Customer Reviews

The Broken Bubble

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This Phil K. Dick novel illustrates why he was driven to sci-fi, much to the world's benefit. This is not great literature, scripts such as his sci-fi, that lifts the reader out of their everyday, boring, mundane lives. One of his themes - that the world's fate rests in the hands of the young, the innocent and the honest is underlined here. He shows how kids make glaring mistakes in their personal lives but somehow pull it out of the fire. One of his quirky sci-fi characters is here in Rachel, but alas, the plot, that of a double triangle of romance, is only a recommendation for universal marriage counseling. All this story can be said to do is provide the reader a good look into a cracked mirror. On the plus side it is a well crafted melodramaļ - an autopsy of the human facade which all too often passes off as modern life. But now we have reality TV and a camcorder in every bedroom.

There's nothing like adultery to get a reader's attention and build a story around. In most such books, such as "Madame Bovary", "Lady Chatterley's Lover" or "Fanny Hill", the adultery is the main issue; it moves the plot forward and leads to a climax in which the couple in question either stays together or doesn't. You get the idea; adultery is what the story is about, such a big deal that just about any novel with adultery has to spend the remainder of its running time resolving the issue. "The Broken Bubble" is a novel of adultery in which the sexual shenanigans are sort of beside the point. Now, that may be new.

Okay, so if the cheating isn't the main idea, what might the main idea be? As usual with Philip K. Dick, "The Broken Bubble" seems to be about love. In this case, the characters start out with little idea of what loving is. By the time the story is over, they haven't exactly become experts, but they are a little wiser. Adultery doesn't usually work that way in real life, of course, but it works that way here, and as usual PKD makes you believe it.

Although the emphasis of "The Broken Bubble" strikes one as unexpected, the structure is pretty standard stuff. It's about two couples, one divorced and one married. Since the ex-spouses both work at the same San Francisco radio station, their relationship gets complicated fast. Jim Briskin spins records and Patricia Gray works the front office. Jim still loves Patricia, and she may love him too, but she has no confidence in her ability to love. It's hard to imagine many worse feelings.

Art Emmanual, one of Jim's fans, is an 18-year-old kid with few prospects, a pregnant 17-year-old wife named Rachael, and a group of friends whose idea of a good time is wrecking rich kids' cars as some sort of rebellious statement. Obviously, these two have enough trouble in everyday life; they scarcely have time to ask whether they love each other, let alone answer that question.

So Jim takes Patricia to visit the Emmanuals one night, thinking it might cheer her up, and the next thing you know Patricia has seduced Art in the most casual way possible. Rachael can't manage by herself, and insists that Jim take care of her until her baby is born. They may be contemplating an affair of their own.

Clearly, the purpose of cheating in this story is not just to have sex. Patricia and Rachael spend a lot of time guessing about what the purpose might be, although their respective significant others don't seem to care about that - Jim and Al, instead of figuring out why all of this goes on, want more than anything to build something permanent with a partner, so much so that they don't spend a lot of time listening to their prospective partners.

Doesn't matter much. The women never reach any definite conclusions about why the cheating has gone on, and the men don't seem to care. However, the emotional and sexual confusion does force everyone to confront themselves and their spouses or ex-spouses, change what they can change and accept what they can't. Or not. Which is an exciting story, although I wouldn't take it too literally. You know, "Don't try this at home" and all that.

As I say, structurally, this tale has been around for quite a while. It's the seemingly unrelated incidents in the story that make it really interesting.

Going back to Al's high school buddies and their hobbies, for instance, they don't seem to have much to do with the main plot. They consider their rich-kids'-car-smashing activities to be a sort of early-model anti-capitalist revolutionary movement. Rachael, needless to say, disagrees. So this organization, as incongruous as it seems to the story, winds up having a good-sized impact on Al and Rachael's relationship, and thus on the whole novel. (PKD also includes an sf story by one of these young men as a sort of in-joke. To my delight, it's awful.)

As for the source of this novel's title, it comes from an incident entirely apart from the main action, having to do with a young woman who hires herself out to conventions as a sort of erotic plaything. She climbs nude into a clear plastic ball and lets conventioneers kick the ball around. We see her in action, and unsurprisingly things don't go well. No prizes for guessing what happens to her plastic ball - the book is named "The Broken Bubble", remember. On the other hand, I'll bet you can't guess how the thing manages to land in the lives of the main characters, and what that does to their various emotional dilemmas.

There's something awe-inspiring about an author who can dump such apparently unrelated sequences into a novel and twist them into relevance. There's something even more awe-inspiring about an author who can pull off these kinds of technical tricks, while at the same time remembering to give his characters a rather touching emotional life. PKD did this kind of thing all the time, and yet most of his non-sf work did not get published until after he died. The world, as "The Broken Bubble" demonstrates, is a very strange place.

Benshlomo says, Art is long, life is short.

This realist novel, completed in 1956 but not published until 1988, is an effective exploration of the psychological subtleties of a four-way relationship. Jim Briskin, a classical music radio announcer, still in love with his ex-wife Pat, introduces her to a teenage couple, Art and Rachael. Pat becomes involved with the violent and possessive Art. Meanwhile, in her curious, willful way, Rachael falls in love with Jim. The "broken bubble" of the title refers to a minor incident in which one Thisbe Holt rolls around naked inside a plastic bubble at a convention of optometrists, who end up filling it with junk and smashing it. The broken-bubble image is suggestive of the egoic bubbles that Jim, Pat, Art, and Rachael all float in, that separate them in their relationships. During the course of the novel these bubbles are broken.

Clearly, this is not really a science fiction novel. Oh, yes, well maybe it is. No. No, it definitely isn't. These were this reviewer's reactions while reading this sometimes too prosaic novel by science fiction legend Philip K. Dick. Set in the late 1950's, the story focuses on Jim Briskin, a DJ at San Francisco's KOIF radio station, his ex-wife Pat, and an impoverished young couple, fans of his program, whom he befriends. He finds these young people strangely alien in attitude and beliefs, and strange they are indeed. Art is a shy, stammering young man with zero social skills. He works as a helper at a used car lot, but doesn't seem too concerned that Rachael is expecting their first child, and when she stops working they'll lose two-thirds of their income. Rachael herself has a strangely stoic quality, and while her social skills are also limited, she has a unique self-confidence based on the knowledge that she's always right. Sci-fi buffs will surely expect a denouement in which this couple is revealed to be from some faraway planet, but the truth of the matter is that they are not so much from another world as simply from another generation, yet are still just as distant from Jim and his world as if they really were aliens. The plot thickens when Art leaves his pregnant wife to pursue a torrid affair with Pat, but it quickly becomes apparent who among these all-too-familiar characters really needs help.

If subverting reader expectations were a goal in itself, this would surely be a very successful novel. This reviewer felt almost as though Dick was playing a joke on his readers by setting them up to expect first one standard science fiction twist (mind control), and then another (alien invaders), but never delivering on any of them, and instead leaving us (in the end) with a fairly common tale of marital infidelity and emotional loss. More likely this book is just an example of a genre writer trying to stretch out and try something different, even (dare we say it?) something serious. Dick may be trying to define a generational sea change that was taking place in America, with young people growing up oblivious to the hang-ups (and value structures) that controlled the lives of their elders. But while this novel has a few interesting features, some of which lie within the province of science fiction (i.e., the remote control car, and the bubble), they aren't nearly enough to carry the book as a whole. In fact they might actually put off those (few) readers who would otherwise be likely to appreciate this book as a novel of mid-20th Century manners, or whatever. In any case, whether it's because it tries to be too many things at once, or because the disparate elements never really gel, this book fails to do more than occasionally entertain, and much of it's pretty depressing at that.

Too bad the publishers kept PKD tied to sci-fi, thereby depriving us of what would have been one of our greatest FICTION writers ever. Go to your library, read it, savor it. This is a glimpse of the gems PKD wanted to share with us. Watch the bizarre scene of the girl in the bubble. Only PKD could create this!

Found this one at the library and devoured it. Not quite as good as Confessions... but definitely worth reading. As usual, slightly "off" but believable people make up the cast of characters and the overall mood is one of confusion and frustration. Read it! - Linn Stanley

The name of the protagonist (don't know exactly which it is, don't have my copy at hand) is a name that appears in some Dick stories, and I guess in Blade Runner (someone please correct me if I err). The used car dealer reappears in a somewhat different setting in The Simulacra. Maarten Daams