That Shrinking Feeling

I took a holiday from all forms of fiction over the duration of our recent trip. And I've not had much of a chance to read a lot since we got back as things, especially work 'things', have been so busy. I've made a bit of progress though in Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man, the last of the four novels that comprise American Science Fiction, Four Classic Novels, 1953 - 1956.

To be honest, I'm not sure this is genuine sci-fi, though I can understand why it's seen as a bit of a classic (along with the film The Incredible Shrinking Man, of which Matheson wrote the screenplay.) I see it, rather, as fantasy, very much in the vein of Stephen King's Bachman novels. It reminds me particularly of Thinner, the premise being very similar, though Shrinking Man entirely lacks the gothic apparatus of King's intense meditation on losing one's body. What it certainly has got is a similar intensity, pursuing without any let-up the single-minded, and actually quite inexplicable notion of the protagonist's body remorselessly reducing in size.

Normally I try and avoid cleverly metaphorical readings of this kind of fiction, the kind in which the critic tells you what the novel is really about. But in this case it seems to me obvious that Matheson is obsessed with the notion of the loss of masculinity and the various humiliations involved, and, in the context of the hyper-masculine culture of 1950s America beginning to feel threatened by the stirrings of feminist awareness, understandably so. It's striking just how unlikeable he's prepared to make his protagonist.