Canon fodder

National Review, May 28, 2007 by Kelly Jane Torrance

Four Novels of the 1960s, by Philip K. Dick (Library of America, 900 pp., $35)

IN 1981, less than a year before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote that managing to publish only one of the many non-genre books he had written was the "long-term tragedy" of his creative life. The science-fiction writer published over 30 novels and more than three times as many short stories in his lifetime, but the mainstream success he craved always eluded him. Like many American originals, Dick was taken seriously by the French--some even suggested him as a Nobel Prize candidate--before his own countrymen understood his talent. Even after his death, his reputation didn't increase at the same rate as his name recognition: Hollywood turned Philip K. Dick into an identifiable brand, but one that was best known for providing a brainy basis for big-budget action flicks.

If only Dick, born in 1928, had lived to 78 instead of just 53. A quarter-century after his death, he is finally considered not just a serious American writer but one of the century's greatest. At least, that's one conclusion to be drawn from Dick's inclusion in the Library of America: the first science-fiction writer to be so canonized in what is the closest thing to secular sainthood in American letters. Best known for collecting the works of such titans as James and Faulkner, the Library of America presents "America's best and most significant writing in authoritative editions." And Dick has been included not for his realist books, which finally started appearing in print posthumously, but for some of his most outlandish sci-fi creations.

Some may complain that a genre writer has beaten Hemingway and Upton Sinclair into the Library of America. But these four novels--The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik--are not simply outstanding examples of their form. With their haunting evocations of alienation, thoughtful meditations on reality and religion, and vivid prose style, they are among the best American novels written in the last century.

The sci-fi genre, in fact, was just a colorful trapping Dick used to frame his tales of ordinary people caught up in situations they can barely understand, let alone control. As one character in The Man in the High Castle says of that book's novel within a novel, "He told us about our world.... He wants us to see it for what it is."

High Castle is barely even science fiction. It's alternate history, an imagining of what the world would have been like if the Axis had won World War II. Japan has control of the West Coast of the U.S. and Germany has control of the East Coast, while the Rocky Mountain States serve as a semi-autonomous buffer between the two. The novel follows a loosely connected cast of characters from all three regions. Robert Childan is the owner of American Artistic Handcrafts, a San Francisco store selling artifacts of American history--Civil War arms, Mickey Mouse watches--to Japanese clients who worship the remnants of the culture they've destroyed. Among them is Nobusuke Tagomi, a high-ranking bureaucrat who undergoes an acute mental crisis on being faced with the deeds of his German colleagues--they've emptied Africa of the Africans and New York of the Jews. Frank Frink, meanwhile, is a jewelry designer trying to sell his wares to Childan, who has no interest in anything involving current America. Frink is a Jew who's changed his name--the Japanese may themselves not kill the Jews, but they sometimes send them back to the Germans.

High Castle has some of Dick's most sharply drawn characters. Like most genre novels, his are usually strongest on plot. But in High Castle, it is the journey and not the destination that matters. Each character grapples with the difficulty of living in a world of evil--an Axis-ruled America being just an extreme version of our own flawed world.

This world, some characters realize, doesn't have to be so wicked. A banned book making the surreptitious rounds is an alternate history imagining a world in which the Allies won World War II. (Dick could be as meta as the most literary of experimental novelists.) This novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, doesn't exactly mirror the real world--after winning the war, America also solved its race problem. But in showing a world in which Americans didn't adopt Nazi anti-Semitism, Grasshopper suggests to the despondent that it might still be possible for men to do good.

Dick's books are known for their dystopias. His futures are filled with technological innovations that have alienated the human beings who created them. But what many commentators miss is the sense of hope that, without fail, shines through.

Nowhere is hope more needed than in the outrageously imagined world of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Global warming has made Earth almost unlivable; there still exist bores who accost you on the subway with, "It's going to be another hot one." The United Nations drafts unlucky citizens to colonize nearby planets, where conditions are even worse: Facing such barren landscapes, the colonists don't even want to leave their hovels, and keep from killing themselves by taking a hallucinogen that simulates the Earth world they know and love. But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch comes back from the outer reaches of the solar system with a competing drug, this tender equilibrium is disrupted. The new product's slogan is: "God promises eternal life. We can deliver it." But that eternal life--or the hallucination of it--comes with a price: the manifestation of the godlike Eldritch in everybody who takes it.