The FBOTU Book Club discussion of Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman is now open! Feel free to jump right in and tell us what you thought about the book. Since we’re operating on the premise that all involved in the discussion have read the book, there will be SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the book yet, you might want to tread lightly, or go read it and then come back and join in!

You’re allowed to be as honest as you like, but no matter what your opinion of the book might be, try to back it up with some examples. Other than that, there’s no hard and fast rules or guidelines to this.

To get us started, I’ll throw this discussion topic out there. But feel free to bring up any other topics or share whatever thoughts or feelings you might have!

In depicting our villain and his nemeses, Grossman seems to suggest that Doctor Impossible’s transformation into a supervillain comes from a very human, very emotional place. In contrast, the superheroes are often described as grotesque, thoughtless and out of touch with the emotions and motivations of others. Do you think he’s saying there’s more humanity in frailty than in super strength?

I find it interesting that both of the people we see the story through are outcasts in the world of the hero.  Dr. Impossible is, obviously, the ostensible villain and Fatale is the newbie trying to make her way in a circle she knows she’s not a part of.  Impossible sees the heroes as grotesque because he comes from a place of disenfranchisement.  Fatale sees the heroes as unapproachable, almost alien entities. 

Both characters have super-strength, but both resent it in some way.  Impossible perhaps because he’s not as strong as other heroes and because he knows that the physical strength he has doesn’t make him one of the cool kids.  Deep down, he still carries the insecurity and self-doubt that drove him to his obsession with the zeta radiation.  Fatale, on the other hand, resents her strength because she is constantly aware of how abnormal it makes her.  She spends her time alone, resigned to the fact that people think she’s either too strange or too frightening to approach, never mind a romantic encounter.  We only get hints of who she was before the accident, but she seems to spring from the same place of self-doubt that Impossible comes from.

Super strength is a common fantasy, and superhero powers are often wish fulfillment daydreams.  But what happens when that strength is real?  Are you no longer human? 

One thing that puzzles me…every chapter begins with either a ray gun or a bionic eye to signify if the chapter is told through Impossible or Fatale’s view.  But the last chapter has the Fatale symbol with a chapter obviously told from Impossible’s view.  It may be a simple error…or it may signify that the two characters are more alike then they know.

I love Doctor Impossible’s origins as the outsider. I definitely related as a gay man, looking back at my own childhood as an observer outside the realm of the other kids, the popular kids, the “normal” kids. Early in the book, Doc says of his powers, “It wouldn’t make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. If you’re different you always know it, and you can’t fix it even if you want to.” His transformation into a supervillain reads like a coming out survival story: “When you can’t bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn’t you anymore; you’ve changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all.”

I hadn’t thought about Fatale being an outsider as well, but you’re definitely right. If Doctor Impossible is the nerd that the cool kids ignore, then Fatale is the new kid they begrudgingly let into their circle as long as she’s useful.

I love all the layers of longing for acceptance and a place to fit in. Or if there is no place, then the drive to “reign in his or her personal hell.”

CHANCE

It’s not so surprising that the person Fatale warms up to the most is Lily, who WAS one of the popular kids and embraced her outsider identity after she was changed. 

I do appreciate the way Impossible was so humanized in the book.  He’s not the sneering, tie-you-to-the-train-tracks villain.  You get to see his motivation, his inner struggle, and after a while, his attempts at world domination seem like a natural progression.  The heroes, by comparison, seem to be cast in a very harsh light.  I hesitate to use the word “Nietzschian” because I’m not too familiar with his work and his name gets bandied around a lot by people who don’t know what he’s about, but it’s the first word that popped into my head.  What happens when all these heroes decide to fight together?  While most of the world might view them as saviors, it’s very easy to see how they could be considered tyrannical bullies, using their mighty powers to force people into their philosophy.  How can one be sure that the “truth and justice” they administer is for the greater good?

Okay, I’ll be the bad guy: I wasn’t thrilled with or by this book.  Furthermore, I’ll say it’s a minor attempt to co-opt the genre into a more broadly accepted medium—you know, like every single summer movie since 2003.

I read it last year, when a friend held an event with the author at his store.  Said friend refuses to read comics, but simply love, love, loved the novel.  So, of course, I had to check it out.  I took the signed first edition he had set aside for me home, crawled into bed one night, started reading and…  though it was fun in small doses, my excitement faded as I read.

That’s not to say that I hated it. There were certainly elements that I enjoyed throughout. And, as a standard superhero vs. evil genius story, it’s serviceable.  I just didn’t find anything new there.

More importantly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a comic book-book for people who’ve never read a comic book.  It didn’t for a moment seem to me to rise above the gimmick, either becoming a serious (or just very fun) superhero story or a committed satire.  It’s…  just another superhero story that could have been lifted off the pages of any one of a number of forgotten bronze age comics.  And had it been a traditional comic and not a superhero genre exercise in prose, I would have forgotten it before I closed the back cover.

That brings me to another problem I had with the book: the first person prose is not only a gimmick upon a gimmick, but also an exceedingly poor choice, given the narrators. And it’s difficult to argue that it isn’t just another gimmick, unless you can accept that Grossman’s work could more readily be taken for the work of a super genius than that of a moderately talented novelist.

All in all, I felt like Grossman was doing a standard superhero story in a format that would make it -seem- inventive without actually bringing anything new or especially inspired to the table.  Or maybe it was just a sort of backdoor spec script.

Oh well.  Sorry to be the hater.  I really did want to love this book.

Hey, we can’t all love the book, right?  At least people are still discussing it.  I can see why you might dislike the book from your viewpoint.  Still, even without the gimmick, I really enjoyed a few of the characters quite a bit.