Agree about Robert Childan, a great character. I am working from memory, since my copy of the book is elsewhere, but Childan, sweeping in front of his store, thinking about how he hates the Japanese, but his mode of thinking and vocubulary are Japanese! His mind and motives have been colonized, and HE cannot see that but we, the readers can. This is an extraordinary literary feat. I read that book as a teenager, and I saw what PKD was doing then.
Really a pity that the TV show lost its way. A straight, literal depiction of the book would have been better than the mishmash they ended up with. That, or after the first season, let everyone else fade out and make it exclusively about John Smith and Chief Inspector Kido, two good characters played by top notch actors.
Agreed also that PKD's reputation as a sort of madcap fellow who writes about drugs and robots has unfairly ghettoized him. This has unfairly obscured the quality of his writing, which is often excellent, even in terms of prose style, and the quality of his penetration into the human mind and heart, the uniquely decent and charitable way he sees his characters and the world, and his prescience about how timeless human nature would respond to radical changes in technology.
Martian Time Slip, which I read over forty years ago, leaves behind a bleak, squalid feel. But still, Can-D and the Perky Pat set, stick with you. It is set in a housing project, after all. It is sort midcentury kitchen sink realism, with mental illness and drug abuse, except on Mars.
As to Bellow, I've only read Ravelstein, which I enjoyed. I started The Dean's December and didn't like it. Given sufficient longevity, I may give him another chance.
And Norman Mailer was married six times. Your typology seems to fit him. I will read more Mailer before I get to Bellow again.
I agree with you and Lillian on Robert Childan; I read the book 20+ years ago and he's still etched in my memory. PKD was great at creating these Everyman characters facing impossible situations.
Can-D and Perky Pat is "Palmer Eldritch," right? That was the first PKD I read and it's one of his best.
Yeah, you are right about that. My mistake. So, those things stuck with me from a different and much better book. So much for memory versus the Internet.
I do still have the bleak feeling from Martian Time Slip, though.
Scott beat me to it-- Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is also one of my favorites. I even wrote and published a short story a few years ago about discontented Martian colonists with some nods to Perky Pat and Palmer. (If you're interested: https://www.passengersjournal.com/volume-2-issue-2-prose/#selonick)
Martian Time-Slip is the one about a malevolent autistic child who can control reality. The plot is incoherent. The misunderstanding of autism and other mental disorders is profound. The indigenous Martian population is dying off and referred to by multiple characters as 'n*ggers.' There is a sex scene that is so viscerally and metaphysically repulsive ("put my gubbish in your gubbish") it makes me cringe to just think of it. Part of me thinks that, in order to elicit such a powerful negative reaction, there must be some redeeming qualities about the book, but I had such a bad time reading it the first time I don't want to revisit it. Definitely bleak.
Yes, the way PKD manipulates the structure and diction of Childan's chapters to read as 'Japanese' is brilliant. I actually thought the TV show did a pretty good job with his character, although they make him way more likable than in the book as the show went on. Part of what makes book-Childan so great is how unconcerned Dick was with making his beliefs or conduct palatable. He's totally internalized the racial logic of his world, he has vile thoughts about Jews and Blacks, he is greedy and servile, and yet Dick still extends to him one small moment of grace and dignity, in the end.
Once I gave up the idea that the TV show was an actual adaptation of the book, I quite enjoyed it almost to the end. I totally agree that John Smith and Inspector Kido were the most compelling characters.
I found "Martian Time-Slip" quite fascinating, but also pretty morbid, for some of the reasons you give. I didn't understand the autistic child subplot really, but the depiction of Mars as a colonial project of Earth was quite interesting. I remember very well the head of the plumbers' union (Arnie Kott?) and poor Norbert Steiner who committed suicide.
I am reading Ubik as we speak and am blown away by Dick's ability to visualize an alternative temporal reality that speaks to today's political ennui even though it was written in 1969. For someone to do that, they have to be a very special writer with an amazing mind. Like a genius. btw I also like Bellow.
Wow, this is quite fascinating - some perspectives I hadn't considered, especially the comparison with Bellow.
I count myself something of a Dickhead. I've read 10-12 of his novels, and I used Lawrence Sutin's bio as a guide - he gives all of PKD's novels a number grade, so I read the ones that scored at least 8/10. My faves tend to be those that aren't strictly SF but are highly imaginative anyway, like "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" and "Confessions of a Crap Artist."
This is a reminder that PKD wrote a lot of non-SF novels but most of them have gone by the wayside. Who nowadays reads "In Milton Lumky Territory" or "The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike"? And you're right, "Galactic Pot-Healer" is a gem.
I haven't read the biography, but I'm intrigued by the number ratings. Will have to check it out. I'm not much of a biography reader, but I think I could make an exception for PKD.
I'd also like to read more of his non-SF novels. There's something a little eerie about reading his straight fiction, though. Like I keep waiting for the walls to start melting and the robots to appear, speaking in heroic couplets or whatever.
The biography ("Divine Invasions") is actually a good reference work, because of the complete overview of the novels and the corresponding number ratings. Of course, it's just one guy's opinion, but I think it tracks overall critical consensus pretty well. And a biography of a person as weird as PDK cannot be boring!
I love both of these authors, so I'm heartened to see the comparison. With the caveat that it feels very Freaky Friday to be the male prosecutor vs the female defendant in the "misogynistic literary men" case, I do remember feeling a sort of cosmic misogyny in PKD especially, women as this ultimate Other that he is alternately drawn to and spurns, or some sort of evil mommy (DFW is similar, which is why his self-righteousness about it is so goddamn grating). But in a sense this is more forgivable in a writer than just blase normal sexism of the period. It's an ugly expression of an impulse that is probably shared by everyone re the opposite gender to some degree, so there is something primal and honest about it.
I think I know what you mean but I’d say there’s a difference between asking if a man can “write women well” (ie embody their POV convincingly and without resorting to cringe-inducing internal monologues about breasts) and if a man’s writing about women evidences a respect for women as people. I think you’re saying that PKD fails both tests; I’d argue he definitely passes the latter and at least sometimes passes the former.
I think in general people get too worked up over “men writing women badly”— tbh, sometimes I do think about my own breasts. I’m a defender of Neal Stephenson in this respect. (I have an unpopular take on Snow Crash that would probably get me cancelled if cancellations are still a thing.) But I think “men writing women” just a specific instance of a broader problem, which is that empathy is hard and most writers struggle to understand characters very different than themselves, regardless of gender. Some writers have an empathy superpower, like Ishiguro. Most don’t, and it’s fine.
I’ll have to think on DFW. It’s been a while since I’ve read him.
This is such a delightful essay. The first PKD novel I read was "Ubik" -- and I have reread it since and I believe I will reread it again at some point. The consignment of dentists to obsolescence by 1992 always makes me smile (even as so much in this novel chills me). My favorite little-known PKD is "The Divine Invasion." After the direct dive into madness that is "VALIS," this novel is surprisingly quiet and touching to me. After reading your essay I realize I must finally watch "A Scanner Darkly."
One thing about PKD (and fwiw I think I have read more of his books than you, without having actually tallied -- I was obsessed as a teen and had a very good cheap paperback bookstore to draw on) is that he had real talent as a writer but because he was making his living writing pulps, it translated very unevenly in quality of writing. Some books are simply better than others, more consistent and coherent, and others are really most interesting as plot points and ideas rather than the story itself. This latter aspect is what has made him so adapted and adjusted (also fwiw although I love Blade Runner as an independent work not as adaptation, and I agree that Scanner Darkly is great, I think Minority Report is *pretty good* for a Spielberg with Tom Cruise in it. Not magnificent, but much better than the average hollywood of the day, and a good pair to the close-in-time AI).
I recently re-read MITHC and was struck by just how WEIRD it is, with its strange attempts to incorporate the I Ching (which is not Japanese, obviously) in a kind of resistance, as well as a highly accurate supposition of Japanese interest in Western ephemera collecting. It is so off-center as to a typical thriller or spy story, and so full of the strange Dick protagonists that is hard to even imagine how it was read at the time.
My next re-reading will be Martian Time-Slip, which I LOVED when I first read it and look forward to. I look forward to your take on it.
Just watched Minority Report last weekend and I was surprised at how good it was. I remember enjoying it in theaters as a kid, but I hadn't watched it since before I moved to DC 9 years ago. It's fun, well-plotted, with pretty good SFX and acting. And fun to watch as a DC movie. It suffers from being wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end, but hey, that's Hollywood. And of course it mostly fails to evoke the intensity and paranoia of the original story.
Agree that High Castle is strange, even for PKD. When I first read it at age 15ish, it wasn't my favorite. I thought it was kind of boring. I don't think I fully appreciated the subtlety of the character- and world-building he was doing. I didn't understand why it was the one that won the Hugo, and not Androids or Ubik or Palmer Eldritch. This time around I was kind of bowled over by High Castle, plus it kicked off a minor Holocaust/WWII obsession that I'm currently indulging in with some follow-up reading/viewing/podcast choices.
In another comment on this post I expounded on my deep distaste for Martian Time-Slip. I'm intrigued that you had such a positive response. Here's what I said:
"Martian Time-Slip is the one about a malevolent autistic child who can control reality. The plot is incoherent. The misunderstanding of autism and other mental disorders is profound. The indigenous Martian population is dying off and referred to by multiple characters as 'n*ggers.' There is a sex scene that is so viscerally and metaphysically repulsive ("put my gubbish in your gubbish") it makes me cringe to just think of it. Part of me thinks that, in order to elicit such a powerful negative reaction, there must be some redeeming qualities about the book, but I had such a bad time reading it the first time I don't want to revisit it. Definitely bleak."
I'd love to hear what you love about it. I've never had such a strong negative response to a book, much less one by an author I'm otherwise devoted to. I don't usually shy away from difficult emotions in literature, so I'm not sure why Martian Time-Slip got under my skin so much (in a bad way).
I will try to let you know if I am grievously disappointed. I will say that the specific notion of autism is one that I would now find much more problmatic, having worked with autistic people and having gained a lot of experience with it (and also therefore having a white-hot hatred of RFK JR for continuing to promote the vaccines "theory").
However PKD is NOT one who I expect realism or accuracy in respect to mental illness or neurodivergence both because of the time he wrote in and the degree to which he was, due to substance abuse and presumably his own genes and family predispositions, genuinely unstable and mentally ill. My all-time favorite of his is Clans of the Alphane Moon, in which a planet has become a dumping-ground for the mentally ill and they have formed clans around their particular diagnoses. It was my first novel by him and thus I am soft for it, but it is also one where realism in his depiction of these conditions is absolutely not going to be the payoff so I disregarded it.
I don't mean to be flip or imply I'm ok with these problems of representation, only that I can read "around" them to the extent that the other ideas and themes are more valuable. ALL of his work has highly problematic representations of races, mental illness, women, and social order, to name a few, and these are intrinsic to the paranoia and skewed viewpoints we his fans find so interesting. You really can't separate the strands in my experience. See the "exegesis" for some really crazypants hallucinations.
Specifically as to Martian Time-Slip, to me the reality-bending powers coupled with serious deficits of understanding and knowledge by the bender was a highly compelling and hallucinogenic allegory for the MAD of the Cold War (as were so many Dick concepts) and/or Robert McNamara and his ilk, as well as both an endorsement for and serious cautious fear of the kinds of mental distortions Dick himself indulged in/was forced to experience. To the best of my knowledge, by the way, as was Bellow, he was politically conservative and actually rather incoherent in a real-world sense with his political beliefs. Rather like Poul Anderson and Peter F. Hamilton, the politics corrode his ideas at times (and if you "want" to read a cringey, awful, absolutely gratuitous sex scene, you can check out Hamilton, just about any Hamilton) and at other help resist the paranoia sufficiently to make a compelling narrative (see Dr. Bloodmoney)
So perhaps MTS will horrify me, but at least I'll always have Our Friends From Frolix 8 and The Unteleported Man, right?
I was shocked how bad The Adventures of Augie March was. And Bellow was supposedly A GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST. It was my first glimmer of understanding that the English Majors and English Professors and Book Reviewers at the NYTs might just be a bunch of phonies.
Hey now! No Saul Bellow slander in this house! I haven’t been able to get through Augie March just yet (stalled ~100 pages in) but I figured that’s more of a me problem. It read to me like a 19th century novel— long and slow, but I wouldn’t characterize it as “bad.” I do truly love Herzog and believe that it’s worthy of the “great American novel” label. I have more mixed feelings about the other Bellow books I’ve read, but still find them to be very rich texts. And all of them contain just incredible incandescent paragraphs. Bellow is an utter genius at the sentence and paragraph level.
I think I had the opposite experience you did— I never even heard of Saul Bellow until college, and I think very few people my age (millennials) have ever read him. Rather than feeling like the literary establishment was forcing him on me, I felt like I was discovering a hidden gem who had once been acclaimed but now had fallen out of fashion. Maybe that’s partly why I developed such a positive impression of him :)
Well, aesthetic enjoyment is mostly a subjective thing. I like Bellow and I hope it doesn't make me a phony. I'm gonna borrow something I said elsewhere on this site, to wit: "My overriding impression is that he was the literary equivalent of a great barroom talker, the sort of person who has a fascinating way with words but is not necessarily a good storyteller." That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
ASD didn’t predict the opioid crisis. It was a reflection of what was going on at the time with PKD’s social circle. PKD was likely at his worst amphetamine use at the time, and maybe in a state of chemically induced psychosis. I’m going to suggest reading Only Apparently Real, the Paul Williams book, and the single best book of insight into PKD.
But I love this post. I’ve only read one Bellow book and seen a documentary, but I loved the specific comparisons you made. Very thorough and detailed work—especially by Substack standards.
Good post.
Agree about Robert Childan, a great character. I am working from memory, since my copy of the book is elsewhere, but Childan, sweeping in front of his store, thinking about how he hates the Japanese, but his mode of thinking and vocubulary are Japanese! His mind and motives have been colonized, and HE cannot see that but we, the readers can. This is an extraordinary literary feat. I read that book as a teenager, and I saw what PKD was doing then.
Really a pity that the TV show lost its way. A straight, literal depiction of the book would have been better than the mishmash they ended up with. That, or after the first season, let everyone else fade out and make it exclusively about John Smith and Chief Inspector Kido, two good characters played by top notch actors.
Agreed also that PKD's reputation as a sort of madcap fellow who writes about drugs and robots has unfairly ghettoized him. This has unfairly obscured the quality of his writing, which is often excellent, even in terms of prose style, and the quality of his penetration into the human mind and heart, the uniquely decent and charitable way he sees his characters and the world, and his prescience about how timeless human nature would respond to radical changes in technology.
Martian Time Slip, which I read over forty years ago, leaves behind a bleak, squalid feel. But still, Can-D and the Perky Pat set, stick with you. It is set in a housing project, after all. It is sort midcentury kitchen sink realism, with mental illness and drug abuse, except on Mars.
As to Bellow, I've only read Ravelstein, which I enjoyed. I started The Dean's December and didn't like it. Given sufficient longevity, I may give him another chance.
And Norman Mailer was married six times. Your typology seems to fit him. I will read more Mailer before I get to Bellow again.
I agree with you and Lillian on Robert Childan; I read the book 20+ years ago and he's still etched in my memory. PKD was great at creating these Everyman characters facing impossible situations.
Can-D and Perky Pat is "Palmer Eldritch," right? That was the first PKD I read and it's one of his best.
Yeah, you are right about that. My mistake. So, those things stuck with me from a different and much better book. So much for memory versus the Internet.
I do still have the bleak feeling from Martian Time Slip, though.
Scott beat me to it-- Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is also one of my favorites. I even wrote and published a short story a few years ago about discontented Martian colonists with some nods to Perky Pat and Palmer. (If you're interested: https://www.passengersjournal.com/volume-2-issue-2-prose/#selonick)
Martian Time-Slip is the one about a malevolent autistic child who can control reality. The plot is incoherent. The misunderstanding of autism and other mental disorders is profound. The indigenous Martian population is dying off and referred to by multiple characters as 'n*ggers.' There is a sex scene that is so viscerally and metaphysically repulsive ("put my gubbish in your gubbish") it makes me cringe to just think of it. Part of me thinks that, in order to elicit such a powerful negative reaction, there must be some redeeming qualities about the book, but I had such a bad time reading it the first time I don't want to revisit it. Definitely bleak.
Yes, the way PKD manipulates the structure and diction of Childan's chapters to read as 'Japanese' is brilliant. I actually thought the TV show did a pretty good job with his character, although they make him way more likable than in the book as the show went on. Part of what makes book-Childan so great is how unconcerned Dick was with making his beliefs or conduct palatable. He's totally internalized the racial logic of his world, he has vile thoughts about Jews and Blacks, he is greedy and servile, and yet Dick still extends to him one small moment of grace and dignity, in the end.
Once I gave up the idea that the TV show was an actual adaptation of the book, I quite enjoyed it almost to the end. I totally agree that John Smith and Inspector Kido were the most compelling characters.
I found "Martian Time-Slip" quite fascinating, but also pretty morbid, for some of the reasons you give. I didn't understand the autistic child subplot really, but the depiction of Mars as a colonial project of Earth was quite interesting. I remember very well the head of the plumbers' union (Arnie Kott?) and poor Norbert Steiner who committed suicide.
I am reading Ubik as we speak and am blown away by Dick's ability to visualize an alternative temporal reality that speaks to today's political ennui even though it was written in 1969. For someone to do that, they have to be a very special writer with an amazing mind. Like a genius. btw I also like Bellow.
"A Scanner Darkly is one of the greatest film adaptations of any book of all time. "
ASD is a completely brilliant. every aspect of it.
i have to go do productive things but i'm gonna finish reading this later. "scanner darkly" is the kind of film i live for, half-joking
Among other excellent features, it has the most perfect casting in the history of cinema.
Wow, this is quite fascinating - some perspectives I hadn't considered, especially the comparison with Bellow.
I count myself something of a Dickhead. I've read 10-12 of his novels, and I used Lawrence Sutin's bio as a guide - he gives all of PKD's novels a number grade, so I read the ones that scored at least 8/10. My faves tend to be those that aren't strictly SF but are highly imaginative anyway, like "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" and "Confessions of a Crap Artist."
This is a reminder that PKD wrote a lot of non-SF novels but most of them have gone by the wayside. Who nowadays reads "In Milton Lumky Territory" or "The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike"? And you're right, "Galactic Pot-Healer" is a gem.
I haven't read the biography, but I'm intrigued by the number ratings. Will have to check it out. I'm not much of a biography reader, but I think I could make an exception for PKD.
I'd also like to read more of his non-SF novels. There's something a little eerie about reading his straight fiction, though. Like I keep waiting for the walls to start melting and the robots to appear, speaking in heroic couplets or whatever.
The biography ("Divine Invasions") is actually a good reference work, because of the complete overview of the novels and the corresponding number ratings. Of course, it's just one guy's opinion, but I think it tracks overall critical consensus pretty well. And a biography of a person as weird as PDK cannot be boring!
You forgot 0 marriages. ;)
I love both of these authors, so I'm heartened to see the comparison. With the caveat that it feels very Freaky Friday to be the male prosecutor vs the female defendant in the "misogynistic literary men" case, I do remember feeling a sort of cosmic misogyny in PKD especially, women as this ultimate Other that he is alternately drawn to and spurns, or some sort of evil mommy (DFW is similar, which is why his self-righteousness about it is so goddamn grating). But in a sense this is more forgivable in a writer than just blase normal sexism of the period. It's an ugly expression of an impulse that is probably shared by everyone re the opposite gender to some degree, so there is something primal and honest about it.
I think I know what you mean but I’d say there’s a difference between asking if a man can “write women well” (ie embody their POV convincingly and without resorting to cringe-inducing internal monologues about breasts) and if a man’s writing about women evidences a respect for women as people. I think you’re saying that PKD fails both tests; I’d argue he definitely passes the latter and at least sometimes passes the former.
I think in general people get too worked up over “men writing women badly”— tbh, sometimes I do think about my own breasts. I’m a defender of Neal Stephenson in this respect. (I have an unpopular take on Snow Crash that would probably get me cancelled if cancellations are still a thing.) But I think “men writing women” just a specific instance of a broader problem, which is that empathy is hard and most writers struggle to understand characters very different than themselves, regardless of gender. Some writers have an empathy superpower, like Ishiguro. Most don’t, and it’s fine.
I’ll have to think on DFW. It’s been a while since I’ve read him.
This is such a delightful essay. The first PKD novel I read was "Ubik" -- and I have reread it since and I believe I will reread it again at some point. The consignment of dentists to obsolescence by 1992 always makes me smile (even as so much in this novel chills me). My favorite little-known PKD is "The Divine Invasion." After the direct dive into madness that is "VALIS," this novel is surprisingly quiet and touching to me. After reading your essay I realize I must finally watch "A Scanner Darkly."
One thing about PKD (and fwiw I think I have read more of his books than you, without having actually tallied -- I was obsessed as a teen and had a very good cheap paperback bookstore to draw on) is that he had real talent as a writer but because he was making his living writing pulps, it translated very unevenly in quality of writing. Some books are simply better than others, more consistent and coherent, and others are really most interesting as plot points and ideas rather than the story itself. This latter aspect is what has made him so adapted and adjusted (also fwiw although I love Blade Runner as an independent work not as adaptation, and I agree that Scanner Darkly is great, I think Minority Report is *pretty good* for a Spielberg with Tom Cruise in it. Not magnificent, but much better than the average hollywood of the day, and a good pair to the close-in-time AI).
I recently re-read MITHC and was struck by just how WEIRD it is, with its strange attempts to incorporate the I Ching (which is not Japanese, obviously) in a kind of resistance, as well as a highly accurate supposition of Japanese interest in Western ephemera collecting. It is so off-center as to a typical thriller or spy story, and so full of the strange Dick protagonists that is hard to even imagine how it was read at the time.
My next re-reading will be Martian Time-Slip, which I LOVED when I first read it and look forward to. I look forward to your take on it.
Just watched Minority Report last weekend and I was surprised at how good it was. I remember enjoying it in theaters as a kid, but I hadn't watched it since before I moved to DC 9 years ago. It's fun, well-plotted, with pretty good SFX and acting. And fun to watch as a DC movie. It suffers from being wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end, but hey, that's Hollywood. And of course it mostly fails to evoke the intensity and paranoia of the original story.
Agree that High Castle is strange, even for PKD. When I first read it at age 15ish, it wasn't my favorite. I thought it was kind of boring. I don't think I fully appreciated the subtlety of the character- and world-building he was doing. I didn't understand why it was the one that won the Hugo, and not Androids or Ubik or Palmer Eldritch. This time around I was kind of bowled over by High Castle, plus it kicked off a minor Holocaust/WWII obsession that I'm currently indulging in with some follow-up reading/viewing/podcast choices.
In another comment on this post I expounded on my deep distaste for Martian Time-Slip. I'm intrigued that you had such a positive response. Here's what I said:
"Martian Time-Slip is the one about a malevolent autistic child who can control reality. The plot is incoherent. The misunderstanding of autism and other mental disorders is profound. The indigenous Martian population is dying off and referred to by multiple characters as 'n*ggers.' There is a sex scene that is so viscerally and metaphysically repulsive ("put my gubbish in your gubbish") it makes me cringe to just think of it. Part of me thinks that, in order to elicit such a powerful negative reaction, there must be some redeeming qualities about the book, but I had such a bad time reading it the first time I don't want to revisit it. Definitely bleak."
I'd love to hear what you love about it. I've never had such a strong negative response to a book, much less one by an author I'm otherwise devoted to. I don't usually shy away from difficult emotions in literature, so I'm not sure why Martian Time-Slip got under my skin so much (in a bad way).
I will try to let you know if I am grievously disappointed. I will say that the specific notion of autism is one that I would now find much more problmatic, having worked with autistic people and having gained a lot of experience with it (and also therefore having a white-hot hatred of RFK JR for continuing to promote the vaccines "theory").
However PKD is NOT one who I expect realism or accuracy in respect to mental illness or neurodivergence both because of the time he wrote in and the degree to which he was, due to substance abuse and presumably his own genes and family predispositions, genuinely unstable and mentally ill. My all-time favorite of his is Clans of the Alphane Moon, in which a planet has become a dumping-ground for the mentally ill and they have formed clans around their particular diagnoses. It was my first novel by him and thus I am soft for it, but it is also one where realism in his depiction of these conditions is absolutely not going to be the payoff so I disregarded it.
I don't mean to be flip or imply I'm ok with these problems of representation, only that I can read "around" them to the extent that the other ideas and themes are more valuable. ALL of his work has highly problematic representations of races, mental illness, women, and social order, to name a few, and these are intrinsic to the paranoia and skewed viewpoints we his fans find so interesting. You really can't separate the strands in my experience. See the "exegesis" for some really crazypants hallucinations.
Specifically as to Martian Time-Slip, to me the reality-bending powers coupled with serious deficits of understanding and knowledge by the bender was a highly compelling and hallucinogenic allegory for the MAD of the Cold War (as were so many Dick concepts) and/or Robert McNamara and his ilk, as well as both an endorsement for and serious cautious fear of the kinds of mental distortions Dick himself indulged in/was forced to experience. To the best of my knowledge, by the way, as was Bellow, he was politically conservative and actually rather incoherent in a real-world sense with his political beliefs. Rather like Poul Anderson and Peter F. Hamilton, the politics corrode his ideas at times (and if you "want" to read a cringey, awful, absolutely gratuitous sex scene, you can check out Hamilton, just about any Hamilton) and at other help resist the paranoia sufficiently to make a compelling narrative (see Dr. Bloodmoney)
So perhaps MTS will horrify me, but at least I'll always have Our Friends From Frolix 8 and The Unteleported Man, right?
I was shocked how bad The Adventures of Augie March was. And Bellow was supposedly A GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST. It was my first glimmer of understanding that the English Majors and English Professors and Book Reviewers at the NYTs might just be a bunch of phonies.
Hey now! No Saul Bellow slander in this house! I haven’t been able to get through Augie March just yet (stalled ~100 pages in) but I figured that’s more of a me problem. It read to me like a 19th century novel— long and slow, but I wouldn’t characterize it as “bad.” I do truly love Herzog and believe that it’s worthy of the “great American novel” label. I have more mixed feelings about the other Bellow books I’ve read, but still find them to be very rich texts. And all of them contain just incredible incandescent paragraphs. Bellow is an utter genius at the sentence and paragraph level.
I think I had the opposite experience you did— I never even heard of Saul Bellow until college, and I think very few people my age (millennials) have ever read him. Rather than feeling like the literary establishment was forcing him on me, I felt like I was discovering a hidden gem who had once been acclaimed but now had fallen out of fashion. Maybe that’s partly why I developed such a positive impression of him :)
Just my own opinion . . . but "long and slow" is the WORST thing a novel can be.
Well, aesthetic enjoyment is mostly a subjective thing. I like Bellow and I hope it doesn't make me a phony. I'm gonna borrow something I said elsewhere on this site, to wit: "My overriding impression is that he was the literary equivalent of a great barroom talker, the sort of person who has a fascinating way with words but is not necessarily a good storyteller." That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
ASD didn’t predict the opioid crisis. It was a reflection of what was going on at the time with PKD’s social circle. PKD was likely at his worst amphetamine use at the time, and maybe in a state of chemically induced psychosis. I’m going to suggest reading Only Apparently Real, the Paul Williams book, and the single best book of insight into PKD.
But I love this post. I’ve only read one Bellow book and seen a documentary, but I loved the specific comparisons you made. Very thorough and detailed work—especially by Substack standards.