Book Report: Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Personal biases and tastes aside, what most of us want from a work of art – particularly one made by an acknowledged master of his craft – is to experience something that feels unique, personal, and visionary.  It isn’t reasonable to demand brilliance or greatness, as there are too many factors outside of the artist’s control to ensure that the work will live up to such lofty expectations.  But it is fair, I think, to ask that artists attempt to push the boundaries and shake the foundations of their aesthetic to the point that the reader, regardless of whether or not they ultimately “like” or even “get” what they just read, feels that they’ve been through something.

Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik is something and then some, but it’s tough to pin down exactly what it is, especially since its plot, tone, and even setting change so rapidly.  The feeling of the rug being pulled out from under you every time you start to get your bearings can be frustrating when it feels that the author is simply making up the rules as he goes along, but Dick’s nonstop changes are less oriented around plot than they are designed to get the reader into the paranoid headspace of his characters, who are always a step or ten behind the game in whatever mysterious intrigue they’re involved in.  In keeping with Dick’s trademark druggy confusion, the exact shape of the plot is never entirely clear to either the characters or the reader – this is the kind of story where the main characters can’t even be certain whether they are alive or dead (and even after that question appears to be resolved, it is possibly turned on its head in a highly ambiguous final chapter) – and Dick uses the resultant uncertainty to mesmerizingly unsettling effect. 

Here is what we (more or less) know:  it’s 1992, and the North American Confederation is littered with mind readers.  Glen Runciter is the president of a “prudence organization” that employs anti-telepaths, who have the ability to prevent high-paying clients’ minds from being read.  Runciter runs the company with the help of his deceased wife Ella, who is kept in a state of “half-life,” a not-uncommon situation in which the deceased have limited consciousness and communication ability, and in which they can die again.  The prudence organization is hired to secure a wealthy businessman’s moon-based offices from mind readers, a task which Runciter entrusts to an eleven-person team led by his right-hand man Joe Chip.  The assignment is revealed to be a trap when the guest room that the prudence team is invited to explodes, apparently leaving Runciter dead…unless it’s actually Runciter who is the sole survivor of the blast.  Chip and his associates begin to travel backwards through time at an accelerated rate, as they wonder whether they are in the real world, the afterlife, or in half-life.  Before they can figure out what the hell’s going on, the group begins receiving ambiguous messages from their possibly dead boss, who instructs them to use a mysterious, all-purpose protective spray known as “Ubik” that can apparently protect them from the unknown forces that seem to threaten the prudence organization’s existence in their increasingly unfamiliar surroundings.

As is probably clear from the above plot description, Ubik moves very quickly, giving readers an overload of information that makes things more confusing rather than more clear, and then moving on to a new situation before they can fully comprehend the last one.  A typical scene (if anything in this novel even fits that description) begins with Joe Chip stumbling into an old-fashioned pharmacy with a proprietor whose words move out of sync with his mouth as his body movements randomly shift between unnaturally fast or slow speeds, and ends with the building itself mysteriously disappearing.  Dick’s relentless destabilization has a hallucinatory power that makes up for some of his novel’s noticeable flaws.  None of the characters are particularly well-developed, and while protagonist Joe Chip’s lack of distinction seems purposeful (he is the everyman that the reader can identify with), most of the other members of his prudence team are literally given one sentence of description.  Chip’s love interest, Holly, makes no impression at all, and the book’s main villain isn’t even introduced until the last several chapters, as if Dick realized too late that he needed some way to wrap up the story.  But it is a credit to the power of the book’s mood-building and sheer unpredictability that these theoretically major flaws register as minor annoyances in a distinctive experience that the reader will never be able to fully understand or shake off.

Book Report: The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns

The Corner is a long, challenging, depressing story about the plight of one drug-ravaged West Baltimore neighborhood.  The 543-page nonfiction novel rarely strays from its central Fayette Street location, and only follows a handful of people, but authors David Simon and Edward Burns go so deep into the specifics of their subjects’ struggle with poverty and drug addiction that readers can perhaps be forgiven for putting the book down for weeks or months at a time.  (I read the book on and off for nearly a year and a half before finishing it, and read several other books in the meantime).  The book’s structure scarcely makes it more approachable; it is divided logically into four chronological sections, but then broken down into very lengthy chapters and sub-chapters that sometimes seem to begin and end at arbitrary points.

The Corner doesn’t qualify as “light reading” by any stretch of the imagination, but its difficult aspects stem from Simon and Burns’ honorable determination to give a voice to the voiceless and to put a human face on a part of the United States that has been almost entirely ignored by the rest of the world.  Simon and Burns (who went on to be the head creative forces behind HBO’s The Wire) stand alongside Dickens and Chaplin as perhaps our only major chroniclers of poverty.  Even if The Corner weren’t so eloquently written or so agonizingly powerful, it would still have journalistic value on a purely informational level.

But The Corner has much more to offer than simple statistics or abstract arguments about the plight of those involved in the drug trade.  Simon and Burns center their study on the McCullough family, whose members are each struggling with the narcotics market in their own way.  Patriarch Gary was once a promising renaissance man with an entrepreneurial spirit.  But a series of harsh setbacks in Gary’s personal life led him into an endless spiral of addiction, and a revolving series of petty crimes to support it.  Gary’s estranged wife Fran goes in and out of addiction throughout the book as well, the pressures of her environment frequently overwhelming her most sincere attempts to get clean.  Fran and Gary’s fifteen-year-old son DeAndre is a small-time drug dealer whose difficulties fitting in to life outside of Fayette Street (his legit fast food job falls apart quickly) and easy access to drugs ultimately lead him to follow in his parent’s footsteps.

Simon and Burns follow the story of the McCulloughs in riveting, sometimes sickening detail.  The first few pages of the novel include a map of the area where the novel takes place (as if this were The Lord of the Rings), which makes the story more intimate, vivid, and relatable than it otherwise would be.   Following along with the map, the reader can easily understand where the recreation center that DeAndre and his friends play basketball is in relation to the corners where they sell drugs, or where the scrap yard that Gary steals materials from is in relation to the old home where he once showed such promise.  It’s easy to imagine roughly where any of the novel’s major figures is and what they are doing even in sections of the story where they aren’t mentioned, and this sense of intimacy makes The Corner all the more moving and powerful.  Emotional highpoints such as the (surprisingly life-affirming) section where DeAndre’s on-again/off-again girlfriend Tyreeka realizes that she has the strength to raise their newborn child, despite DeAndre’s unreliability and her own young age, succeed largely because readers will understand exactly where the characters are in relation to each other.

The Corner is not entirely without faults.  Simon and Burns’ devotion to detail can be distracting, as when they report tirelessly about the specifics of the recreation center’s basketball program.  And while the book goes into minute detail about the lives of the junkies and dealers, the other forces that effect the characters’ world (such as politics and the police force) are only dealt with in the abstract, which retroactively makes The Corner feel lacking compared to The Wire’s full-bodied look at the ways that circumstances conspire to keep the poor separated from the wealthy.  Some of the novel’s essayistic passages contain its best pure prose, particularly the second chapter’s passionate yet well-reasoned argument for legalizing drugs, and a late-book screed that gives the lie to the idea that someone from Fayette Street could pull themselves up by the bootstraps and succeed in the “real world” if they only tried hard enough.  But most of the sections that comment abstractly on poverty and drug laws feel like they could use the vividly personal touches that take up the rest of the book.  Fortunately The Corner is mostly filled with powerful personal stories that honor the lives of the real people that they discuss while making larger, thought-provoking points about the many ways that we’ve all failed the less fortunate among us.

Book Report: Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt

Though best known for his stand-up comedy, Patton Oswalt has been successfully bringing his distinctive sensibility to a variety of mediums for years.  Because so much of Oswalt’s comedy revolves around his encyclopedic knowledge of and appreciation for high and low art, his appearances in films (ranging from Ratatouille to the underappreciated Big Fan) and television shows (including an extended cameo in Dollhouse and a recurring role on United States of Tara) are like stamps of quality.  Given Oswalt’s enviable versatility, it’s unsurprising to see him branching into the world of literature with the part-autobiography, part-comedy book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland.  And considering the high quality of the projects that Oswalt normally associates himself with, fans have every reason to have high hopes for his full-length print debut.

They won’t be let down, though the book is marred by its lack of a consistent throughline and by the unevenness inherent to essayistic literature by stand-ups.  Oswalt scores early with a grippingly detailed, hilariously worded, and movingly bittersweet chapter chronicling his misspent years as a directionless movie theatre usher whose cultured tastes (R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction was his soundtrack to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle) provide a contrast to his depressingly inert social life.   Oswalt displays a real talent for prose, and his voice makes an easy jump to the page.  But the less autobiographical chapters tend to seem like rough drafts of stand-up routines, minus the crucial vocal delivery that would sell the jokes.  A chapter about made up hobo folk songs might be hilarious if Oswalt were actually belting out the ridiculous lyrics onstage, but the jokes are only vaguely amusing in the context of the book.  And some of the more silly material would’ve been much more interesting and insightful if Oswalt would’ve drawn from real life rather than making up joke scenarios.  Surely the veteran script doctor has some amusing anecdotes about movies he’s been tangentially involved in, but the only allusion to this aspect of his career is an overlong note on improvements for a hypothetical romantic comedy script. 

Fortunately, the chapters tend to be short enough that even the less successful parts breeze by, while the more intriguing bits are infectiously re-readable.  A chapter about Dungeons & Dragons manages to make the game sound surprisingly fun without downplaying its essential nerdishness, while the titular chapter’s analysis of the three types of stories that young fiction writers tend to gravitate toward is simultaneously biting and touching.  Even the inevitable “shitty clubs I played when I was a struggling young comedian” chapter is full of trenchant social observations and vivid accounts of strip mall sleaze.  At only 189 pages, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland could be called slight, but its finest moments will leave readers restarting at page one and clamoring for a followup.