By H.F. SAINT (Atheneum; 1987)

This eighties updating of THE INVISIBLE MAN has been out of print for over thirty years, but was quite popular in its day.  MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN also set some kind of record for book club and film rights, netting its author, whose first novel it was, a reported $2.5 million.

Harry F. Saint (credited as “H.F. Saint” in a deliberate play on H.G. Wells), a real estate investor, aimed to write a book “that I thought would have some chance of doing well enough that I could spend the rest of my life writing.”  Appropriately, Saint has essentially become invisible in the years since the book was published (and the mediocre John Carpenter directed film adaptation was released), having retired to France and vanished entirely from the spotlight.

H.G. Wells used THE INVISIBLE MAN to illuminate a concept introduced in Plato’s RING OF GYGES, which detailed how invisibility leads to evil (a point repeated in subsequent invisibility narratives like the novel A PERFECTLY NATURAL ACT and the Paul Verhoeven flick HOLLOW MAN).  H.F. Saint had more commercial aims, and so ignores the darkness of Plato’s parable; Saint’s protagonist does some questionable things, but overall stays on the straight-and-narrow path.

That fellow’s name is Nick Halloway, who narrates the book, as the title portends, in the form of a memoir.  He’s not an especially compelling character, being a slick, cynical and selfish securities analyst.  It takes until page 48 for Nick to become interesting, as he’s caught in a botched scientific experiment that renders him invisible.  Attempting to adjust to this condition, and fleeing an officious government-appointed sociopath named David Jenkins, Nick winds up in New York City, where he hides out in men’s clubs and empty apartments.  Eventually Nick decides to make the best of his situation, sitting in on confidential business meetings and using the knowledge he gleans to purchase lucrative stocks.  To spend the money he earns Nick opens a bank account for one “Jonathan Crosby.”

The novel is intelligently constructed, and written in an elegant brogue that marries the commercial with the literary.  The subject matter carries great metaphoric weight, with Nick’s condition providing a potent representation of 1980s yuppiedom, but that’s never allowed to get in the way of the narrative momentum, or the faux scientific detail.

The properties of invisibility are convincingly delineated, with challenges that include sleeping (being invisible, Nick’s eyelids are completely useless), eating (he can only ingest clear foods, as its digestion in his body is fully visible), clothing oneself (Nick has to live his life nude) and the procurement of invisible objects (all held by Jenkins, forcing Nick to break into his headquarters).  The proceedings are never allowed to become too bleak or horrific, although they threaten to in the third act, when Nick meets Alice, an attractive woman with whom he makes contact by sexually assaulting her.

Saint has claimed the novel sprung from an image of a woman caressing an invisible man, and that image evidently informed Nick’s overtly carnal relationship with Alice.  Luckily for him she fully reciprocates his affections, assuaging something else Saint illuminates with great vividness: loneliness.

That aspect isn’t as harrowingly depicted as it was in Ken Grimwood’s REPLAY (another well-received fantasy-themed bestseller from the mid-1980s), with Saint making sure to keep his account lively and optimistic.  That’s not a bad thing, as MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, despite some overwritten passages (a lengthy chapter in which Nick listening to Jenkins and his goons talking about him could have stood to be pared down), is never less than thoroughly entertaining.  My preference, however, is for the hard stuff.