Puttering About in a Small Land, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, Confessions of a Crap Artist – Philip K. Dick

My fondness for Philp K. Dick’s mainstream novels has to do with their evoking 1950s California, which I somehow feel nostalgic about, even though I am not from there and hadn’t even been born then. Although I think he would get that.
 
I have these four titles and also Mary and the Giant in mind, with Confessions of a Crap Artist being my favourite. If you enjoy odd, interesting, unworldly characters, Jack Isodore is up there with John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly.
 
I like it that Dick’s protagonists are typewriter, TV or used car salesmen and suchlike in these and his sci fi books. You can’t get more down-to-earth than these tangible, familiar, domestic items and their vendors. They are so reassuringly familiar and uncomplicated that the reader is seduced by the unthreatening technology of everyday life and the straightforwardness of the character’s job, and the stage is thus set for the weird and the wonderful twists that Dick will now introduce. It just wouldn’t work with an insurance broker, or a banker.
 
These humble occupations get the characters into other people’s homes and lives, and they are indifferently paid, which means that the character struggles, so the narrative ball is rolling and there’s a tension already.
 
Theses books evince a sympathy for and celebration of ordinary people in small town America that has a personal appeal for me. Unlike the science fiction novels, which play out brilliant ideas, these narratives are character-driven. And people, Dick finds, are naturally amusing.
 
The novels are shot through with Dick’s dry yet often gentle humour, in a world and an elegant prose that moves at the pace of a 1950s saloon. When the nutty stuff happens, we can sit back and watch and wonder.