Philip K. Dick was long exiled to the science fiction hinterland, and a read through his early realist writings shows that he was at his best in alternate worlds with flying cars, time scoops, colonies on Mars and deadly automatons.
“Humpty Dumpty in Oakland,” apparently completed in 1960, is believed to be Dick’s last non-science-fiction novel. Only published posthumously in England, it is the second of Dick’s early works this year that Tor Books is publishing for the first time in the United States.
A bumbling used-car salesman attempts to thwart an attempt to sell his run-down lot in a seedy Oakland neighborhood, with tragically comic results. The salesman and the lot’s owner, a retiring mechanic, each spiral into sweaty paranoia as they contemplate their next business ventures in 1950s America.
Dick has been criticized for his blunt writing style, often sacrificing artful description in favor of quickly advancing the plot. Compared with much of his later fiction, “Humpty Dumpty in Oakland” brims with detail. Upholstery hangs from the roof of a Dodge with a misaligned bumper. A prim real estate agent has shockingly wrinkled, leathery hands.
The details, though, stall the story. Like a tired old car, Dick’s plot fails to hold a charge. It’s too real. The mundane despair over a lot full of run-down cars does not equal the profoundly chilling insecurity Dick later finds in the ownership of an electric sheep.
What “Humpty Dumpty in Oakland” does show is Dick trying out the themes he’ll explore in his more futuristic work: paranoia, drug addiction, the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots, the millstone of technology and the reckoning we will face for over-reliance on that technology. Opening the garage for business requires a time-consuming sequence of small electronic appliances needing to be switched on, a process so taxing a coffee break is immediately required. The mechanic shies away from a wealthy client’s expensive new Cadillac with daunting power accessories. The used car salesman revs up for a job interview with candylike pills. A shoddy, overproduced recording distorts a song into mere vibration, a “pure disturbance of the air.”
In all, Dick’s attempts at realism are better read as drafts by a writer finding his voice than definitive works of fiction.
“Humpty Dumpty in Oakland” feels like this: I grew up with the animated promise of flying cars in my future. The car in my parking space is such a disappointment.
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