Confessions of a Crap Artist

Confessions of a Crap Artist has successfully inspired me to pursue PKD's other non-science fiction novels. It possesses the perfect mix of heart, humor, tragedy, and social reflection with some of the same themes and topics as Dick's science fiction. The only non-science fiction novel of Dick I had read prior to tackling this engaging novel of Jack, his sister, and his brother-in-law in rural Marin County, was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Here, however, we are treated to country life in Marin County (with occasional trips to San Francisco and the Bay Area) and the likely OCD Jack Isidore, who resembles several protagonists in the oeuvre of PKD (mentally ill, socially awkward, working odd jobs, dominated by a woman). His willingness to hear out any idea, apply it to his scientific method, and focus on what is real (or, eternal) separates him from his sister, Fay, her husband, Charley, and the young man Fay eventually has an affair with, Nat Anteil. 

Along the way, we are treated to a series of events told from the perspective of the aforementioned characters, posing deep questions about the meaning of marriage, family, free will, loyalty, love, and mental illness. And much like the dream house Charley and Fay build in rural Marin County, each of them fall for something that brings more problems than expected. Tragically (and hilariously), Jack falls into a UFO cult that believes the end of the world will occur near the end of April 1959, but he's possibly the most sane and selfless individual in the novel, suggesting some of the profound religious and spiritual themes of PKD's later work. Both in his willingness to believe and his service for the animals on Charley and Fay's property (plus taking care of their daughters), Jack by far possesses the most redeeming qualities. For a portrait of life in 1950s California, plus seeing Dick's other themes and ideas in realist fiction, this is essential.

Clans of the Alphane Moon

Although not his best work, Clans of the Alphane Moon is a hilarious self-referential novel about Dick's marriages (several, many not ending well), his workload (Chuck, the central character, writes scripts for simulacra), and the narrow boundary between mental health and psychosis. As someone who wrote similar novels about precogs, psionic powers, and time travel involving schizophrenia, Clans takes this interest in new directions. A colony of various schizophrenic types have formed an autonomous society on a moon in the Alpha system by rebelling against the hospital (which was established there to provide psychotherapy for the schizophrenics settled there by Terra). Now, after 25 years of isolation from Terra, a mission led by Chuck's psychologist wife is sent there to provide therapy, reassert Terran authority (a war between the Alphane race and Terra recently concluded, not to mention ongoing tensions between the US and the USSR), and impose therapy on the various clans of schizophrenic inhabitants. Chuck and his wife, who separate after years of acrimony, predictably duke it out on this moon in the later parts of the novel, after a series of manipulative moves and quirky characters (including a slime from Ganymede that communicates telepathically) culminates in a final showdown over the state of their marriage. Where this novel's hilarity reaches its peak is Chuck's use of alien drugs to stay up all night and write (scripts for Bunny Hentman's show, and scripts for the simulacra sent to accompany his wife to the lunar colony), something Dick must have meant as a humorous self-referential commentary on his own use of drugs to stay up all night and write science fiction novels (and support his wife). Despite it all, one sees through the fateful reunion of Mary and Chuck that effort, persistence, and selflessness are necessary for a marriage to work, and mental illness is more of a continuum and capable of change. Indeed, the the paranoid schizophrenic, Gabriel Baines, can change.