The LA Times’ Scott Timberg provides a basic overview of Philip K. Dick’s final years, which Dick spent living in Orange County when it was in its late Reagan period.
This piece makes mention of the forthcoming film adaptation of one of Dick’s finest novels, “Radio Free Albemuth.” I’m always torn when it comes to filmed versions of novels I love. As a playwright, I love what actors and directors bring to words — the good actors and directors, anyway. But film is a different medium; a novel doesn’t need anyone but the writer. So, in general, I stay away. That didn’t prevent me from seeing the filmed version of “The Road” (more about that later), and I’m still itching to see that film version of “Anna Karenina,” because Alfred Molina seems as though he’d be so perfectly cast as Levin. Of course, once I heard that Molina was playing Levin, I haven’t been able to think of Levin in any other form — and that’s part of the problem.
This story also mentions Dick’s “realist” novels. For many years, I eagerly awaited their posthumous publication; then, unfortunately, they started to get published. “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” which was published in Dick’s lifetime, is an ingenious and completely captivating postmodern story told from three different points of view; ultimately, the entire story may be a lie (or fiction) told by the self-professed “crap artist” of the title. It’s a book that should stand alongside far better known literary American novels of the 20th century. “Mary and the Giant” has the benefit of an explosive story — a young white girl takes up with a large African-American singer and then an elderly shopkeeper — but is utterly lacking thematic unity; its ending leaves you wondering what it was all about. “Voices from the Street,” written in 1952 and finally published in 2007, makes for less engaging reading than the Chinese phone book. Characters natter on endlessly about nothing. I tried twice to read it and got only halfway. Here’s a review from “In Milton Lumky Territory” that might speak for most of the non-science-fiction books Dick wrote:
Like many of Dick’s main characters in his realistic novels, Bruce and Susan decide they need to move to start again—but missing from most of these novels is what happens to the characters after they have moved. Similarly, the tone of In Milton Lumky Territory is not very adroit; as in his science fiction novels, the story can feel sparse and padded with unneeded adjectives. There is little of the wild conjecture that one finds in Dick’s more popular books; rather than oppressive and violent governments of the future, there are toxic personalities to avoid.
That sounds about right: Nothing happens in these books. And no, not much happens in Philip Roth’s latest book either, but it happens far more interestingly because the internal life of the protagonist is so deeply plumbed.
These negatives about the realist novels aside (and, again, one of them is excellent), I’m confident that Philip K. Dick’s legend and influence will grow even higher. Edgar Allan Poe was a far worse writer, one given to lugubrious prose in his fiction and overstressed cadences in his poetry, but we remember him for inventing the detective story and the gothic horror tale. Dick has made no less an impact in his paranoid but telling vision of an overcommercialized culture controled by the colation of government, business, and celebrity. This vision is best expressed as a whole in three books — “Ubik,” “Radio Free Albemuth,” and “Confessions of a Crap Artist”– and they remain recommended.
