The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson

I am on a roll with Richard Matheson; the man can sure tell a good story. The Shrinking Man has a absurd premise, but I think Matheson was using it as a platform to deconstruct the male role in modern society. What makes a man, a man?

While on holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray shortly after he accidentally ingests insecticide. The radioactivity acts as a catalyst for the bug spray, causing his body to shrink at a rate of approximately 1/7 of an inch per day. A few weeks later, Carey can no longer deny the truth: not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was and deduces, to his dismay, that his body will continue to shrink.

Scott Carey is not a likeable character from the start. But as the story progresses, I understand his despair and anguish. Here is a man who is not just shrinking physically, his role as a husband, a father and his entire being are gradually eroding to oblivion. Contrary to what the world tells us, size does matter.

God sure has a dark sense of humour. Even as Scott shrinks, his desire for intimacy with his wife never reduces. It is disarmingly moving to see him try to clutch on to these things. If you take away a man’s height, power, stature, respect and his primal need to be with someone and the ability to provide, what does that make him? Is he still a man?

I know Matheson can tell a good yarn through his short stories, but a novel is a whole different ball game and he has come up tops. Interspersed in the main narrative are flashbacks detailing his painful emasculation of his role as a man, and the main storyline is a story of survival in a cellar of horrors. He has to battle a spider, birds, a cat and trekking across landscapes searching for scraps of food and water. All through it, I wondered how he got separated with his family and landed up in the cellar. It was superbly explained near the end.

The Shrinking Man ends on a heroic note as he engages the spider in a final battle and the narrative hits a bittersweet end that is surprising and stirringly hopeful. This is a poignant tale of man’s need to be needed and an excellent study of masculinity and loneliness.

PS – I may give the 1957 movie a shot. There is a cool Twilight Zone vibe about it.