor, to assume the literary executorship of his estate. Callahan asked me to be his assistant — to help him gather research, photocopy documents and sort materials — which explains why I ended up carrying shipments arriving from the Ellisons’ Riverside Drive address up a creaky staircase to the manor house attic on my college campus. My first task was to unpack the boxes and array the pages contained within across a long mahogany conference table, preparing them for Callahan’s inspection. Among the papers were drafts of Ellison’s unpublished second novel, around 40 years in progress; dot-matrix printouts from his computer, some with penciled edits; and handwritten notes scrawled on scraps of paper and on the backs of used envelopes.

It was while examining one such note that I saw Ellison — or, rather, that I saw past my own veneration of him to the human being he had once been. He was in the texture of the paper as I held it, as he might have held it, between thumb and forefinger. He was in the slant of his spidery script. He was in the faint scent of cigar smoke that had settled into the fibers of the fine bond paper and lain dormant for months, even years, until my nose woke it up. It startled me to realize that I was likely only the third person, after Mr. and Mrs. Ellison — perhaps even the second, after Ellison alone — to have held this page, to have read this note. I felt exhilarated and unsettled.

Though I could not have articulated it back then, I was overtaken in that moment by an ambivalence akin to that which Ellison’s unnamed protagonist expresses in the final line of “Invisible Man” — “And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” I knew intellectually, because Callahan had explained it, that the lower frequencies were the registers of our shared humanity. Through his protagonist’s voice, Ellison was making the audacious claim that he, a young Black writer in segregated America, could conceive a young Black character with the capacity to speak to the universalities of human experience through the dogged particulars of his own. But I was puzzled, and would remain so for many years, by the foreboding tone of that last line.

I now believe that the narrator’s ambivalence comes from his understanding that speaking for anyone means assuming a heavy burden of responsibility, for oneself and for others. Perhaps it stems, too, from knowing the horrors that some of those for whom he dares to speak, those for whom he remains invisible, are capable. And I know from spending countless hours among Ellison’s papers, now housed at the Library of Congress , that when composing “Invisible Man,” Ellison bore the weight of both his own exacting standards of craft as well as his conviction that he must write fiction that reflected the depth and diversity of Black life as he knew it.

RALPH ELLISON WAS PRIVATE but not reclusive. In a word he favored, he was complex. His letters reveal a man capable of tremendous humor and self-reflection as well as stubbornness and occasional vanity. Born in Oklahoma City, he was a proud Southwesterner to the last, though, after attending the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama, he lived the vast majority of his life in New York City. He was decidedly old-school in his literary passions — his tastes ran from Henry James to Dostoyevsky — but was also a gearhead: an enthusiast of high fidelity audio equipment and an early adopter of the personal computer. The author of only one novel, two books of essays (1964’s “ Shadow and Act ” and 1986’s “ Going to the Territory ”) and a clutch of occasional pieces and published excerpts from his second novel, he nonetheless wrote constantly, leaving behind thousands of pages, some of which have now appeared posthumously, including two iterations of his second novel — 1999’s “ Juneteenth ,” the core of the narrative, edited by Callahan and just released in a new edition; and 2010’s “ Three Days Before the Shooting … ,” the sprawling sequence of manuscripts and variants that Callahan and I edited together.

“Invisible Man,” for which Ellison is best known, is a big book, in every sense. At nearly 600 pages long, winnowed from more than 800 manuscript pages, it is teeming with characters like a Charles Dickens novel, and has the roving geography of a picaresque, like Mark Twain’s “Huck Finn” (1884). We follow Invisible Man from his high school graduation through his early years at a Southern Black college before his own naïve ambitions and eagerness to please those more powerful than he result in a fateful error in judgment, setting off a chain of events leading to his dismissal from school and his journey through the chaos and excitement of 1940s Harlem. Searching for employment in the city, he experiences the dislocation and uncertainty felt by so many Black Americans who made the move from the rural South to the urban North during the years of the Great Migration. Soon he catches the attention of white leaders of a leftist organization called the Brotherhood that, noticing his talent for moving a crowd, grooms him for leadership. The Brotherhood gives him an identity — quite literally, they assign him a new name that, like his given name, the reader never learns. The action of the novel follows his dawning awareness of his own predicament: that he is an invisible man in the eyes of those who refuse to see him as anything other than a projection of who they want or need for him to be.

Early on in the novel’s more than six-year composition process, Ellison discarded the dominant literary modes among Black writers at the time: naturalism (the idea that environment is determinant of human character) and realism (the effort to represent on the page lived experience in concrete terms), both powerfully exemplified in his friend Richard Wright’s 1940 classic, “ Native Son .” That kind of fiction, Ellison believed, was too restrictive to capture the raucous humor, the quality of intellect and the improvisational spirit of his protagonist. He also resisted, and perhaps resented, the impulse of many white critics and readers to confuse Black fiction with sociology. With “Invisible Man,” Ellison set out to write a novel that would be impossible simply to file and forget.

It should come as no surprise, then, that strange and shocking things happen throughout the novel. Blindfolded Black boys, stripped naked to the waist, fight each other in a boxing ring, then collect their reward by scrambling for coins strewn across an electrified carpet while a jeering audience of wealthy white men look on in anger and amusement. A Black sharecropper impregnates his wife as well as, in a dream state, his teenage daughter, then takes an ax to the cheek from his wife in retribution and somehow survives to sing the blues. A paint factory boasts a state-of-the-art hospital with a machine capable of executing a noninvasive equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy. An eyeball falls out of the dry socket of an incensed party leader, during a leftist committee meeting where a room of mostly white men decide to abandon an entire community of Black supporters in the name of political expediency. A young, unarmed Black man dies at the hands of a white policeman, gunned down in the street for a crime no greater than the unlicensed sale of dancing paper dolls. And Ellison’s narrator, his Invisible Man, writes all of this — Ellison’s novel is his character’s memoir — from his underground retreat in an abandoned coal cellar somewhere “in a border area” of Harlem, illuminated, he tells us, by precisely 1,369 light bulbs.

In 1948, Ellison published an excerpt from his novel in progress, the episode of the blindfolded battle royal, in a journal called ’48: The Magazine of the Year. In those pages, which would become, four years later, Chapter One of the published novel, Ellison generates dissonance between the fanciful details of the scene (the most startling of which is the electrified carpet) and his naturalistic attention to his characters’ bodily functions (they sweat and bleed and even become sexually aroused, though that last detail was excluded from the published excerpt). Enough readers wondered if the story was, in the words of the publication’s editors, “grounded in actual experience” for them to ask its author to write an explanatory note, published four months later under the title “Ralph Ellison Explains.” “The facts themselves are of no moment,” he writes. “The aim is a realism dilated to deal with the almost surreal state of our everyday American life …” With this declaration of literary independence, Ellison demands two remarkable things: that he, and by extension that other Black writers, be granted the full and free exercise of their imaginations; and that realism must necessarily expand to contain the absurdity of everyday American life under segregation and white supremacy: “For all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd,” observes Ellison’s protagonist in the novel’s epilogue.

Dilating realism, in other words, means opening up a space in one’s fiction to reach a verisimilitude of feeling inaccessible through a direct account of incident alone. This approach has radical and necessary value for Black writers and writers from other communities for whom the normative patterns of literary representation fail to account for their lived experience. It’s one way of understanding why Octavia E. Butler invokes time travel to revisit the ravages of slavery in “ Kindred ” (1979). It illuminates Ishmael Reed’s fugitive slave novel, “ Flight to Canada ” (1976), which broadens its narrative frame through wild anachronisms — his characters take commercial airline flights, they watch television news, they deal with the publishing industry, with talent agents — so that the reader can’t forget that the evils of racism and white supremacy still dog us.

In spite of critical acclaim and commercial success — “Invisible Man” was a national best seller and earned Ellison the 1953 National Book Award, beating out Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” — Ellison continued to face criticism from those who rejected a novel that did not play by the rules. Reviewing for The Atlantic, Charles J. Rolo praised the book but argued that “it has faults which cannot simply be shrugged off,” the most damning of which is “a tendency to waver, confusingly, between realism and surrealism.” But this wavering is precisely Ellison’s point. Four years after the novel’s publication, Ellison answered a letter from a professor at a small New Jersey college who asked about the novel’s narrative style: “If you go back to the beginning of the book you will notice, after the Prologue, that the action starts on a fairly naturalistic level,” Ellison explains. “The hero accepts  society and his predicament seems ‘right’ but as he moves through his experiences they become progressively more, for the want of a better word, ‘surrealistic.’ Nothing is as it seems and in the fluidity of society strange juxtapositions lend a quality of nightmare.”

ONE OF THE MOST NIGHTMARISH — and therefore most surreal — scenes comes near the novel’s end. The final chapter begins with gunshots — “like a distant celebration of the Fourth of July” — in retaliation for the murder of Tod Clifton, a charismatic Black youth leader of the Brotherhood who was shot to death in Midtown Manhattan by a white policeman. Following Clifton’s death, Ellison’s protagonist leads the funeral procession and delivers the eulogy for his slain friend, repeating his name time and again to the crowd.  “The story’s too short and too simple,” he says. “His name was Clifton, Tod Clifton, he was unarmed and his death was as senseless as his life was futile.”

As night descends on the city, the people rise up, some in anger over Clifton’s murder; some inspired by the protagonist’s oration; some incited by Ras the Exhorter, now the Destroyer, a magnetic Pan-African community leader who opposes the Brotherhood — especially the protagonist, whom he sees as a race traitor — and channels the people’s rage as a weapon; others take to the streets simply to revel in the chaos. As his nameless narrator walks through Harlem, Ellison floods our senses with impressionistic images, illusions that never quite resolve into tangible form. Looters push a bank safe through the streets amid active gunfire between protesters and police; a ricocheting bullet grazes the narrator, who passes a dead man lying in the street, a crowd gathering around the corpse; a milk wagon, pulled by several men, becomes a makeshift throne upon which “a huge woman in a gingham pinafore sat drinking beer from a barrel” belting out the blues; pale and naked female figures suspended from lampposts, a macabre spectacle, reveal themselves to be store-window mannequins hanged in effigy.

In perhaps the novel’s greatest dilation of reality, Ras makes his way through the streets of Harlem on horseback, dressed as “an Abyssinian chieftain” and brandishing a spear against the white policemen. Ras, the narrator observes, is a “figure more out of a dream than out of Harlem, than out of even this Harlem night, yet real, alive, alarming.” When Ras sees Invisible Man, he cries out “Betrayer!” launching the spear at him, missing wide. The narrator makes one final rhetorical appeal to the crowd, but soon realizes its futility — “I had no words and no eloquence.” He is shocked, at long last, into awareness. With Ras calling for his death, the narrator finds his hands on the spear. Reality and symbolism collapse upon one another. The narrator lets the spear fly and he watches it rip through Ras’s cheeks, locking his jaws. Ras wrestles with the spear as the narrator flees the uncanny scene.

All of this, however, would be too tidy a resolution — the hero vanquishing his antagonist, claiming his own identity as an invisible man — for a book as defiant as this. Just as the novel’s focus closes in on the protagonist, Ellison expands the frame. Still wandering the streets, the narrator overhears a conversation among a small group of Black men; unnoticed, he stays to listen. Over the next several pages, the men pass a bottle back and forth as they talk and shout and laugh about Ras and the riot, conjuring tall tales out of tragic circumstances. Some of the lines read like the source material for Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor stand-up riffs: the Black Everyman as wry observer of the foibles both of white folks and his own folks. “I was drinking me some Budweiser and digging the doings,” one of these down-home rants begins, “when here comes the cops up the street, riding like cowboys, man; and when ole Ras-the-what’s-his-name sees ’em he lets out a roar like a lion and rears way back and starts shooting spurs into that hoss’s ass fast as nickels falling in the subway at going-home time — and gaawd-dam! that’s when you ought to seen him! Say, gimme a taste there, fella.” With chaos, even death, around the corner, these men are somehow still at ease. As readers, it puts us at ease, too, the humor helping metabolize the surreal scene that precedes it by bringing it within the command of the tragicomic eloquence of these street-corner chroniclers. It baffles the protagonist. “Why did they make it seem funny, only funny?” he wonders.

IT TOOK ME UNTIL 2021, on perhaps my 40th time through the book, to give this passage the attention it deserves. Opening my tattered copy of “Invisible Man,” the same one I carried with me up those manor house steps more than half my life ago, my notes appear as palimpsest: layers of thinking and rethinking, circles and underlines, question marks and exclamation points written in a riot of pencil and ink. But I left these pages in the book blank, whether out of puzzlement or neglect. Reading them today, I realize that I now see myself in Ellison more than in his protagonist.

In these pages Ellison understands — I think I do, too — something that his protagonist does not: that these men are exercising their tragicomic awareness of life, a capacity to contain chaos and not to fall victim to nihilism. Their laughter is necessary equipment for living while Black in America, something the narrator will have to write his memoir to learn — something that Ellison himself had to learn.  In a long-labored-upon essay titled “An Extravagance of Laughter,” published in “Going to the Territory,” Ellison recalls his own experience confronting Jim Crow racism as a college student in Alabama during the 1930s. “My problem,” he writes, “was that I couldn’t completely dismiss such experiences with laughter. I brooded and tried to make sense of it beyond that provided by our ancestral wisdom.”

“Invisible Man” demands to be read, then, not solely as an indictment of white supremacy’s obliterating gaze, but as a tall tale that dilates our frame of reality to entertain us, and by entertaining us perhaps to save us. During a 1955 interview with The Paris Review, Ellison responded with exasperation at his interviewers’ self-serious line of questioning about his novel. “Look,” he finally asks, “didn’t you find the book at all funny ?” When questioned by those same interviewers about whether his novel would still be read in 20 years, Ellison was dubious. “It’s not an important novel … many of the immediate issues are rapidly fading away.”

Behind this humility is a remarkable claim. Ellison believed — as someone who grew up in segregation perhaps he had to believe — that the conditions his novel exposes (racial discrimination, the erasure of Black identity, the failings of American democracy) might soon improve to the point that the book would no longer resonate. Almost 70 years after his novel’s publication and nearly 30 years after his death, we now know what Ellison could not: that many of the conditions he described have not only persisted but propagated. This fact, along with Ellison’s timeless talent, is why the novel endures. Its power lies in how it confronts racism and white supremacy with a realism that dilates to contain the surreal nature of American life. It lies in its blues-toned understanding of how people endure and even make beauty out of brutal experience by, as Ellison elsewhere describes it, choosing “to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” This is the challenge that “Invisible Man” sets out. And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, it speaks for us?

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INVISIBLE MAN

by Ralph Ellison ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 1952

An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem. His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power. This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.

Pub Date: April 7, 1952

ISBN: 0679732764

Page Count: 616

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952

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by Ralph Ellison and edited by John Callahan and Adam Bradley

by Ralph Ellison & Albert Murray & edited by Albert Murray & John F. Callahan

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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PERSPECTIVES

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.

Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

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Invisible Jet Comics

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159 W Portal Ave

San Francisco, CA 94127

West Portal

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About the Business

Comics for Everyone! Graphic novels and comics for younger audiences from little ones to young adult. New single issues every Wednesday and we offer subscriptions (pull boxes) with no minimum! Large selection of graphic novels and omnibus books. Back issue browser section with modern, vintage, and reduced priced single issue comics. …

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I have really come to love this store. There's a huge collection of back issues, most priced at cover price, and just a really varied collection of comics across genres. Comic stores are not gotten here so this is clearly a labor of love, though I wish the owner all the financial success in the world too. My favorite thing about this store is the presentation of new / ongoing series. Everything is well organized and tab marked. It's a joy to peruse.

Invisible Jet is a great addition to the West Portal neighborhood--like the sign says, there's comics for everyone, from kid-friendly graphic novels to the mainstream superheroes and more erudite and mature stuff. It's a welcoming space for all ages, and proprietor Kris is super-friendly and willing to help you find the book you'll love. Stop by and say hi to the full sized Iron Man statue inside.

Owner Kris P. has suggestions for all readers!

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