Customer Reviews

Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
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I have mixed feelings about this book. Sutin gives the impression that he interviewed me extensively, but he actually used quotes from other interviews and never met me, although I did briefly answer three of his questions by letter. Furthermore, I must disagree with most of his conclusions. Since I spent ten years with Phil, and those were the last ten years of his life, I believe that I know more about him than a biographer who never met him and simply read about him.

This is Lawrence Sutin's best book (well, of the three that I've read). It's also the best book on Dick I've found, and it's about as engrossing as some of Dick's better novels. There's a lot of stuff in here, but I wolfed it down pretty quickly.

The various troubled relationships, paranoid experiences (and attitudes), drug experimentation, and transcendental experiences are discussed here in some detail. We get lots of stories from Dick's ex-wives and such discussing his writing habits and nervous behavior.

I found particularly helpful the bibliography (with plot summaries) at the end of the book. It's depressing how much of Dick's work is still out of print.

A great book on a great American writer. Anyone who wants to go further might look at IN SEARCH OF VALIS, also by Sutin.

Sutin's comprehensive literary biography of PKD is a godsend, because it clears up so many loose ends of his life and work. The background about his lost twin, who died as a baby (he was buried with her in Colorado), and his father's abandonment of the family, does much to clarify a lifetime of driven insecurity. Dick's failure to break out of the genre category with his "quality novels" (most of them published after his death in small editions) in the late 1950s led to a revolution within science fiction itself, where he had to continue publishing. In fact Dick was a fantasist at heart, and ahead of his time in working through genre categories. Unfortunately the pay and prestige for even brilliant genre writers were so limited that his spirit was finally broken. Moreover, he made several bad decisions about relationships that gradually led him into his own strange world of cosmic paranoia. When acclaim and success finally came his way, his life was over. He died at age 53 in March 1982. Sutin adds a very helpful "Chronological survey and guide" that establishes the actual order of the books he wrote, their publication history (which has altered a bit since 1989, when the book was publshed), and summary and evaluation of each book. Strongly recommended for anyone seriously interested in this author's work.

DIVINE INVASIONS is a herculean attempt to put the life of Phil K. Dick between the covers of one book. That Dick wrote too many words is the problem for any biographer. Which of the many millions of words to select from revealed the truth and which disguised it? The additional problem is that Dick described himself not as a novelist but as a "fictionalizing philosopher."

In his search to reveal his own reality Dick describes one reality that surrounded him everyday, another reality that framed the everyday reality, and also his personal mental reality enclosing the everything, existing only in his mind that could not be shared. Paul Williams' Forward gives Sutin the ultimate testimonial, "this is the man I knew." Yet Sutin, like Paul Williams, was "too close to the subject matter," and had difficulty separating the wheat from the chaff. Whether his story is about Dick the man or about the plethora of fictive characters in Dick's works becomes clouded. What becomes clear is that Sutin did pass judgment on Dick in referring to him as "a hidden treasure of American literature." I doubt that Dick's many readers, after all, those who the tortured writer wanted to reach, would agree with this assessment.

The portrait of Sutin painted was not pretty. The author pulled no punches is showing Dick as a wife beater, adulterer, cradle robber, lech, suicide, hypochondriac, child abandoner, doper, tax evader, malingerer, fabricator and snitch. What became clear was that when a relationship no longer fueled the fires of his personal solipsistic hell, Phil moved on. But a nagging question remains: did the reader learn more about Phil K. Dick than he/she wanted to know?

Sutin's sometimes sarcastic style might surprise the reader at first, but this is a very insightful look at the life and work of Philip K. Dick - it's also the most substantial book of its kind we have yet. Sutin does a good job of inserting his comments about the works while sharing with us their genesis at the same time; the analysis aspect of `Divine Invasions' is fairly limited, but since it's not a scholarly book, it doesn't disappoint. It reads somewhat like PKD's own novels and short stories, with Dick himself as the central character. The extracts from the Exegesis show PKD at his speculative best and made me want to read more. One more note: in the last section, Sutin offers a `guide' in which he rates PKD's books on a 1-10 internal scale, also providing capsule reviews of the works he didn't write about in the main narrative; it's sure to provoke arguments, as he thought it would. Serious PKD readers should definitely read this.

Author Sutin does a marvelous job of conveying the real Philip K. Dick. He conducted interviews with each of Dick's five wives and his contemporaries in the SF field, including Ellison with whom Dick had a nasty feud.

I feel that I can understand Dick's novels much better given that all of them are so heavily biographical. A writer is always told to 'write what you know', but Dick takes it to extremes. Knowing so much about his life, I'm able to see deeper into character and setting.

Sutin does the reader the favor of sifting through Dick's enormous memoirs, showing us the parts that illuminate PKD's manic personality.

I haven't read enough biographies to determine whether this one is complete, but judged on its own, Divine Invasions gives a thorough account of the life of one of SF's brightest lights.

Sutin, who obviously did his homework, begins with the loss of a twin sister when Philip K. Dick was an infant, and develops the idea that this had a profound influence on his life and his writing. He weaves literary and psychological insights together to explain Dick's entire career and the themes of his books. Sutin also proposes a plausible theory (bringing medical and psychological facts together) about the source of the "VALIS" experience, which was the major event of Dick's adult life and the impetus for some of his strangest, best, and most difficult books. Along the way, Sutin manages to put Dick's life in context of the times (especially the counterculture of the 60's) while making it clear that he was very much outside the times. It's too bad this is out of print, and I hope it's reissued someday.

This one is dense so I'll keep it brief. Read this about 15 years ago. Lawrence Sutin's bio is the official one, though Anne's(Dick's 3rd wife?)is a great addition. It's jam-packed and Sutin did his homework for sure. There is everything from his home and personal life, to writing in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dickthe SF "ghetto," philosophies, places he lived... the usual bio material, but very well crafted and researched. Sutin was a friend and gathered some great material on Phil. There are also some plot summeries of key novels, and the events under which they were written. It's dense as hell and fun to read. A must for any Philip K. Dick fan or collector. There is so much information, it is overwhelming... but also a great reference on this special man and his work. Snag it up!

Having read any Philip K Dick, you may be moved to learn more about this troubled artist. Sutin's book is the perfect place to look. This biography fills in all the necessary facts, but more than that, shows their influence on what would become a great body of vividly imaginative fiction. From the loss of a twin sister at the age of six weeks, through drug addiction and the pain of the breakup of multiple marriages, and finally to the transcendent visitation from God (as fictionalized in VALIS), we see how the events and people in Dick's life became distilled into his fiction. A fascinating account of the life of a sad genius.

Far too much time is spent on Dick's relationship with women and rarely is any of this material truly enlightening about Dick (or, for that matter, his wives and girlfriends) - it pulls too many punches. As well, far too little time is spent discussing Dick's fiction - most of this is unhelpfully relegated to an appendix as if the author could not find a way to incorporate this material into the main text. It betrays a limited understanding Dick's work and how the work and the life integrate, something all good biographies manage to accomplish. That being said, the closing chapters dealing with A Scanner Darkly, Valis and the as-yet unpublished Exegesis are revelatory, but primarily as an afterthought. It's a serviceable biography but it comes up short and is ultimately disappointing. For that reason, I can't recommend this book to a general audience unfamiliar with Dick's work, nor can I recommend it for a Dick aficionado. For now, it will do, but the subject awaits an authoritative biography.