GATHER YOURSELVES TOGETHER

Written in the early 1950s, this novel takes place in 1949 in post-revolutionary China and concerns three Americans, two men and a woman, who have remained to hand over control of a factory to the new government. One of the men, Carl, a boyish innocent, falls in love with the woman, Barbara, who is cold and emotionally repressed, and happens to be the ex-lover of Vern, the other man. The working out of this triangular situation is told rather tediously, with many flashbacks to minor incidents. The subplot of the political takeover of the factory is not well integrated with the romantic theme. Despite the vividness of some scenes, there is a meandering slackness to this novel, undoubtedly the weakest of Dick’s mainstream works.

MARY AND THE GIANT              

Completed in 1955, but not published until 1987, Mary and the Giant revolves around a subject close to Dick’s heart, music. Almost everybody in the novel is related somehow to the music business; music is the constant topic of conversation and is usually playing in the background. Joe Schilling, the “giant” of the title, is a record-shop proprietor who represents a taste for the classical, while Mary Ann Reynolds, a young woman whom he hires as a sales clerk, gravitates to jazz. A very strong example of Dick’s mainstream writing, Mary and the Giant is a tight, well-constructed narrative. The character of Mary is convincing and compelling. Although cold on the surface, she is a multilayered creation with whom the author empathizes strongly. Her refreshing honesty and directness are seductive. The scenes in the jazz club, the wild party, the sordid and claustrophobic atmosphere of Mary’s family home, and the well-drawn subsidiary characters make this novel memorable.

THE BROKEN BUBBLE

This realist novel, completed in 1956 but not published until 1988, is an effective exploration of the psychological subtleties of a four-way relationship. Jim Briskin, a classical music radio announcer, still in love with his ex-wife Pat, introduces her to a teenage couple, Art and Rachael. Pat becomes involved with the violent and possessive Art. Meanwhile, in her curious, willful way, Rachael falls in love with Jim. The “broken bubble” of the title refers to a minor incident in which one Thisbe Holt rolls around naked inside a plastic bubble at a convention of optometrists, who end up filling it with junk and smashing it. The broken-bubble image is suggestive of the egoic bubbles that Jim, Pat, Art, and Rachael all float in, that separate them in their relationships. During the course of the novel these bubbles are broken.

PUTTERING ABOUT IN A SMALL LAND

The title of this realist novel, written in 1957 but not published until 1985, refers to the “small land” of Roger Lindahl’s TV repair shop. His wife, Virginia is ambitious, and ends up taking control of the business and expanding it into a large appliance store; but she, as much as Roger or any of the other characters, exists in the small land of her own mind. California, the land of opportunity which had lured the Lindahls from the East coast, is small in its own way: the deadening conventionality of 1950s manners and morals contract the range of human happiness there as elsewhere. Into this wasteland a fertilizing influence appears in the person of Liz Bonner. Roger finds her refreshingly uninhibited and sensual. In its concentration on the triangle of Roger, Liz, and Virginia, Dick fully develops the psychological dynamics of marital and extramarital relations. His sometimes fantastic descriptions of the wasteland of the “small land” of this novel anticipate the entropic landscapes of his later science-fiction novels such as Martian Time-Slip and Ubik.

IN MILTON LUMKY TERRITORY

This realist novel, written in 1958 and not published till 1985, is a concise, ironic story, set in Idaho, of the marriage of Bruce, a young man, to Susan, his former fifth grade teacher, and his devastating experiences in trying to run her business. Milton Lumky, a dumpy, red-faced salesman with a penchant for outrageous remarks, is not the main character in the novel, but he has center stage whenever he is on. Dick wrote In Milton Lumky Territory under the influence of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Both works deal with the tragedy of the common man, making the point, as Dick quoted in an interview, that “attention must be paid to this man.” Like Willy Loman, Milton Lumky is a man of essential goodness who has been beaten down by what he has come to see as the degrading nature of his job. His Idaho is a provincial world of small towns, small minds, and a certain unrelieved nastiness. The only reprieve from the dreariness of this barren land and culture is to be found in the felicities of the heart, which Bruce and Susan take refuge in at the end when they move out of Milton Lumky territory.

CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST

This book, written in 1959 and finally published in 1975, was the first of Dick’s mainstream novels to appear in book form. In many ways it is probably the best: its multi-focal narration offers inside glimpses into the minds of two of Dick’s most fascinating characters—the “crap artist” Jack Isidore and his sister Fay Hume. The novel derives its energy from the juxtaposition of their radically different perspectives. Jack was the classic nerd in high school, who was obsessed with pseudoscience and adolescent power fantasies, which if anything have intensified as he has grown into his thirties. Faye is impulsive, uninhibited, outspoken, and aggressively sexual. But the root of her attractiveness lies in her ability to live in the moment with a seeming intensity and freedom. This combination is potent in tempting Nat Anteil, a young student, away from his wife, while driving Fay’s husband Charlie to a violent end. The predictably tragic consequences of this situation put the reader in the odd position of identifying with the nerd, whose emotionally stunted state make him an ideal and acute observer of the passionate madness of the other characters.

THE MAN WHOSE TEETH WERE ALL EXACTLY ALIKE

Set in West Marin County, California, the focus in this novel is on two men and their marriages: Leo and his alcoholic wife Janet, and Walt, whose wife Sherry is a bitch without any redeeming qualities. Dick’s portrayal of women here might be seen as hopelessly misogynistic, but there is psychological truth in Dick’s portrayal of unhappy marriages, and he never exonerates from responsibility the husband whose weakness turns his wife into a harridan. In his mainstream novels such as this one, Dick claimed that he dealt in Jungian projections. The “real” world is a projection of inner states; the roles characters play in each other’s lives are externalizations of inner selves. Whether this is any truer of the straight fiction than his science fiction, it is well to remember that the element of the fantastic pervades Dick’s vision. It intrudes into this novel in the plot surrounding the discovery of a fake Neanderthal skull. Beyond that, as long as we are in Dick’s world, be it realistic or science-fictional, we inhabit a psychic landscape where anything can happen and people are never to be taken at their face value.

HUMPTY DUMPTY IN OAKLAND

The last of Dick’s early realist novels, written in 1960 but not published in 1986, this is an excellent book, full of ambiguities. We view its events mostly from the point of view of Al Miller, a used-car salesman who is discontented with his life. When Jim Fergusson, an older man who is like a father figure to him, sells the property Al’s lot is on, Al becomes unhinged. He becomes convinced that Fergusson’s friend Harman is a big-time crook and tries to warn Fergusson and his wife Lydia to avoid a real estate deal with the man. We are so involved with Al’s perspective that it is not clear until the end of the novel that the only con being perpetrated is Al’s own deception of himself. We may see through his stupidities and misperceptions, but we are not inclined to judge him harshly. For Dick has not let us be complacent about what reality really is: there is no absolute certainty about how to interpret the novel’s events.