The Impossibles — Reading Companion

A Voice of Self-Deprecation

Malone's internal monologue is the primary vehicle for characterization. He awards himself medals for getting out of bed and makes mental notes to apologize to Boyd for past roughness. The narration lingers on his physical suffering with a comic precision: sunlight is described as "searing its way through the face's closed eyelids," and he fantasizes about mausoleums as "nice, cool, dark places." This self-deprecating voice, full of exaggerated self-pity and wry observation, establishes a protagonist who is both unreliable and endearing.

Extended Metaphor as Narrative Device

The authors employ an extended metaphor to describe sunlight's journey from the sun to Malone's hotel room, tracing photons through space, the ionosphere, ozone, and finally a window. This passage, which spans several paragraphs, personifies light as an epic traveler whose "million-year epic" ends by "illuminating a face" that "responded with something less than pleasure." The technique defamiliarizes a mundane experience, turning a hangover into a cosmic event. It also showcases the authors' willingness to pause plot for stylistic flourish.

The Mundane and the Psychic

Despite the catalog subject "Psychic ability," the excerpts focus on ordinary details: a hangover, a forgotten show called The Hot Seat, a girlfriend named Dorothy. Malone's psychic abilities are not mentioned in the provided text. This suggests the novel grounds its speculative elements in quotidian reality. The contrast between the extraordinary (the FBI's involvement with psychic phenomena) and the banal (Malone's struggle to wake up) is a deliberate structural choice, likely used to make the fantastic feel plausible.

Collaborative Authorship and Tone

The prefatory material, written in a shared first-person voice, describes the book as written "in six days" and includes playful biographical notes about the authors' hobbies ("leaping to conclusions"). This irreverent tone carries into the novel. The narration's willingness to mock its protagonist and indulge in digressions suggests a collaborative sensibility that prioritizes entertainment over strict plotting. Readers should expect a voice that is knowingly clever, occasionally self-indulgent, and always aware of its own absurdity.

The Impossibles rewards attention to its prose style and narrative voice. The authors' choices—from the extended sunlight metaphor to Malone's self-deprecating interiority—create a distinctive texture that distinguishes this novel from more earnest science fiction. Readers may find that the pleasure of the book lies less in its plot than in the sardonic, playful sensibility that shapes every sentence.

Reading about the protagonist’s sardonic voice, I remembered my own dry grin during a long bus ride, the way humor kept a strange day bearable. It wasn’t the same plot, but the tone felt kin to something in Vigorish — Text and Context, which once made me pause mid-page, simply nodding at the page’s quiet handling of life’s odd edges. A familiar companionship, really.