Dickering over Philip K. Dick
This week’s New Yorker has an excellent appraisal of Philip K. Dick by Adam Gopnik. You can read it here.
Dick, for those who’ve only recently tuned into this blog, is a writer whose work I’ve been following closely for 30 years. I’ve read almost all of his books (I’m still trying to get through the excruciating mainstream novel “Voices from the Street” — if “trying to get through” means “allowing it to collect dust on my nightstand.”), as well as a few biographies. Gopnik does a good job of looking at Dick’s body of work, correcting some strongly held bad judgments or misperceptions by Dick’s ardent admirers, and placing him where he more aptly belongs. Among other salient points, he:
- locates Dick as a satirist, alongside Swift, identifying “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” as a take on middle-class escapism, “Clans of the Alphane Moon” as a take on the Johnson-Nixon years, and “Ubik,” most hilariously, as a perverse cultural wish-fulfillment dream, one where people can actually speak with the dead, “but, when you go to speak with them, there is static and missed connections and interference, and then you argue over your bill.”
- downgrades “The Man in the High Castle” (“the book that made Dick famous”) in favor of “his masterpiece,” “Ubik.” I concur, but would add a masterpiece: “Confessions of a Crap Artist.”
- corrects the notion that Dick was somehow neglected in his lifetime. “You can find unfairly neglected writers in America; Dick, with a steady and attentive transatlantic audience, was never one of them.” Let me just say that, somehow, in a house in the woods of southern New Jersey far from any bookstore and in the early 1970’s before the creation of Amazon.com, that house somehow had dozens of Philip K. Dick books. So he couldn’t have been that obscure.
- and, finally, he concludes that while “all this remains thrilling and funny … the trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut — or, for that matter, Chesterton or Tolkien — as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a hack’s habits….” While I disagree that Dick won’t be ranked alongside Vonnegut (he already is), or, for some of us, above Tolkien, I will repeat what I said years ago to a friend: “Nobody reads Philip K. Dick for the writing.”
Perhaps Gopnik’s most salient point, in an essay that is overall very smart about its subject and filled with insight, may be this, from his opening:
“There’s nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him. … The combination of evident value and apparent secrecy makes Elmore Leonard fans feel more for their hero than Borges lovers are allowed to feel for theirs. … Eventually, enough of these secret fans grow up and get together, and the writer is designated a Genius, acquiring all the encumbrances of genius: fans, notes, annotated editions, and gently disparaging comprehensive reviews.”
Guilty as charged, your honor. But… what is the downside? All readers hope to find writers who “speak to their condition.” In adolescence it may be Philip K. Dick; in college it may be Chaucer and Beckett. In middle adulthood, heaven help us, we may light a pipe and start reading Updike seriously. If we want writers who don’t speak to us, I’m sure we can find them. Personally, I could start reading Mitch Albom, or all those people who write books about their dog.
Philip K. Dick never believed anything directly in front of him. I don’t know why, but neither have I. I wish the bad writing were better, but I can overlook it because the rest of the view is so eye-opening. I’m glad Gopnik doesn’t hold Dick’s science fiction genre against him. As I remind my students, Samuel Beckett, darling of existentialist artists, was a fan of detective fiction. Just because it’s genre doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy.
August 18th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Recently read PKD’s novel THE ZAP GUN, complete with ‘alien slavers from Sirius’. While it can be seen as a satire on the arms race, it also features lots of the author’s ponderings on matters cosmic. When I finished it I had the feeling that it was either profound or just confusing. Perhaps both.
What irks me is how much attention is paid to Dick and how little to peers like Robert Sheckley, William Tenn, R.A. Lafferty, Cordwainer Smith and (early) J.G. Ballard. Also Thomas M. Disch.
August 20th, 2007 at 1:43 am
Add Fedric Brown to Roesberg’s list.
FREDRIC BROWN?
Yes, just because he (and PKD) made prose look easy, don’t confuse it with bad writing.
August 29th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Yes, the Zap Gun was weird and curious but slightly pointless!
PKD’s prose style is readable enough (although I’ve met people who can’t read him because of it). Most people write faster and with a poorer style than normal under the influence of amphetamines. But with PKD the speed paranoia fueled and informed his work.
What about writers like Jack Vance who had a unique prose style?