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 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. ( )

I saw the movie first and liked it enough to hope the book was better. It wasn't. ( )

The basic story is that the author/narrator is a psychotherapist in a mental institution, where a new patient by the name of “prot” (rhymes with goat) arrives. He claims to be a visitor from the planet K-PAX, and is only visiting Earth to study.

The narrator disbelieves him, instead taking him to be a facet of a split personality that the actual bodily inhabitant created and is hiding behind. He uses various psychotherapeutic methods to coax the supposed hidden personality out, but at the same time prot is able to help many other patients of the institution in ways that the clinical staff just couldn’t do previously.

Over the course of the trilogy, various truths and untruths about prot are discovered, along with the same about the narrator. prot enables him to realise things about himself and his own family which had passed him by, including some quite remarkable insights.

The major question throughout the books is whether prot is what he says he is: an alien, or if the narrator’s diagnosis is correct. This ambiguity dominates the plot and the narrator’s thinking, and what seems like a resolution is often quickly disproved.

With regards to the supporting characters, I have to say that a good few of the other patients are very quickly glossed over, and some forgotten until suddenly returning to the action. Their mental deficiencies or illnesses are very conveniently non-identical and somewhat amusingly described, but there’s no real depth to them.

Style-wise, many of the chapters are supposed transcripts of the narrator’s sessions with prot, and so are full of short, snappy, back-and-forth dialogue, followed by the narrator’s conclusions at the end of each session. It can get a little repetitive after 700-odd pages, but the plot is sufficiently varied to keep things interesting.

I’ve not seen the film, but I have a vague recollection of Kevin Spacey being in the title role, and it helped to visualise prot with Spacey’s face/mannerisms. A lot of what prot does is physical in nature, and to apply an existing face to him was a big plus.

Is it worth reading? I’d say that the first book is just about sufficient as an intro to the world of prot, and it has a pretty hefty cliffhanger which means that the second is a necessity. For me, the third part of the trilogy was definitely an afterthought, as things are relatively nicely wrapped up earlier in the grand scheme of things. ( )