A while ago, a friend introduced me to the concept of Mr. Exposition Man. Mr. Exposition man is a superhero with only one power — the ability to summarize backstory at blinding speed. Mr. Exposition Man can appear at any time and take on the guise of any character: wherever there is a sloppily plotted film, comic book, or novel, wherever a bad guy has struck and the local officials are baffled and an author didn’t feel like taking the time to set up the scene, someone will say, “Who would do such a thing?” At this signal, Mr. Exposition Man will step out of a shadowy corner, saying, “It all started back in 1987…”
Mr. Exposition Man’s magical appearance relieves the need to do the hard work of foreshadowing, character development, or smooth transitions. That’s why he appears so often in the sorts of films that spend fifty times more on special effects as they do on a screenwriter. When I picked up Austin Grossman’s new novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, a more literary treatment of a world peopled with superheroes and arch-nemeses, I was hoping that Grossman would not feel the need to employ Mr. Exposition Man’s services. Grossman is well known in the world of video game design, as well as a PhD candidate in English Lit at UC Berkeley. He also happens to be the twin brother of sci-fi novelist and Time Magazine book critic Lev Grossman. The Grossman twins are both Harvard grads, and all of this is the kind of stuff that has book jacket copy writers at major houses salivating.
Austin Grossman knows his stuff. He has clearly spent a lifetime steeped in comic book lore and his superhero knowledge is vast and encyclopedic. The novel’s premise is similar to that of Alan Moore’s classic Watchmen or even to the pixar movie The Incredibles. It takes place in a sort of counter-factual present day, in which a significant minority of humans have super powers, and this causes them no end of emotional, moral, and physical torment. “This morning on Planet Earth, there are one thousand six hundred and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otheriwise-powered persons,” the book opens. These members of the “powered community,” or “metahumans” as they prefer to be called, came by their abilities in myriad ways. “Once in a hundred million times, a lifetime of factors align, and at the right moment something new coalesces out of high-tech industrial waste, genetic predisposition, and willpower, with a dash of magic or alien invention,” one of our two narrators, Fatale, explains. “It started happening more often in the early 1950s, and no one knows why — nuclear power plants, alien contact, chlorinated water, or too many people dancing the Twist.”
Grossman alternates the action between two narrators, one on the side of the forces of light and the other for the forces of darkness. Dr. Impossible, an angry narcissist with childhood problems, developed his abilities after being accidentally hit with a “zeta beam.” As the book opens he is being held in a special prison, a holding facility for captured supervillains — but being, of course, a supervillain means he escapes in short order. In the custody of two young, green interrogators, he makes quick work of them. “They can’t believe they’re interrogating me, the terror who held the Supersquadron at bay for over a decade. A guy who stood in the oval office and told the President of the United States to call him Emperor.” (anyone else feel the impulse to insert a Dick Cheney joke here?) “And now I’m inches away, chained… I see no reason why I should make this easy for them.” His archnemesis, the golden boy, American hero, unbeatably powerful CoreFire, has disappeared, and is maybe dead. Now, finally, Dr. Impossible believes, he will be unstoppable.
The rest of the chapters are narrated by Fatale, a fascinating, complex creation for whom being a “hero” is more a curse and burden than a gift. Fatale is half a woman wired and grafted inside a 400-pound, 6-foot-7-inch metal and elecronic body. She has no memory of who she was before half of her was sheared away by a bus and a stone wall in Sao Paolo, no life before the top-secret army “super soldier” program turned her into this cyborgian thing. When she is recruited to join a famous hero team called the Champions in order to fight the newly emboldened Dr. Impossible, she takes the job. How could she not? What else could she possibly do?
