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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
It doesn't read like other Philip K Dick stories, and ultimately feels as though it could have been written by a dozen other authors. It's not bad, as far as it goes, but it's not great the way Dick usually is. If you're looking for another mind-bending sci-fi story of his, you'll unfortunately have to move on.
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
funny
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
This almost never happens to me, but the central character was so hateful that I gave up about five minutes in.
Content warning for violence against animals, animal death, and suicide. These happen all at once near the end of the book. I was expecting a murder, or a heart attack or both, but not a farm animal massacre with a small-caliber handgun followed by suicide. It was meant to be shocking, and it was.
I went into this book blind. I didn't realize this is one of his few non-sci-fi novels. This is a story of small-town adultery set in northern California in the late 50s. As usual with PKD novels the story is told from multiple viewpoints. I liked it, but it was a bit tedious in parts. Mostly because all the characters are believably awful people you wouldn't want to know. The titular character, real name Jack Isadore, can be amusing, but not likable. If he were around now he would probably be a Qanon cultist.
At one point Jack's brother in law asks him "Haven't you ever faced the fact that you're a warped, stunted, asshole type?" Everyone in this book is a warped, stunted, asshole type.
It's not Dick's finest. It's a fairly disjointed narrative, and it takes some time to get into the more interesting parts of the novel. I put it down frequently before finally committing to it. In the end, it provides a fairly unique commentary. There is nothing particularly impressive or brilliant in this, but there are a couple of starkly violent moments that managed to shake me up a bit. I liked it, but it's difficult to recommend.
I went into this book blind. I didn't realize this is one of his few non-sci-fi novels. This is a story of small-town adultery set in northern California in the late 50s. As usual with PKD novels the story is told from multiple viewpoints. I liked it, but it was a bit tedious in parts. Mostly because all the characters are believably awful people you wouldn't want to know. The titular character, real name Jack Isadore, can be amusing, but not likable. If he were around now he would probably be a Qanon cultist.
At one point Jack's brother in law asks him "Haven't you ever faced the fact that you're a warped, stunted, asshole type?" Everyone in this book is a warped, stunted, asshole type.
It's not Dick's finest. It's a fairly disjointed narrative, and it takes some time to get into the more interesting parts of the novel. I put it down frequently before finally committing to it. In the end, it provides a fairly unique commentary. There is nothing particularly impressive or brilliant in this, but there are a couple of starkly violent moments that managed to shake me up a bit. I liked it, but it's difficult to recommend.
Tough to give my all-time favorite author a 2-stars, but this one wasn't memorable. It does feature the most violent, grim scene of any PKD I've read (which is most of them at this point), and there is a very symbolic moment that opens the work up to a particular analysis. The symbol comes in the form of two lambs: the first, a female, born healthy, and the second, a male, smothered in the womb and stillborn. This seems at first like an inversion of Dick's own life, in which his twin sister died six weeks after her birth; however, there is more at work here. Not only is the male lamb stillborn, but the men in the book are in many ways destroyed by the woman, Fay. In this way, the stillborn male lamb opens up a reading of this work in which Dick's misogyny (and by extension, that of his characters) is rooted in a guilt complex over the premature death of his own twin sister.
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
“I realized, sitting there, that I was a nut. It was just a lot of crap. The supposedly ironic title of my work wasn't ironic at all. Or possibly it was doubly ironic, that it was actually crap but I didn't realize it.”
so interesting to read a non science fiction from philip k dick; but he seems well prepared to take on the form, set in the 1950's in northern california. there are a handful of players - a man, barely able to keep himself together, his (fairly) affluent sister and her husband and their two daughters, and a young married couple who move to north west marin, the setting for the examination of civilization and its discontents. a rather bleak tale unfolds, told from the perspective of the central characters in slightly different styles to reflect their personalities and interests. good stuff from start to finish.
Since this is Mr. Dick's only non-science fiction book, he deserves an "E" for effort. Variously told from the players' perspectives, this story of love, manipulation, revenge and regret has interesting aspects. Master manipulator Fay is the star around which all others revolve. Only her husband Charley is strong enough to escape - and he dies for it. Brother Jack, on the other hand, seems entirely dispensable with his pseudo-scientific mind, passivity and general lack of presence.
It's almost like Dick works out all his frustrations with men, women, and marriage in this novel. Really had no idea what to expect, although I was surprised both by the lack of any real science fiction element and by how much I enjoyed it. I think the continuing change of perspective really helped. Hard not to see this as highly autobiographical in some parts, although I don't know enough about his marriages to speak with any authority. Take away: Everybody is a crap artist--it just takes some of us longer than others to come to this realization.