Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169290 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-02
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Fans of late SF icon Dick (1928–1982) who have yet to discover his obscure nongenre works will be pleasantly surprised by this profound—and perplexing—1986 posthumous tragicomedy. Unpublished in the U.S., this tale revolves around two truly miserable characters: Jim Fergesson, a world-weary, ailing garage owner preparing to retire, and Al Miller, a shiftless used car salesman who rents lot space from Fergesson. Learning that Fergesson is investing his life savings in a questionable real estate venture, Miller hatches a series of ill-conceived and delusional schemes he hopes will grant him some sort of redemption and save Fergesson from getting scammed. Evoking the economically booming, socially repressive and prejudiced America of the 1950s, this paranoid and ambiguity-filled exploration into the psyche of the small businessman showcases not only Dick's wild imagination and sardonic wit but also, and most notably, his mastery at intertwining perception with reality. (Oct.)
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From Booklist
Long before establishing himself as one of sf's foremost innovators, Dick served his writing apprenticeship by penning sober mainstream tales about harried American workers. First published in 1986 in England and now receiving American publication, this early novel recounts the intertwined fates of California-based used-car-salesman Al Miller and his aging landlord, Jim Fergusson. Perpetually down on his luck, Miller sees the world through cynical lenses, whereas Fergusson, despite a recent heart attack, remains optimistic. When Miller discovers that Fergusson is selling their shared business and taking the advice of a shady record producer to purchase a new one, he becomes suspicious. With the aim of undermining the deal, Miller recklessly talks his way into a job for the producer and bumbles headlong into life-unraveling charges of fraud. Dick aficionados will recognize the familiar themes of psychosis and confrontation with inimical powers that permeated his later work. As a formative novel, this book contains surprisingly strong writing and character development and reveals an interesting dimension of the Dick canon. Hays, Carl

Review
“A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.” --The New York Times “Remarkable. . .echoes of Dick’s contemporaries such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Yates, Rod Serling, Raymond Chandler and early Kurt Vonnegut Jr. resonate, and a bonus exists in Dick’s impeccable eye for detail. . . .Dick fans will be in rapture.” --Publishers Weekly [boxed review] on Voices from the Street
 “He reworks the territory of soured domesticity (à la Richard Yates and John Updike) in a working-class milieu anticipating Raymond Carver. Decades later, his oeuvre (like Philip Roth's) is lovingly enshrined in our national pantheon.” –LA Times
 
"It may be hard for some to accept that the same writer who recently snuck into the American canon as a visionary and paranoid pop surrealist also penned a half dozen or more proletarian-realist novels set in the California of the '50's and early '60's, the best of which occupy a region demarcated by Richard Yates on one side and Charles Willeford on another. But accept it."  —Jonathan Lethem
“Well written, it is a welcome addition to its authors’ large and brilliant canon.” --Booklist on Voices from the Street

Customer Reviews

Two Novels: One Small, One Large
When I first penned this review, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full was the best selling book in the country, a huge success critically and commercially, while Philip K. Dick's Humpty Dumpty in Oakland was not published during his lifetime, and has been little noticed since (though a new paperback edition is coming to Amazon in September '08). Wolfe's is a large book, sprawling, with dozens of characters, while Dick's Oakland book is small in scope. Yet the connection is there: both books contain thematic elements in common, and as American novels both are rewarding and worth reading.

Like its famous predecessor, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full is an attempt to capture the zeitgeist of The Way We Live Now. (Come to think of it, Trollope's novel would also make a worthy comparison.) The bull-like 60 year-old former Georgia Tech football hero and real estate developer Charlie Croker is in trouble: he's upside-down to the tune of 850 million dollars, and things are starting to unravel.

The first thing I noticed about the book is its cinematic quality: every chapter plays out like a dramatic scene in a movie. Here's a thought that ran through my mind: "It would be a no-brainer to make this into a great film. Of course, that's what they said about Bonfire too. Tom Hanks to play Charlie Croker, anyone?"

Charlie owns a 29,000 acre plantation down in Baker County (well, actually his corporation, Croker Global, owns it) along with numerous corporate jets and planes. And Charlie's firm also owns the big white elephant that's to blame for his "situation": Croker Concourse, a huge mixed use development with a nearly empty 40 story tower, north of Atlanta in Cherokee county, beyond the ring road. Charlie was too far ahead of his time: you can see Atlanta's skyline from his tower, but you can't get there from here.

An early scene sets the stage for Charlie's humiliation: a "workout meeting" at his primary lender, PlannersBanc. Charlie arrives at the meeting with a huge entourage, planning on bluffing his way through a minor annoyance, but instead finds out that his status has been dramatically downgraded, from customer to "s***head." It is the job of the bank's workout team to issue a wakeup call to large debtors-in-denial, making them sweat until their dripping shirt hangs like saddlebags. This is just one of the many brightly-lit scenes that is larger than life, and perhaps destined for the big screen.

Dick's book, on the other hand, is small screen, in black-and-white: a period drama set in the late `50s, the kind of thing Rod Serling was so good at, in Patterns, or Requiem for a Heavyweight. Like Wolfe, a story about people on the way down, except these are not millionaires. Jim Patterson owns a garage in downtown Oakland that he's selling for health reasons. He is afraid of having a heart attack under a car, where no one can see or help him. Jim leases out part of his parking lot to Al Miller, a small time used-car salesman, whose life is thrown into chaos when Jim sells out. They become strangely involved with a prominent businessman named Harmon, who owns a record label. Is he aboveboard, or a swindler?

Strangely, both books offer a vision of the Bay Area, though Wolfe's book is set primarily in Atlanta. After the workout session, Charlie decides to appease the bank by laying off 10 percent of his workforce in Croker Global' s frozen food business. Cut to: the frozen food warehouse in El Cerrito, CA: a surreal world of frozen breath and nose icicles, as big-armed workers in spacesuits toil in a freezing zero degree warehouse for eight hours, hefting heavy cartons off pallets of frozen food for the truckers waiting in warmth and comfort beyond the serrated plastic curtains, destined for customers like the Santa Rita Jail in Pleasanton. In a horrifying series of misadventures, an inoffensive young character named Conrad Hensley finds himself thrown out of work at Croker Global, and ends up in that very frightening penal institution.

Meanwhile, Dick's Oakland exists 50 years in the past, a time remote and different from ours, yet showing all the guideposts that led to the present. Back then, Oakland was a white city, with "Negroes." A middle-class man like Jim, the garage owner, would deal only with whites, while lower middle class Al's best friend happens to be colored. Over in Marin county, north of San Francisco, Highway 101 is extending further northward, to Novato and beyond: the public housing projects in Marin City have just gone up. The freeway system in the East Bay is already in place along the bayshore, and smog and traffic is already noticeable in 1958.

The resolution of Wolfe's book, and the intersection of Charlie and Conrad, involves an almost-Dickian device: their conversion to the religious philosophy of Epictetus: Stoicism. The powerful applicability of this to their situation lends the force of Greek drama to their story, and ultimately offers a kind of calming closure to the book.

I find Dick endlessly fascinating. Certainly, the author was fascinated with mental illness (Clans of the Alphane Moon, et al.) and was able to portray it dramatically. He foreshadows Jim's fatal heart attack with eerie scenes of his "losing it," and Al's chronic lying and inaction are also far from healthy. In addition to his character's weird internal lives, the other aspect of Dick's exploration of insanity is in his surreal and self-referential plotting. For instance, when Jim visits Marin County Gardens, (echoes of "Chicken Pox Prospects" in Palmer Eldritch,) the salesperson is reading Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, and rants about pot-boiler science fiction.

I felt a palpable sense of shifting from the real world to an alternate reality when Al Miller gets a job at Teach Records (named after the real Blackbeard, Edward Teach, since it is a "pirate label,") and was assigned to record electronically-enhanced Barbershop quartet music, since it was projected to be the next big trend in American music. (!) One of the most frightening scenes, when Al gets off the bus in Salt Lake City and is immediately arrested and flown back to Oakland, is an echo of numerous similar paranoia-inducing developments in other books. It happens to Decker in Androids, and is intimately related to the famous scene in Time Out of Joint when the hot dog stand disappears before the protagonist's eyes, replaced by a fortune cookie-sized piece of paper reading: hot dog stand.

You won't have any trouble finding Wolfe's large and popular book, and now Humpty Dumpty in Oakland is also reprinted (virtually everything Dick wrote is now back in print!) and available on Amazon. I recommend them both.

Early Dick rediscovered
When I first started reading Philip K. Dick in the early 1980s, he was just on the cusp of fame, the result of the movie Blade Runner as much as anything. Now, in fact, he is considered one of the greatest science fiction writers (and maybe writers in general) of his era. Unfortunately, Dick - who had lived a rather unhealthy lifestyle - would die just as his writing was being noticed outside the narrow confines of the science fiction community. This new-found fame would not only result in re-releases of his science fiction novels, but also the first-time publication of some of his early, mainstream fiction.

This is both a service and disservice to Dick's fans. On the one hand, for someone like me who's read practically everything he's written, this is a chance to read something new. On the other hand, there's often a reason that this work is unpublished. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, one of his posthumously released works, is not bad, but I'm not sure if it would have been published if not for who wrote it.

The novel focuses on two men: Jim Fergesson is a successful auto mechanic who is selling his shop due to a heart condition (Jim is constantly described as old, though he is only in his late fifties; this must have seemed elderly to the young PKD who wrote this, and ironically, he would never reach the age of his protagonist). Al Miller is the young used car dealer who rents space from Jim and whose livelihood is threatened by the garage sale.

One of Jim's customers, Chris Harman, is an entrepreneur who turns Jim onto a business opportunity, but the resentful Al suspects Chris is a con man and passes on his suspicions. The relationship between Jim and Al gets more and more strained which threatens Jim's fragile health.

As is typical in Dick's stories, there are no true heroes or villains. The main characters are distinctly flawed individuals, always seeking a happiness that eludes them, often because they don't even know what will satisfy them. This is a decent enough novel, but I think it will most likely only appeal to those who want to complete their Dick collections. For others, this is not where to start with Dick's work to get a good feel for his writing; instead, it's better to go with one of his classic science fiction works.

IT'S ALL THERE -- BUT IN RAW FORM
A fascination with men and machines and mind-altering substances -- it's all here in this previously unpublished early effort by Philip K. Dick, but in raw form and lacking the focus and clarity of vision of Dick's later works. "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland" was written before the visionary found his signature style and in a more realistic vein than his best novels and short stories, which most bookstores shelve under science fiction. But where Dick's most memorable creations used the SF tag as a point of departure, "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland" feels constrained by its crime fiction plot and the genre's conventions. Diehard PKD fans will no doubt find this readable thriller an interesting companion piece to Dick's canonical ouvere, and will delight in spotting eventual Dicksian obsessions with the nature of reality and paranoia in their early stages. But initiates should be warned that the novel isn't representative of and doesn't make a good introduction to the writer's compelling world. You can see where Dick is going, but he hasn't gotten there yet with "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland."