Dark prophet

A new collection reveals the despair and distrust at the root of Philip K. Dick's science fiction

July 27, 2008|Mark Feeney

Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s
Edited by Jonathan Lethem
Library of America, 1,128 pp., $40

Is Philip K. Dick the father of the paranoid style in American fiction? "Every pay phone in the world was tapped," a character thinks in "A Scanner Darkly." "Or if it wasn't some crew somewhere just hadn't gotten around to it."

As it happens, that character is an undercover narcotics agent assigned to spy on himself. Perhaps he got the job through an employment agency run by Franz Kafka. His boss tells him: "We evaluate; you report with your own limited conclusions. This is not a put-down of you, but we have information, lots of it, not available to you. The broad picture. The computerized picture." That final sentence fragment, the way it's both sinister and ridiculous - re-DICK-ulous? - is a true Dick touch.

Paranoia came naturally to Dick (1928-82). Bedeviled by drug abuse, mental illness, and the bill collector, he had good reason to think people might be out to get him. He churned out science fiction novels at a dizzying rate. According to Jonathan Lethem's excellent explanatory notes, Dick wrote 140 pages of "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" in 48 hours. (Flow my words, the novelist said?)

Not infrequently it was the reader who got dizzy. Writing hardly comes any clunkier than this sentence from "Now Wait for Last Year": "But in all fairness, it had to be realized, Eric reflected, no one possessed the money and economic know-how to underwrite this admittedly uniquely expensive and beyond all others - imitations all - utterly impractical venture."

Dick was also capable of fine, simple writing, too. A nuclear attack in "Dr. Bloodmoney" raises "a stout trunk of smoke, as dense and brown as a living stump." Another character in that novel wonders if a recent experience (unexpectedly happy - as happiness in Dick's novels tends to be) wasn't merely "a pageant of figments." It's a lovely phrase - a bit of poetry, really - and just the sort of thing one might expect from a hallucinogen user, like Dick.