Customer Reviews

We Can Build You

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Not one of PKD's famous novels, but one of the very best of the rest (see my review of NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR for more on this phenomenon). Dick actually wrote this in 1962, immediately after THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and at the same time as MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, when he was at the height of his powers. It was conceived, written, and shopped to publishers as a mainstream novel with an sf setting -- and, like Dick's brilliant 50's mainstream novels, it failed to sell (a setback which had a huge influence on his subsequent career). When Dick wrote DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP in 1966, he recycled the unforgettable dark-haired girl character, Pris Frauenzimmer, as Pris Stratton. And when his life fell apart in the early 70's, he finally sold the ms. as a magazine serial.

This is, I believe, the only PKD novel written in the first-person. Our hero, Louis Rosen, falls in love with a young schizoid girl. There's the usual amount of brilliant PKD sf speculation (in this case, about what it means to be human), wedded seamlessly to the very best portrayal of a male-female relationship in all his fiction. The dialogue is priceless; there's a scene in a hotel room that has more quotable lines than most writers can muster in a career.

There are two aspects to the novel that may bother people who read only sf -- but they are central to the conception and true nature of the book (as both an sf novel and a highly experimental postmodern novel, without compromise to either). First, it changes horses midway, leaving a lot of plot strands dangling (what Kim Stanley Robinson calls Dick's "broken-backed" novel structure), as our narrator becomes more and more obsessed with his femme fatale. In the same way, there's not a lot of *plot* closure in the ending, but there's total emotional closure (a lot like real life).

This one will break your heart, as it undoubtedly broke PKD's, in more ways than one.

Lots of people seem not to care for this book, which (along with Flow My Tears... Dr. Bloodmoney and Deus Irae) is one of my favorites, hands down.

First of all- In this man's honest opinion, Phillip K. Dick is the ONE bona fide (as in Oh Brother- 'he's bona fide!') GENIUS of American letters, post-WWII. No one can match his breadth of vision, his uncanny ability to make his perceptions and dreams work while undermining one's sense of reality and existence as objective. He makes the lit-theory sci-fi jargonmeisters (Pynchon and Delillo, for example) look like the drivel-laden frauds they so clearly are; they write solely to ensure that lit-theory academics can continue their pointless little lives in their ivory towers and not have to work for a living- a relationship that works quite well for all involved, save those few elect that cherish honest literature... I see that damn blurb on many reviews of Dick's works- "The poor man's Pynchon,' what absolute tripe. In fact, Pynchon is the dickless man's Dick.

At any rate, ranting aside, this little novel, published around the time of the first centennial passing of our Civil War, concerns a man (Louis Rosen) who is drawn into a relationship with his business partner's daughter (Pris Frauenzimmer): a cold, spiteful, driven, vicious woman (Dick's prototypical 'dark-haired girl,' a theme that reoccurs throughout his fiction) who creates simulacra of historical personages. These people she creates- one Abe Lincoln, and one Edwyn M. Stanton (Lincoln's Secretary of War) represent two potential poles of human experience- Stanton quickly adapts to the new world and becomes a shrewd advisor to Rosen's company while Lincoln can't really adapt to the world or the fact that he's a robot version of himself. Lincoln eventually becomes an idiot savant/mentor to Louis, who gradually succumbs to insanity and loss...

It's an odd novel, not of the typical sci-fi adventure mode, and not your standard Dickian, hard-working everyman tries to figure out the nature of reality-type scenario. Still, it's an inimitably poignant little novel, one that ends abruptly and without much resolution. I really dig it. It also anticipates that buffoon Baudrilliard by about a quarter century.

Here, I love this quote; "It was as if Pris, to me, were both life itself - and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending and yet also the spirit of existence itself. Movement: she was motion itself. Life in its growing, planning, calculating, harsh, thoughtless actuality. I could not stand having her around me; I could not stand being without her. Without Pris I dwindled away until I became nothing and eventually died like a bug in the back yard, unnoticed and unimportant; around her I was slashed, goaded, cut to pieces, stepped on - yet somehow I lived; in that, I was real. Did I enjoy suffering? No. It was that it seemed as if suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unfair, unbalanced. But also, there was nothing alive, only small-time schlock schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand..."

It's a novel about a man loosing himself and clinging to the one real thing he knows- being tormented by a beautiful enigma. I can relate if you can't...

As always Dick explores the themes: "who and what are real"; "who is crazy and who is sane". Louis Rosen is a former piano salesman whose family company starts to make simulcra (exact robot replicas). Abe Lincoln is their first construct and he soon gains consciousness and begins to ask for his rights vs. a wealthy mars colonizer. Who is and what is human? Our hero meanwhile falls in love with teenage Pris, a refugee from a Federal Bureau of Mental Health hospital. Is anyone sane? From there on things take delightful dizzying Dickian twists. Its a wonderful book for anyone with a healthy measure of paranoia.

We Can Build You is not one of Philip K. Dick's most famous or popular works, and even many hard-cores disparage it, but this long-time fan thinks it a near-masterpiece. I certainly understand why many dislike it, and it is easy to see why he could not get it published originally; it is at once typical of the most controversial and often frustrating aspects of Dick's writing and atypical in missing much of what makes him loved. This seems destined to satisfy no one, but certain fans will take to it enthusiastically. No one should read this first, but anyone who has been through a dozen or so Dick novels and several dozen short stories should try it; some will be very pleasantly surprised.

We is in many ways transitional; written just after The Man in the High Castle, Dick's first real success, it is a somewhat uneasy mix of his mainstream 1950s novels, which were not published, and the 1960s science fiction ones that made his name. Most SF trappings are gone; there are few futuristic gadgets, and space travel is mentioned only very tangentially. The basic setting is essentially early 1960s America, which leads to some interesting - and somewhat distracting - anachronisms considering the then future setting. The major exceptions are what Dick calls simulacra - robots all but indistinguishable from humans. This of course recalls his masterpiece Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the works have several other similarities. The difference is that this was written just after the Civil War centennial, and without giving anything away, suffice it to say that this whet Dick's muse. As in Do, he uses simulacra to explore one of his perennial themes - What does it mean to be human? He does so variously and quite deeply, provoking extensive thought. Perhaps surprisingly, the touchy situation also leads to much humor, particularly in dialogue. This may be Dick's funniest book, which truly says much; I lost count of how many times I could not read for laughing, and it took great control not to wake my sleeping wife.

The book could have easily been a masterpiece in this regard, but Dick drops the thread about two thirds of the way in, never resuming it. Here we come to readers' ambivalent evaluations. Such things are not uncommon even in Dick's best work, but this is particularly jarring and clearly causes much frustration. We cannot know the reason, but it is important to remember that, for all his genius, Dick was essentially a pulp writer; paid by the word, he wrote quickly and almost never revised. He may have simply lost the thread or - struggling with mental illness, various drugs, money woes, relationship problems, etc. - even forgotten it. Whatever the case, I believe it can be justified artistically.

Which leads to the other main thread - mental illness. "What is sanity?" is one of Dick's other classic queries, and this is one of his fullest expressions. It explores many mental illness aspects, from onset to the worst episodes to treatment; all are thoroughly questioned and somewhat critiqued, provoking significant thought. Dick clearly had great insight into the issue, portraying it with great sensitivity and nuance; at least as importantly, he writes with the understanding and authentic air only experience can give. That this is almost Dick's only first-person novel is very significant here; the protagonist's apparent downward spiral into insanity is one of the most believable and affecting ever written. His self-documented fall is terribly moving; immersing us in it directly is far more absorbing and realistic than outside narration could have ever been. This is where abandoning the other thread is justified; as so often, Dick pulls the proverbial rug out from under us when we expect it least, making us feel the narrator's disorientation, confusion, and doubt as we could not have otherwise. Many will of course think this does not atone, but surely it at least goes a long way.

It is worth noting that this is one of Dick's darkest works even with all the hilarity. The depiction of human relations is bleak; little hope is held out for meaningful communication, while alienation, ennui, and general existential despair are rampant. Dick's love depiction is particularly barren; this focuses more intensely than perhaps any of his other works on a single male/female relationship, and the book as a whole can even be legitimately seen as a sort of very off-kilter love story. But what a depressing one! The book shows love to be an all-encompassing, utterly undeniable force but not in the usual fairy tale way. We instead see just how painful it can be when is not reciprocated - or, rather, when it is frustratingly impossible to tell if it is. This love is cruel, near-mocking - even sadistic. The object of the narrator's love is the mentally disturbed Pris, one of Dick's most fascinating characters; seemingly knowing she was too intriguing to languish, he essentially recycled her in the Do Androids character of the same name. She provides yet another mental illness angle and makes the love portrayal even subtler. It is a tribute to Dick's talent that we truly feel for her and the narrator despite their almost total lack of traditional virtues - or even of sanity.

The book's darkness largely emanates from the love depiction, but there are few bright spots. The ending is so ambiguous that the serial editor apparently felt the need to extend it, which is very understandable from a conventional standpoint but undercuts Dick's vision. Uncertainty is the book's essence; the ending is surely intentional, even if abandoning the first thread was not exactly so. Dick returned to these themes many times, often with more resolution, but this is more than compelling in its own right and arguably at least as legitimate.

In the end, We is essential for fans because it is in many ways unique in Dick's vast canon, though it also has many classic strengths. All will enjoy the latter, and the former just may be an even bigger treat.

This is a transitional work between Dick's mainstream novels of the 1950s and the science fiction of the 1960s, as the science-fictional element is de-emphasized in favor of psychological themes. Written in 1962, its first book publication was not until 1972. Critics usually unfairly regard We Can Build You as an artistic failure because what seems to be the main plot of the book - the story of a company that produces simulacra, or lifelike androids of historical Civil War figures - bit by bit dissolves into exclusive focus on the narrator Louis Rosen's obsessive love for his partner's eighteen-year-old daughter, Pris Frauenzimmer. Certainly Dick will confound those expecting conventional narrative unity, for this is an experimental novel masquerading as straight science fiction. It's really kind of a Trojan horse, an sf cover on a book about desire, obsession, and madness. As Louis descends into schizophrenia, the center of interest shifts from the projection of human life on the inanimate through building simulacra, to the search for authentic human feeling within oneself.

Throughout his adult life Philip K. Dick struggled both in his fiction and in his life with the questions of what it meant to be human and what it meant to be sane/insane. WE CAN BUILD YOU puts both of these on display, though the latter more than the former. This is somewhat surprising, because once the simulacra of Edwin M. Stanton is revealed, the reader would anticipate that the novel would deal, much like DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (with which this novel shares "mood organs," robots, artificial people, and a major character named Pris) with what it is that makes a person a person. Instead, even after the introduction of the Lincoln model of simulacra, the novel veers sharply to the question of sanity/insanity. This is by no means the only Dick novel to apparently start off with one theme and end up with another. As any student of Dick knows, he was not a careful writer, despite his unquestioned brilliance. He was paid by the word, providing not only no incentive for careful rewriting, but a disincentive to spend much time on any particular novel. Even the best Dick novels are rough and a bit unfinished. Some of them are just a mess. In this particular case, we apparently are being given a novel about artificial life and what it signifies, but it quickly is taken over by the notion of what it means sane, as Dick's protagonist quickly descends into an inability to hold onto reality.

I personally think Dick should have stuck with the simulacra in his novel instead of shifting over to questions of insanity. The two most interesting characters in the novel, by far, are the Stanton and Lincoln simulacra. There were moments where it appeared that the self-consciousness of the Lincoln would become the dominant aspect of the novel, but despite being teased in that direction, Dick refocuses on the deteriorating mental state of his main protagonist.

A few themes dominant most of Dick's work: what is reality? What does it mean to be insane? What is the status of a drug altered consciousness? What does it mean to be human and what challenge does artificial life represent to that? Dick also returns again and again to corporations, which is largely sees as evil. His villains are apt to be business tycoons and that certainly holds true here. Interestingly, while one might imagine that his critiques of consumerism and the corporation would make him open to Marxist (though not Communist) critiques, he personally was intensely paranoid about the Soviet Union. For instance, the great Polish Sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem (who many literary critics believe should have been considered for a Nobel Prize in literature) considered Dick (as do I) the greatest Sci-fi writer who ever lived. Dick reciprocated by imagining Lem at the heart of a conspiracy to destroy his life, orchestrating an investigation into his (Dick's) life from his home in Poland, which Dick saw as ominously behind the Iron Curtain. Nevermind that Lem was not a dedicated Communist. Dick's mind was so messed up by his intense drug use and insanity that was either natural or drug-induced that he did not perceive Lem as an ardent admirer, but a passionate, dedicated enemy.

WE CAN BUILD YOU, therefore, comes very much from Dick's ongoing struggle with his own tenuous grip on reality. What makes Dick amazing as someone writing about insanity is that he could stand back from his own experience with it and view it almost objectively. It isn't unlike the protagonist of A SCANNER DARKLY, in which a police officer -- who is investigating a seller of a drug whose main side effect is to make the user intensely schizophrenic -- doesn't realize the he is himself the person he is investigating.

I don't believe that WE CAN BUILD YOU is one of Philip K. Dick's finest novels, but it is a typical one. And although not one of his finest books -- it is not one of the books that has been collected in the three Library of America volumes dedicated to his major novels -- neither is it a bad one. And trust me, Dick has some very bad books. I think it is a good if not great book, but one that shows how interesting Dick could be even when he was not at his best. There are several such books, like TIME OUT OF JOINT or CLANS OF THE ALPHANSE MOON or even the very early THE COSMIC PUPPETS that cannot be counted one of his best novels, but that nonetheless are books that repay reading.

This is a very typical PKD story, but I thought his voice was quite good in this in the first person. The story may not be as catchy as some of his others, and the plot is rather weak, but thematically the story is as strong as any of his other good books (Ubik, Flow my Tears, etc.) This is actually a story about schizophrenia with the simulacras thrown in as thematic plot devices.

As others have noted, WE CAN BUILD YOU has two main storylines which never really mesh. Two thirds into the book, the simulacra plotline is simply dropped & the remainder focuses on Louis Rosen's mental health & his 'relationship' with Pris. While Pris is the most coherently drawn character in the book, Rosen's infatuation is rather clumsily drawn & never quite believable. In addition, Rosen makes a somewhat bland protagonist--I found myself more sympathetic to Pris, even if she is a borderline sociopath.

A shame the simulacra (manufactured replicas of humans) plotline is abandoned, as it had real potential. In particular, the Edwin M. Stanton simulacrum was a fascinating character (more so than the Lincoln, as it doesn't come with our own preconceptions)--Dick could have taken that character & run with it. I might also note that Dick treats Pris rather harshly, considering this is a mentally ill 18-year-old girl. Hence my sympathy leaning toward her.

While it's not "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," this is still a good book. Lawrence Sutin, in his book "Divine Invasions," gave "We Can Build You" only six stars. I would give it seven. I've read at least one PKD book that I considered "unreadable." This is not one of those. The first-person narrator is intriguing and his actions just fly in the face of his intentions. The secondary characters are either immediately identifiable or bizzarely remote. When deciding which PKD books to read, one must place a line somewhere. This book falls on the side of the line worth your time.

The same things some hate about Dick's writing I tend to enjoy, and they're all in this book.

For one thing, it changes focus halfway through. I can see a publisher rejecting the book because it does not follow the three-act structure - we open with questions about whether the character will save his business by marketing androids; we end by finding out whether he can save his own sanity and resolve a love-hate obsession with the androids' co-creator, the troubled, dark-haired jail bait, Pris. But to me this feels like the form reflecting the subject. Both love and madness tend to overwhelm everything; you forget all the work with which you've been distracting yourself up to that point. If you are a man, your work life, even if it's futuristic work, is only ever meaningful insofar as it can get you closer to the girl or give you an identity, so falling in love and losing your mind are really the same struggles one experiences at work, only played out more dramatically.

It's a conscious tactic in many of this writer's novels to start with a relatively straightforward SF premise only to disintegrate it and rearrange the pieces into a picture of strangeness and introspection that Dick's matter-of-fact prose always seems to be trying to describe as objectively as possible. This feeling of not being in the same novel you opened simulates the experience of either a psychotic break or an epiphany. In a famous essay Dick says as much: "I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem." Even so, I think there may have been another, pragmatic reason. While he was alive Dick couldn't get his non-SF novels published, yet no matter how strange his SF novels became, his publishers seemed more confident in finding an audience for those as long as they could put a robot on the cover. Dick's workaround for this problem seems to have been creating novels that contain a few SF props superimposed on a largely contemporary setting.

Nevertheless there's a subtler SF element than the androids in this story - the perception of mental illness in the world of the novel is the same as ours to swine flu - scary, yet common and generally treatable. Schizophrenia comes up so often in conversation that characters sometimes refer to it as "'phrenia". It's an interesting projection based on the decreasing stigma about seeking therapy, and people becoming more open about discussing their psychological difficulties.

Even so if you read science fiction primarily for interesting visions of the future I don't think you'll finish this book. For me what saves it is that for all the unresolved questions at the end, Louis Rosen's emotional plot line does have a beginning, middle and end. He may break down and hallucinate but even in his fantasies about Pris he makes her aloof and emotionally unavailable, because that is part of what draws him to her. I wrote about Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden that its unpredictability made me lose interest - sometimes the more anything can happen, the more it feels like the story is about nothing. Dick takes this risk, too, especially in his obsession with unreliable narrators and the fact that almost anything described may not be real, but what keeps it grounded is that the characters are still limited by their personalities - as Dick put it in an interview, no matter how "fantastical" his fiction gets, "in the final analysis the people must be people".