Frolixing with the freaks

Our Friends from Frolix 8, by Philip K. Dick, 1970.

Among Dick's 1960s novels, this one does not seem to get much love. It may be because there is a strong air of depression about the main character, Nick Appleton. He is a tire regroover, an occupation that one might be surprised still exists in the 22nd century, but it fits the personality. Nick is in love with a 16-year-old revolutionary guttersnipe, Charlotte, for whom he eventually leaves his wife and son.

There are some tragic and absurd deaths and perhaps not as much humor as we are used to in a Dick novel. Characters have a tendency to rattle on endlessly, seemingly without purpose. Another cause for disillusionment about this book may be the ending, as it seems to resolve very little.

Of more interest is the sociological layering of this future world. There are four categories of people in this world: Old Men, who possess normal intelligence but are passive and servile; Under Men, who are basically rebels to the authoritarian social order; New Men, who have highly developed brains; and Unusuals, who have advanced psi powers such as telepathy. The News and the Unusuals run this world with a tight grip using the PSS, an elite police corps also known as Pissers.

There is a type of character we have encountered in other Dick novels such as The Simulacra and Now Wait for Last Year. It is the conflicted world leader., this time named Willis Gram, who is able to enforce his despotic rule through telepathic powers. For no good reason he falls in love with Charlotte, who is an Under Man, and such a martial-arts whiz that she escapes from four Pisser guards that Gram has assigned to her. This intersection plunges Nick into the center of the political plot and into an "advisor" role of sorts to Gram.

The leader of the Under Men, Thors Provini, has been away on a long space journey for decades, and is returning with a giant protoplasmic alien in tow, Morgo Rahn Wilc, from the planet Frolix 8. This alien has extraordinary powers and upon return of Provini's ship to earth the Frolixan is able to scan the minds of the New Men and the Unusuals and in an instant reduce them to childish idiocy.

It might seem that this is an overly easy solution to a difficult problem. The authoritarian government is toppled, as it deserved to be, and the unempathetic brainiacs, the New Men or double-domers as they are called, are put out of business with just a bit of mental sabotage on the part of Morgo. Besides the political plot finding some resolution, however, the existential plight of Dick's characters remains tenuous. It's not a feelgood book.

But Dick's creations always fascinate beyond what we think they should, given the technical problems we might perceive in the writing. It has something to do with the fact that he wrote so many novels and they tend to run together in the mind, because they share many elements of a background reality. And a book like Our Friends from Frolix 8 benefits from that.

Time to teleport

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, 1955. 
The science fiction novel did not come of age until the 1950s, but when it did, and with the sudden profusion of mass-market paperback publishers, a new literary form was born. Though the 1940s were regarded as the "golden age" of SF, the '50s were equally gilded in a different way. Not only were the landmark works that exploded upon the scene better written, they extended the conceptual boundaries of the form into social criticism and consciousness speculation.

Alfred Bester was one of the most influential SF writers of the '50s, primarily for two novels: The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. The former involved telepathic detectives; the latter was an adventure story based on teleportation. In a world where everyone can instantly transmit themselves mentally across large regions, social status seems to track the distance one is able to "jaunte."

Bester's style is fantastical and pyrotechnic, exuberant, over the top. His story is a revenge tale: The Count of Monte Cristo in space, jumping around  the Solar System in sudden explosions of action. It wears its historical and literary allusions on its sleeve. But it seems a thoroughly modern science fiction book; it could have been written yesterday. The setting is a hypercapitalist future ruled by giant corporations. It has often been noted that The Stars My Destination is a proto-cyberpunk novel. It has the urgency of tone that we find later in William Gibson. The first lines of Bester's novel are indicative: “This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying… but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice… but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks… but nobody loved it.” Literary echoes (Joyce, Blake, Dumas) pepper Bester's stylish landscape, providing historical depth while plunged into radical future excursions. 

One can legitimately question whether there is substance beneath the style. At times the reader can feel exhausted by the density of characters, incidents, and sudden shifts in scene. The book is not an epic but it reads as if it has epic scope. In short, the suspicion is that there is less here than meets the eye. The main character, Gully Foyle, begins as low and rough with more muscle than brain, and ends up a sort of god-man, the first human with the ability to "space-jaunte" across millions of miles. But we never know this man, or feel much kinship with him. The character and the stars themselves, his "destination," leave us cold in the end. Still, the journey is compelling on its own terms, and one every science-fiction lover must take.

A pop from the past

The Broken Bubble, by Philip K. Dick, 1956.

This realist novel is one both in and out of its time, the 1950s. Philip K. Dick wrote it in 1956 and it is both a mirror to the contemporary world and to PKD's mind. That in itself recommends it to the discerning philophile (or Dickhead).

The main characters are Jim Briskin, a disk jockey, and his ex-wife Patricia, with whom he is still in love. Then there is a young couple, Art and Rachael, with whom Jim and Pat become enamored. Shortly we have a marital mess, with all the characters continually changing their minds about which partner they want to sleep with or marry or remarry or unmarry. On top of that, throw in some juvenile delinquents who are sort of neither here nor there but provide a certain greasy comic relief. One is actually a would-be science fiction writer, which is about all the science fiction one gets in this book.

Close to the end a grotesque creature called Thisbe Holt, an exotic dancer, makes a brief appearance, nude and rolling around inside a plastic bubble, at a convention of equally grotesque optometrists. Dick seemed to give especial emphasis to this image, as his title for the book was "The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt" (it was not published until 1988, with the shortened title). The original title would have been peculiar in that Thisbe scarcely appears, and her sudden spherical entry is jarring. It is intrusive and seems to have no place in this narrative of two troubled marriages. She's like La Saraghina meets Dr. T. J. Eckleberg. What a strange and unexplained departure from ordinary 50s reality, and what a weird stew this book suddenly becomes!

So whose bubble really breaks in this novel? Thisbe's? Pat and Jim's? Pat has an amazing scene where she almost kills herself--"In the darkness of the apartment, she painted; she put more darkness around her. She lifted darkness and carried it about the living room and the bedroom and into the bathroom and the kitchen. She took it everywhere. She brought it to each thing in the apartment, and after that she turned it to herself." Jim returns to find her covered with blood.

So this is not just a book of its time. It exists just around the corner from the incomprehensible, trembling on the edge of just a little bit of insanity. If we remember the 50s, these scenes could be part of the fabric. They certainly were part of Philip K. Dick's.

The girl who could not make up her mind

Mary and the Giant, by Philip K. Dick, 1988.

Mary and the Giant is one of Philip K. Dick's nine surviving mainstream or realist novels. These were written in the 1950s but for the most part not published until after his death in 1982, Dick's other 36 novels were science fiction. The mainstream novels are underrated and underread, in my opinion. But usually only those who have exhausted the SF novels will venture on the path less traveled by into obscurer PKD.

Mary and the Giant, like the other mainstream novels, is a realistic evocation of the 1950's, a time as strange, in retrospect, as any we might find in an SF novel--which is sort of the point, really, about why we should read these books. They evoke a sense of mystery and otherness--only here, instead of making the otherness explicit by using SF memes--androids, time travel, dystopias, and the like -- here the otherness stays largely hidden and only hinted at.

The characters here are connected in terms of being in the music scene of a small northern California town. No heroes and heroines here: this is about their relationships, and their errant and fugitive attempts of awkward groping for love with each other in various combinations. The racial and sexual frankness of the book is extraordinary for the time period in which it was written, which may partially account for why it was not published at the time.

The giant of the title, Joseph Schilling, arrives in town to open a classical record shop. His origins are mysterious: "Perhaps he had come all across the world; perhaps he had always been coming, moving along, from place to place....He was so immense that he towered over everything." This mythic description introduces a note of fantasy into the drab small town setting.

Mary Anne Reynolds (of the title) is a very confused young woman who bats around ceaselessly from lover to lover, apartment to apartment, job to job. Joseph briefly becomes her employer and would-be sugar daddy. Although he appreciates her as a free spirit, the match is hopeless because of her headstrong and dilatory nature. Also, because she was sexually abused by her father, an older man like Joseph cannot be other than toxic to her.

Joseph is mysteriously drawn to her,like to a femme fatale, despite his better judgment. She eventually finds happiness with a younger musician, but in the ironic ending, Joseph does not.

How do you solve a problem like Mary if you are Joseph? You don't; the answers stay hidden. He understands that she is trying to fit into a world that has not come into being yet; that may not exist for a hundred years. Her indecisiveness can thus be explained by the fact that she is trying to inhabit a different reality, as was Dick himself.

Music was an article of faith for Dick. His inclusion of it here as a constant background gives us the author's witnessing presence, presiding over the eternal accompaniment to the dance of the wandering humans.

A blues-ribbon book

Black Cherry Blues, by James Lee Burke, 1989.

This was the third in the Dave Robicheaux detective series and the first of Burke's books to win the coveted Edgar prize for best mystery novel of the year. By now there are twenty or more titles in the series, and while I have read many of them, oddly I had never read this one before. I found it to be an outstanding representative of the series and certainly deserving of the honor it received. The writing is as deeply felt and vivid and memorable as anything in Burke's oeuvre.

If you have not experienced Burke's prose before, any of his books will do. His models were the great American writers like Hemingway and Steinback, and not so much the genre of mystery fiction. His whole object is to sear you with blazing prose that makes you feel into the recesses of the heart and uncover the true mysteries there that can never be totally solved.

However, the Robicheaux series is special, and if you are approaching it for the first time, I would recommend the first two books of the series, The Neon Rain and Heaven's Prisoners, before you read Black Cherry Blues, as your understanding of the main characters will build consecutively. Still, every title in the series stands alone and it is not necessary to read them in order. This is especially true of the later titles.

In this book, Dave, who has become an ex-cop living in a Louisiana bayou, finds himself accused of a murder he didn't commit, and has to travel to Montana to clear his name. These contrasting milieus provide a canvas for descriptive master Burke to pull out all the stops. This is Louisiana: "Late that afternoon the wind shifted out of the south and you could smell the wetlands and just a hint of salt in the air. Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water. It rained hard, dancing on the bayou and the lily pads in the shallows, clattering on my gallery and rabbit hutches, lighting the freshly plowed fields with a black sheen." And Montana: "There were lakes surrounded by cattails set back against the mountain range, and high up on the cliffs long stretches of waterfall were frozen solid in the sunlight like enormous white teeth."

Somehow the shift in scene lets some air into the oppressiveness of the initial chapters and symbolically gives Dave space to redeem himself, at least for this novel. There will be many other opportunities for redemption in the books that follow, for Dave Robicheaux is a mysterious soul whose integrity and self-control dance dangerously on the edge with his propensity for violence. It's a compelling brew which make the reading of these books a compulsive addiction.

A couple of cases

The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Sulky Girl, by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1933. Perry Mason is an iconic figure whose relevance, eighty years after his creation, is perhaps even greater than ever. We need a lawyer-hero, dammit, to help us safely negotiate our course through the shark-infested waters in these parlous times. These were the first two of ninety Perry Mason books by Gardner, and it is interesting to see the sprouting of the nascent character. In the first story, The Case of the Velvet Claws, which never even makes it into the courtroom, Mason is more like a private eye than a lawyer. Think Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, and all the detective pulp fiction of the 1930s, which is a good distance from the urbane Raymond Burr of the TV series. By the second book, however, Mason has fully developed into the legal wizard who has probably done more to resuscitate public faith in the judicial process than all the actual lawyers out there. He is more restrained, less of an overt tough guy, but inwardly as tough as they come.

In these books it is abundantly clear that the beautiful Della Street, Mason's secretary, is majorly in love with the dashing attorney. She even gets to plant a kiss on him at the end of Velvet Claws, leaving some very visible lipstick behind. This is an element that never evolves much through the book and TV series, unfortunately for her; Mason is much too preoccupied with whatever his current case is to stoop to notice any form of wood at hand other than a gavel.

Somehow these books seem timeless. There is very little description that fixes them in their time period. We are completely pulled into the mystery itself, which exists in a world of its own. The discovery of a whole other layer of truth underneath the apparent one, the status quo obviousness of guilt and innocence pulled back by the superior man. Perry Mason represents the truth. That is his ultimate client.

Support your local sociopath

Pop. 1280, by Jim Thompson, 1964.

As one of the writers who defines literary noir, Jim Thompson found the perfect balance of black comedy and bleak irony with this novel. If you have read his best known book The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280 is also a variation on the theme of a small-town sheriff who ends up presiding over a murderous roundup of most of the story's other characters. In the case of this book, the carnage is accompanied with a leavening dose of low comedy and a feast of sociopolical satire from the point of view of the sociopathic Nick Corey, High Sheriff of Pottsdale.

This comic tale is something that might be produced by an unholy union of Mark Twain and Jack the Ripper's mother. The sheriff juggles three women, possessed of insatiable sex drives, who are amusingly offset by his attempts to accommodate all of them without getting caught and while not missing breakfast. The passions that fuel the characters have escalated to the level of mini-religious apocalypse by novel's end. Only then do we realize Nick's comic objectivity conceals a frightening psychosis. This is also seen when as the only character with sympathetic feelings for the downtrodden Negroes, he dispatches a loyal old black servant with a shotgun practically on principle.

It is interesting to consider this work in light of the influence that Texas has had in terms of national politics over the last fifty years since it was written. We are still a killer nation and Texas, which is the evident setting of the book, epitomizes this. The annual number of gun murders in Texas (1246 in 2010) is approximately the population of the small town where this novel is set. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has nothing on the more efficient bloodbath that greets us daily from the "red" states.