Friends and Society: Invisible by Pete Hautman

Doug Hanson is a nerd, an outcast, and a target for bullies due to his strange behavior, most specifically his stalking of his classmate Melissa. He is obsessed with building a matchstick town and railway in his basement.  Doug sees a psychiatrist  and is supposed to take medication (he doesn't always) to help him deal with his issues, particularly with a painful secret from his past, a secret he is really hiding from himself.  Still, Doug's life isn't all bad: he always has Andy. Andy is everything Doug is not: athletic, handsome, popular.  Despite their drastic differences, though, Doug and Andy are the best of friends.  Next door neighbors, the two boys talk every night.  The only thing they don't talk about is what happened at the Tuttle Place, although this incident is clearly the key to what's really wrong with Doug and why his parents are not pleased about his ongoing friendship with Andy.  It is clear Doug is headed for a catastrophe and eventually he must come face-to-face with what happened that night at the Tuttle Place.  The truth is that Doug and Andy were playing with matches at the Tuttle Place and accidentally started a fire, a fire that killed Andy.  Doug couldn't accept a reality without Andy, so he continued their friendship in his mind.  Finally forced to accept the truth about his friend, Doug is driven to a crisis point and sets fire to his matchstick creation.  The end of the novel is ambiguous: Doug finds himself a patient at the Madham Burn Unit, Madham being the name of his matchstick town.  It is up to the reader to decide whether Doug survived the fire and has simply created another false reality for himself to help him deal with the truth about his life or if Doug actually died in the fire.

I truly enjoyed Invisible.  While some readers may figure out the truth of the story long before it is revealed, I was able to wrap myself up in Doug's world and the twist ending totally worked on me.  Sure, I knew something was wrong and that the Tuttle Place was the key to the truth, but I let myself be carried along by Doug and his story.  The fact is that there are so many Dougs out there, students who are dealing with serious issues, who are bullied and treated as outcasts, who's reality is so dim they need an escape, whether that escape be a false reality as in Doug's case or whether it be an escape into books, video games, or drugs.  That's what really makes this book so powerful: that fact that it is so timely.  While this book was published in 2006, the topic of bullying brought up in the novel has really come to the forefront over the last year or so.  Teenagers have trouble dealing with and accepting those who, like Doug, are different, whose behavior seems bizarre, unexplainable, and maybe even dangerous. Doug's story shows, though, that there is always an explanation, if one is willing to dig deep enough.

References

Hautman, P. (2006). Invisible. New York: Simon and Schuster.