Puttering About in a Small Land

The quest to complete every novel written by Philip K. Dick is nearly at an end. This week, I finished Puttering About in a Small Land, one of Dick's posthumously published realist novels set in 1950s California. Unlike the rest of his realist fiction, this novel takes place in Los Angeles and Ojai, and much of it is centered on the drive between a boarding school near Ojai and Los Angeles, a drive I have a certain familiarity with when accompanying relatives to Ventura County. Like his other realist novels, this one revolves around marital infidelity, personal relationships, and small men fighting against big currents. Here, Roger Lindahl, who has moved through life and lacks the drive to make it, has depended on various women while managing to screw up each opportunity given to him. However, his wife, Virginia, and her mother, have given him the support needed to launch a small-scale television store in LA. Naturally, Roger ruins everything by having an affair with Liz Bonner, a married women with children at the same school Roger's son, Gregg, attends. 

While this novel does deliver a denouement close to the satisfaction of Dick's other non-science fiction novels, it takes far too long to build momentum. In addition, the flashback chapters, to life in Arkansas during the Depression and the 1940s in D.C. or LA during World War II, were a bit clumsily handled by PKD. However, unlike some of his other novels, Mexican migrant workers and "pachucos" of LA make an appearance, adding another dimension to the complex social relations of postwar California. Although Roger Lindahl is a racist, his disdain and aggression is primarily directed at African-Americans, while he eventually learns to take a risk and offer a ride to hitchhiking Mexican farmworkers. However, this novel is perhaps too similar to Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, particularly in the 'low ambition' of Al Miller and Roger, who both flee from their problems (and, in so doing, violate social conventions). Like many a PKD protagonist, Lindahl can't compete with the new forces changing the ways businesses operate. Indeed, perhaps even more a reflection of the changing times, it is his wife, Virginia, who is the one who sees the changing tides and adapts, while her husband continues to "putter" as the world moves. In this sense, Puttering About brings to mind several of Dick's better works and the the individual 'mass man' struggling to make his way.