Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #414480 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-23
• Released on: 2007-01-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This previously unpublished novel is remarkable for a number of reasons, probably the least of which is novelistic merit. Stuart Hadley is a young man born to privilege; he is handsome and educated; his pregnant wife is devoted to him; he has worked his way up from salesman to manager of a television and radio shop, but he wants more. The more he wants is not clear, even to him, and his existential crisis involves him with a shady, quasi-religious sect, the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, led by a charismatic evangelist. Stuart's flirtation with the movement soon leads him away from his placid middle-class life into a sinister association with a mysterious femme fatale, Marsha Frazier. His decline is accelerated by psychotic depression that spirals into life-threatening self-destruction. Like much of Dick's fiction, the plot skims ambiguously along an abstract surface, only occasionally revealing concrete motivation or linear connection. But that's what endears Dick's novels to millions of readers nearly 25 years after his death, and that's what makes him a significant postwar American novelist. Shallow characterization and crude dialogue show a young novelist groping for style. Still, 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. Apart from creating an ambience that complements the novel, he provides a veritable literary museum of the early 1950s, replete with the period's social and political attitudes and dozens of references to everyday items, commonplace practices that underscore and illuminate this significant transitional period in American culture. Literary critics will have a field day; Dick fans will be in rapture. (Jan.)
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From Booklist
Almost 25 years after his death, Dick is enjoying a revival of interest in his work that most of his surviving peers in sf might envy. His stories have been the bases for six Hollywood movies--most recently, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly--and almost every scrap of his writing has been spirited back into print. While this heretofore unpublished novel from Dick's early years is strictly mainstream fare, it foreshadows themes that appear later in his speculative fiction, particularly those concerning madness and alienation. In many ways, the central figure here, Stuart Hadley, lives the ideal American dream, working as an electronics salesman and married to a beautiful woman in a tony district of 1950s Oakland, California. Like many of Dick's iconoclastic protagonists, however, he is also a dreamer, an idealistic artist, and ultimately a dropout from lockstep social conformism. The novel follows Hadley's descent into depression, madness, and eventual return to sanity. Surprisingly well written for a formative effort, it is a welcome addition to its author's large and brilliant canon. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"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, author of The Fortress of Solitude "One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction." -- The Sunday Times (London)
 "A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet." --The New York Times "Dick is entertaining us about reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation.... We have our own homegrown Barges."-- Ursula K. LeGuin "If someone were to write a history of the future as it has been dreamed up by Hollywood over the years, the chapter on today's tomorrow would belong in large part to Philip K. Dick." --The Washington Post “[Dick] sees all the sparkling—and terrifying—possibilities . . . that other authors shy away from.” –Paul Williams, Rolling Stone “Dick was . . . one of the genuine visionaries that North American fiction has produced in this century.” –L.A. Weekly "When it comes to intellectually challenging and deeply philosophical grist for contemporary screenwriters, few literary minds have been as reliably fertile as that of the late science-fiction master Philip K. Dick. The longtime Berkeley resident's many novels and short stories overflow with the kind of suspense, intrigue and heroics that interest Hollywood." --SF Chronicle

Customer Reviews

Quiet Desperation
The time is 1952, the place Oakland. Stuart Hadley lives a life of quiet desperation, putting in time as a salesman in an appliance store, marrying, having a child, putting his pants on one leg at a time and feeling miserable. Dick captures the ennui/paranoia of the time, with everyone certain that the Atomic Bomb would soon bring life on earth to a quick and meaningless end.

Unfortunately the bleak subject matter isn't helped any by Dick's not-quite-developed-yet style. Long stretches of the book consist of endless (and rather pointless) dialogue, preachy diatribes and unmotivated character actions. There are some nice turns of phrase here and there, but it's readily apparent why this manuscript, alone among all of his effects, remained unpublished during Dick's lifetime. He must have felt that it was unworthy of his later work, and who are we to disagree.

Stuart Hadley begins the story in jail, and ends it with brutality against the women in his life. In between the reader is treated to lots of casual bigotry and McCarthy-era fear-motivated conformity. It's an unflattering portrait of a not-pretty time in our history, and the flow of language used to tell it is not yet masterful.

Dick fans (like me) will probably read it just to fill out the collection, but once will certainly be enough.

gutter noise
A reader who is not already a Philip K. Dick fan is unlikely to enjoy Voices From the Street. Publishers had plenty of good reasons to avoid this manuscript for the past 50 years. More than most of his work, Voices reeks of Dickian narcissism. Thoughts, emotions, motives, dialog, and descriptions are dominated by the trite and trivial. The humor, inventiveness, and free association that justify Dick's science fiction are totally lacking.

Dick fans will recognize many autobiographical characteristics in Stuart Hadley - his borderline personality, TV shop identity, and obsession with high school German.

The most interesting aspect of Voices is how Hadley's injuries immediately prior his is emotional "resurrection" (teeth, eye, and rib) prefigure The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, arguably Dick's most mature novel.

Brilliant, disturbing -this man was a great writer.
I've been reading P.K. Dick since 1975. I read his 'Confessions of A Crap Artist' in the late 1970s and loved it, but thought it was more or less a kind of one-off mainstream novel. And now we have 'Voices From the Street', 'Humpty Dumpty In Oakland', and 'In Milton Lumky Territory', the last two of which I haven't yet read. One might hope this particular posthumous Dickien mainstream vault was bottomless because the stuff is so good, however the introduction to 'Voices' seems to indicate that this novel is it, the last one. Too bad. This is a brilliant book. Not perfect by any means, but withering and harrowing in its honest and uncompromising points of view, devastating in its portrayal of America, that supposed materialistic paradise, in the early 1950s. The writing is wonderful. The characters are fascinating, if anything but sympathetic, and it is impossible to predict exactly what is going to happen, although there is a definite aura of doom about the book from page one. The time and setting of the novel are evocative and even nostalgic in a perverse kind of way; you might think of it as a kind of subversive mid-20th Century West Coast time capsule. Just about everyone in the book is lost or floundering. The ones who haven't sold out and are clinging on grimly to cheap materialistic values take desperate lunges for that something missing in their lives, but they for the most part end up unhappier than the duller, more plodding majority. The most basic, simple human relationships don't seem to work. There is fear, hostility and outright hatred between races, and between those with differing political and religious beliefs. Violence seethes just below the surface. The whole society is sick. Maybe the whole world is sick. After reading the first chapter, I felt the author was making a pretty good case for there being something wrong with life itself. One of the most pathetic characters in the book, Horace Wakefield, a middle-aged recluse who works in a flower shop and belongs to a Jehovah Witness-type cult that reveres a charismatic black man with an end-of-the-world message, actually comes across in the end as one of the most grounded people in the book,
'Wakefield winced. Fingers trembling, he straightened his tie, smoothed down his coat; he pulled himself upright and faced Hadley. "You can't," he said hoarsely. "You're living in a crazy world Stuart. It isn't possible to cut out a neat little pattern; this is a world of war and lunatics, and you're in it whether you like it or not." Leaning towards Hadley, he grated: "In a crazy world, it's the nuts who know what's going on".'
And yet the gloom is relieved by scintillating angles of dark humour that flash by when least expected. With Dick the unexpected is always expected and that saves a gritty, uncompromising work like this from being oppressive. This book compares well with Richard Yates' 'Revolutionary Road', which was written at about the same time but set on the East Coast. The fact that Dick's novel didn't get published at the time says something about the publishing business, not that any more evidence is needed to prove that it is severely dysfunctional. On the other hand, if they had printed it in 1952, maybe we wouldn't have been able to enjoy all of those great mind-bending Science Fiction works Dick would go on to produce. With these wonderful mainstream novels seeming to come out of nowhere, it almost seems as if we are getting the best of both worlds. Say, you don't suppose that the P.K. Dick from a parallel universe, the one where he was a successful mainstream author and where he didn't write much SF, has now made contact with this universe and is slowly feeding us the novels he wrote there? Oh well, we can only hope.