Why will I be seeing the new film “Next”? Because it’s based on a Philip K. Dick story, “The Golden Man.”

Meanwhile, Paul Giamatti is working on a Dick biopic, with himself in the lead. A couple of years ago Giamatti wowed me in back-to-back leads in “American Splendor” and “Sideways,” so to me this bodes well.

Finally, Cornel Bonca in the OC Weekly does a nice roundup of recent and forthcoming Dick events, as well as a generous review of the recently published “Voices from the Street.” She admits the book’s faults, but greatly oversteps when comparing it favorably with “Revolutionary Road,” a far superior novel by Richard Yates, a truly haunted man I knew briefly the one semester he taught at USC before dying. (Yates had a host of health problems, one remaining lung, and nearly choked to death at dinner.)

Regarding “Voices,” while my regard for Dick is undiminished, the book is nearly unreadable; I feverishly ordered it as soon as it was available and while trying to get through it I’ve finished three other books instead. At the moment it’s mostly gathering dust on my nightstand, two-thirds unread. The first of Dick’s “mainstream” novels I read was “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” a book with a tripartite point-of-view storytelling style that qualifies it as postmodern; it is also a compelling read that rewards one, page after page, with insights into male-female relationships and how the truth of such stories can never be known. It’s a great book. The next one I read, “Mary and the Giant,” was odd and rambling, but each page was such an affront to the sensibility of the 1950s that I couldn’t put it down; among other things, it concerns a tryst between a large black man and a young white girl. Had this been published in the 1950s it’s unlikely that Dick’s obscurity would have continued. But now that I’m reading “Voices,” I see the same faults identified by the editors who turned it down — its rambling, its passivity, the two-dimensional characterizations, Dick’s bad case of adjectivis — and I remember them in “Mary” as well.

All of Dick’s books will wind up kept in print and studied, not because they’re all good, but because he is becoming a canonical writer. As someone with a 30-year enthusiasm for his work, it’s odd to find myself in agreement with those editors who long ago decided that some of these books weren’t good enough and rejected them. From the descriptions and from the rejection letters published in several Dick biographies, I’m starting to suspect that the rest of the mainstream books are even worse than “Voices.”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.