Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. Adam Balm is a regular and valued member of The Zone, AICN's message boards, and when I recently mentioned in an introduction to one of Frank Bascombe's columns that I was hoping to expand the AICN BOOKS coverage this year, Adam wrote to me to offer himself up as a new reviewer. Today, he's making his AICN debut with an excellent review of Philip K. Dick's latest Tupac act, a brand-new book. This time, this really is the last book we're going to get from him. I'll pick this up as soon as it is in stores, and until then, I'm excited by this review, and I'm pleased to welcome Adam to the site. And how often can you write a serious piece of literary analysis that contains the phrase, "if you're a long-time Dick lover"? Great stuff, man.
Voices from the Street written by Philip K. Dick, published by Tor. “They find it harder to locate their external enemies than to grapple with their internal conditions. Their seemingly impersonal defeat has spun a personally tragic plot and they are betrayed by what is false within them...” -C. Wright Mills And so begins the eerily prophetic final work of Philip K. Dick. As any PKD nut knows, and as we are reminded on the back cover of this book, Philip K. Dick had three 'lost' works: Pilgrim on the Hill, Nicholas and the Higs, and this one. The manuscripts for the other two were destroyed or tossed aside by Dick while he was alive. But for some reason he hung onto Voices from the Street. And so for the first time, later this month Tor will publish the last and only surviving Philip K. Dick book that will ever be published. Of course this isn't the first time this has happened to an author, nor the first time this has happened to this author. (There was a huge dump of Dick's early works published through the mid 80s following his death.) Often the response from fans is elation, soon replaced by gradual disappointment. Often, the fans discover, there's a very good reason that these authors never published these. So, does VftS fall into this category? Yes, and no. No doubt fans will be disappointed that this isn't the Dick that they came to know and love. (Oh yeah, I'm the first one to ever make a penis pun on PKD's name.) This isn't that partied out and burned out, paranoid and borderline delusional, drug-soaked cerebrum of the 60s. And sadly, this isn't going to be the next hot Dick property that Hollywood will be clamoring to adapt. To go in with those expectations perhaps misses the bigger point: that this is the Batman Begins or Casino Royale to Dick's career. This is the PKD who didn't yet know he was going to be the Salvador Dali of 20th century literature. This is PKD before he knew that he was Philip Fucking K. Dick. He's a diamond that hasn't been cut yet, still rough around the edges, still learning his trade, discovering who he is. This PKD is 25 years old. He had only just sold his first short story with Beyond Lies the Wub, and it would still be three more years until he would sell his first novel, Solar Lottery. It was this year that he would quit his job at the record store to try and devote himself full time to writing. (During this period he would publish 72 short stories, an average of one every two weeks.) This isn't yet PKD the “American Borges” or Kafka. This isn't surrealist or “neo-realist” PKD. This is gritty realist PKD wanting to tell you about the fucked up day-to-day world around him, about the sick society he sees outside his window. The closest thing to this that PKD has done would maybe be Confessions of a Crap Artist. It's PKD by way of Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk. The thing that most struck me about Voices from the Street isn't that it's PKD's 'long lost' book' or even that it's last one. The most interesting thing is that, had it been able to find a publisher, it would've been this book that would've been PKD's first novel, and perhaps his work would've taken a different course. PKD, like all pulp writers, was foremost concerned with paying the bills, not making his mark on experimental fiction. If his realist works (Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, Puttering About in a Small Land, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, etc...) had not been greeted with deafening silence from the mainstream publishers, forcing him to turn to SF, then there's no doubt what road he would've taken. And so in the end Voices from the Street isn't just a peek at a PKD that was, this is a peek at a PKD that might have been. That's not to say that all is unfamiliar. Dick aficionados will still find plenty of classic Dick. We of course have our standard PKD archetypal hero: the guy unable to fit in to society, who might be losing his grip, feeling that there's something wrong with the world around him, all the while tip-toeing across that razor-wire fence between sanity and insanity. Like Dick, our protagonist Stuart Hadley starts out as basically a kind of Kevin Smith character. He's a wise-ass salesmen disillusioned with the early 50s suburban life and his insignificant little place in it. He knows he was meant for more than this. From his wife, from his sister, they tell him how talented he is, how he could be doing so much more. It's not hard to imagine the same things being said to Philip K Dick around the same time. Stuart also finds himself fed up with the creepy pretense that everyone maintains, the hollow smiles that greet him on the city sidewalk that mask a society suffocating on the inside, a mask that hides racists, sexists and anti-semites like...well, Stuart Hadley himself. When we first meet him, he's awakened in jail after a fight with two Joe McCarthy supporters. He bills himself as an intellectual and an enlightened man, but really the only difference between him and the ignorant mob is that he is better at hiding this rottenness within him than they are. In the world around Stuart, everyone is a either a hypocrite or a monster, and they're all either unwilling or unable to see it. The sweet old lady at the health food store can't stand cruelty to animals is also given to ultra-fascist rants lamenting the destruction of poor nazi Germany who only wanted to 'make the world clean.' The woman who seduces Stuart into the cult is a bible beating puritan, except when it comes to shacking up with the cult's leader (while she's still married) and of course playing hide the communion wafer with Stuart. And even though she admires the cult leader, because he's black she views him as a primitive, a 'child'. Altogether it makes one wonder that if Stuart Hadley is a stand-in for Philip K. Dick, it would certainly explain his odd fondness for the word 'n*gger' in his works of this time. (ala in Martian Time-Slip) Stuart's a right bastard, but his growing paranoia and isolation is fed by the general paranoia of the country. No one exists in a vacuum, and reading this, you do get a bit of a sense of how much Dick was a product of his times and the world around him. Just like another paranoid schizophrenic, John Nash, whose own fear and delusions were fueled by the red scare of the early 50's. As a friend tells Stuart: "There's hysteria in the air. A cold wind of witches...the fear of death." And in this ultra-paranoid world living under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, a new religious movement is emerging calling themselves the Society of Watchmen of Jesus (Which reads a bit like a thinly veiled analog of Jehovah's Witnesses). And we aren't really too surprised when Hadley is drawn to the new cult. "We're rotten with wealth and opulence.” Stuart tells a friend, in another prophetic moment, where it feels almost like Dick is railing against the America of today. “We deserve to get slaughtered. Can't you feel it? Don't you know it? Our sin, our guilt. We deserve the punishment that's coming..." and later ”This country is evil. We're big and rich and full of pride. We waste and we spend and we don't care about the rest of the world.” With his entry into the cult, we see the beginning of another Dick staple (ouch...), what will be PKD's life-long obsession with religion. It would first begin as a suspicion of organized religion and its potential abuses (as he was suspicious of all authority) as you see in Maze of Death and Three Stigmata of Palmer Aldritch, but later in his life as his mental condition deteriorated, it would be transformed into him viewing himself as a religious figure, a prophet of divine revelation as you witness in VALIS and Exegesis. This has been a good year for PKD, and it's actually a fortuitous thing that the movie version of Scanner Darkly was released so close to this book's publication. Because after reading this, you can look at this and Scanner Darkly as the bookends to the life of Philip Kindred Dick. Both being perhaps his most personal, most autobiographical works. This one is the work of a John Osbournesque 'angry young man' frustrated at life, that he's a 'never will be'. Whereas in Scanner, you find the work of an old man looking back at his mistakes, at lost friends and lost years. If this is your first time with Dick, you might end up reading VftS and wondering what the big deal is, or worse you might get turned off Dick altogether. This is probably one of the hardest of his works to read, because it doesn't have any of the normal escapist elements, the fun new ideas and twisted thought experiments: it's just, cold, harsh, stinky reality waving its skid-marked underwear in your face. And there's no mincing words, it is some pretty fucking hard Dick to take, especially near the end (lol punz!1). In a scene about 200 pages in, a woman asks why Stuart wants to make her suffer, and he replies simply without thinking "Because I suffer. And I want to share it." This is interesting for one thing because it's basically the antithesis of PKD's humanist philosophy, that it's empathy that makes us human. Is this before PKD came to believe that, or is this PKD raging against what he saw as a cruel and unempathetic world? Who knows... Either way, it really feels that that's what PKD wanted to do here, to make you suffer. Like Dante, you descend downward and downward with Stuart, and the last bloody and grotesque hundred pages are like one long car accident you can't look away from. So in the case that you're new to Dick, you might be best getting introduced to PKD through his short stories or any one of his novels in the SF masterworks series. But if you're a long time Dick lover, this rare insight into the man's early life will be worth checking out...if for no other reason than morbid fascination. Voices from the Street hits bookstores January 23rd.
