Gene Brewer

I was first introduced to K-Pax when I saw the film starring Kevin Spacey. It was a wonderful movie and I immediately went out and bought the book, K-Pax.

The first book was great and was very much the same as the film. I enjoyed both.

Having been so happy with both the original book and the film I bought K-Pax II and K-Pax III.

I'm sorry, but these did not work for me. The first book contained mystery, awe, humour and intrigue. The second and third books added nothing to the first and K-Pax show more III especially, destroyed the magic that was created in the initial book. It felt to me that the second and third books were only written to make money and to cash in on the success of the first. Having read the author's notes on these books I realise this was indeed the case.

The first book was a wonderful story, and it was complete. It created a world of mystery and awe that did not need to be explained or extended. Books II and III, IMNSHO, should never have been written. show less

Read this prior to finally seeing the movie. Not entirely certain what all the fuss is about and definitely not convinced I need to read more of the series. Not bad, just not.... impactful?

Perhaps the movie goes some way to helping it out.

The problem is... Well, it's all been done before, hasn't it? And with much more meaning and depth. Strange in a Strange Land for one. Though you can argue there are different themes at play and they aren't identical characters with identical missions, it show more still comes down to someone says they're an alien visitor, the complain bitterly about the way we do things here, and then in the final act they ambiguously turn out either to be maybe, or not to be definitely, an alien. Brewer even name checks a few similar ideas in the final pages.

It just feels like he could have gone harder and written more meaningfully. show less

A patient about whom nothing is known is brought to the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute. He claims to be a visitor from K-PAX, a utopian paradise of a planet where there are no laws, governments, religion or cruelty of any kind. He is here to write a report on B-TIK (commonly known by us as Planet Earth).

Prot, as he calls himself, is one of the most remarkable protagonists of a novel I've read about lately. He is an empath and can connect even with some of the most shelled-in inmates at the show more hospital, such as autists. He can also allegedly talk to animals, see light into the ultraviolet specter and travel at super-light speed. It's done with mirrors.

Naturally, he is immediately diagnosed with a multiple personality disorder - he is supposed to be an alter ego of a young man somewhere from the American southwest. Is he really, though? Even his doctor sometimes doubts the theory, since prot is so sure of himself and can provide on demand the details of K-PAX history, geology and even the arrangement of constellations visible from K-PAX's surface. Much of the novel occupies itself with finding out about the life of prot's alter ego and the presumably horrible events that have caused him to assume a different dominant personality. We're nearly crossing into a sort of whodunit territory here as a crime possibly connected to prot's alter ego is being slowly uncovered by prot's psychiatrist and a journalist.

An interesting approach with K-PAX is that the author, Gene Brewer, is a character in the novel - prot's psychiatrist at the Institute. This, plus the fact that he actually refers to the novel inside of it, makes you think that the story is real, non-fictional. Until too improbable things start happening, that is. It's kind of a cheap trick, but it worked on me, for a while at least. Maybe I'm just too gullible, although of course I haven't seen the movie yet.

Not everything is rosy. Prot's bleak vision of humanity's future and his failure to find anything beautiful in our society is hard to argue against, but it does kind of act as a downer and perhaps sometimes even as the author's attempt of pushing certain personal convictions down our throat. I didn't really mind, since my own personal world-view is pretty much one-on-one with that, but consider yourself forewarned. There's also the case that a lot of problems that prot sees are really specific to American, or at the very least, Western society and so his simultaneously hilarious and horrifying report (included as a bonus content to the Omnibus version) reflects mostly those issues (for example, proudly wallowing in ignorance, the ongoing process of numbing oneself with the help of popular media, especially TV, capitalist exploitation of the working class and tendencies towards war).

I am also of the opinion that the third part, The Worlds of prot, is rather unnecessary and only serves to artificially lengthen the series, since it doesn't actually add anything new to either prot's personality or the alter ego's past, but is instead rather heavy on prot's supernatural abilities. This only breaks the credibility of the novel and the feeling of immersion.

In the end, though, K-PAX is still a rather excellent, thought-provoking and often hilarious look into human psychology, as well as human society. Highly recommended. show less

Having seen the film countless times and just now getting around to reading the book, I found it rather entertaining and felt they might have been better off sticking to the book rather than modifying it for the film. That said, Kevin Spacey does a remarkable job playing 'prot', and the book character is equally colorful. I enjoyed it thoroughly and would recommend it to people that may not have seen the film yet.