It isn’t overthought or minutely considered. He’s not making any great claims for himself (or the novel), he’s just turning it out. And there’s a profound sense that Dick doesn’t really give a damn. Dick’s writing is like a kind of psychological washing-up-brush – he carefully pushes its bristles up into his character’s minds and rotates exhaustively. What I most admire about the book is the way people simply do not understand what they are doing while at the same time experiencing utter clarity. Here they meet the Bonners – Chuck and Liz. The Lindahls have a son with asthma who they send to a private school in the mountains. We see Roger open a television sales and repairs shop. They move from Washington to LA at the end of the war. They meet, are kind of in love, and kind of horrified by each other. In brief, the novel details the coming together of its two protagonists, Roger and Virginia Lindahl. I suppose there is a “Kitchen Sink” element (the timing corresponds), but there’s nothing mannered or crass about the way Dick handles his subject matter. And because this is not an art I have refined myself (a cat may look at a king!), I deeply envy it. He is finding drama in smallness, in the margins, in tiny changes of perspective. Dick isn’t making a big deal out of anything. The bare bones of the story are certainly, on initial appearances, deliberately unshowy – almost pedestrian. Because I can find little to fault in it. Sutin rates it – rather disconcertingly – at a shockingly measly five. It was published in 1959, but Puttering (written in 1957 – when Dick was only 29) is my firm favourite.
It’s a little masterpiece (and for some reason slots into my consciousness hard upon John Kennedy Toole’s superb A Confederacy of Dunces). You wouldn’t know it because I have it bound in.” But my contention is that there are several true gems among them, the shiniest of which – and for me, the most creatively inspirational, as a novelist – are Confessions of a Crap Artist and (my marginal favourite) Puttering About in a Small Land.Ĭrap Artist definitely has the best opening two lines, though: They aren’t among the most celebrated of his works.
OPENOFFICE CONDITIONAL FORMATTING OR SERIES
His writing celebrates art, life, ideas (as surely all the best writing must) and, perhaps most deliriously – the inexpressible.Įarly on in his writing career Dick wrote a series of straight novels (not that Dick was ever capable of straightness – he was, by nature, intrinsically curvy). They are soft and sumptuous and twirl around the reader’s calves, hissing and purring. These books aren’t simply a series of hypotheses sparsely covered in a thin pelt of character, emotion and language. But deny it as he might, he is a novelist – a true novelist – and a novelist of rare genius. He was plainly a highly perverse individual and at some level (a funny, clever, joyous level) an outrageous bullshitter. When you are writing about Dick, there is so much to include, such abundance – so much scandal, so much complexity, so much richness. His life was illumined by a series of extraordinary spiritual visions. He was a twin – his sister (who he insisted was a lesbian) died shortly after they were born. One of his highs (or lows) of choice was horse tranquilliser. Dick himself claimed “the core of my writing is not art, but truth”, and – still more perplexingly: “I am a fictionalising philosopher, not a novelist.” To a majority of his contemporaries (even in sci-fi circles) Dick was, for the most part, considered “a drug-addled nut”. Sutin rightly summarises Dick’s artistic drive as an exhaustive investigation into both what is real and what is human. It would certainly be fair to say that in the 35 years since his early death in 1982 Dick has been openly acknowledged – nay celebrated – as one of the world’s greatest ever writers of science fiction. I do co-own a large selection of them, though, and in 1992 – or some time thereabouts – I attended a seminar at the ICA, hosted by Brian Aldiss (who else?) in which each title was read aloud and marked out of 10 (this was an approach established by Lawrence Sutin in his marvellous biography of the writer, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick), so that attendees could yell a riotous higher! or lower! according to their own personal predilections. You couldn’t really call me a bona fide Dickhead because I haven’t read everything Philip K Dick wrote (60-odd books, including short story collections during a relatively short career – at one point he was so prolific that he completed 11 novels in a single year).
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