There’s a moment midway through Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible when Doctor Impossible, evil supergenius and half of the novel’s narratory binary (the other is a previously unemployable cyborg named Fatale who is given her first shot at the superhero big leagues) finds himself in a sticky situation. While sitting in a Manhattan Starbucks sipping a latte, he is recognized by a passing member of the Champions (the novel’s version of the Justice League or X-Men) named Blackwolf. Caught off guard, Doctor Impossible is reduced to the indignity of masking his face and his identity with a paper napkin and Scotch tape, throwing a coffee mug at Blackwolf in order to buy time and muttering to himself, “Shit shit shit” while manically attempting to improvise a defense for the melee about to ensue between him and the quickly assembling team of Champions outside.
This frantic, slapstick scene, and the all-out superpowered throw-down that follows in the streets of New York, illustrate simultaneously the most entertaining and the most frustrating elements of Soon I Will Be Invincible, a novel that purports to invert the clichés of superheroes even as it reinvents them. Although moments of verisimilar insight into Doctor Impossible’s thought processes are amusing, they also betray an underlying ambiguity concerning the book’s narrative goals. On the one hand, Grossman seems concerned with giving us the story behind the story, a self-reflexive and comedic expose of what life is really like with uncanny superpowers or a devastating intellect. However, the book also seems content to lose itself for long stretches in the grandiose mythmaking of the genre.
For every self-effacing moment of parody or satire, Grossman injects an attempt at sweeping narrative arch, compelling back story, or genuinely human motivation. The result is disorienting. Should we care for these “metahumans” or not? Moreover, the novel suggests that this subversion of the traditional superstory is something new. In fact, recent adaptations of comic books cropping up in multiplexes around the globe have been nothing if not self-consciously and flirtatiously satiric with regard to their source material, whether it’s Edward Norton as Bruce Banner misspeaking his catchphrase in Portuguese (“You wouldn’t like me when I’m ... hungry.”), or Hugh Jackman’s wry comments as Wolverine regarding yellow spandex, or simply Stan Lee’s insistence on a cameo in every big screen outing from Marvel.
Superhero stories by their very nature explore the borders between the banal and the unique, the attempts to conduct a “normal life” in the face of extremely abnormal circumstances. And of course, glimpses into the flawed psychology that lead one to don mask and cape are more intriguing than a simple paradigm of Truth, Justice and the American Way. (Everyone knows Batman is more interesting as a person than Superman; just look at the critical response to their most recent Hollywood iterations.)
Rather than reinventing the clichés of the genre, as the flashy blurb from Wired Magazine on the book’s cover suggests, Soon I Will Be Invincible merely retreads them. Although the laughter is spontaneous and genuine, in the end we’re left wondering why we’re supposed to care.