nihilisk 's review for:

Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick

2.0

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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.