Dying Inside (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: Robert Silverberg, David Selig, Miss Mueller (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda David Selig is in his early 40s, with his youthful promise long behind him. A lonely child and a smart aleck in elementary school, he grew up feeling isolated from the rest of the world, happiest with his books. Even at the age of 10, he seemed so maladjusted that his hardworking parents sacrificed to send him to a psychiatrist, to no good purpose. He and his adopted sister have cordially hated each other their whole lives. At Columbia in the mid-1950s, Selig did reasonably well in his literature classes, and after graduation he went to work briefly in a stock brokerage firm. Over the years he fell seriously in love twice, and both affairs ended disastrously. Most recently, he has been eking out a living by ghost-writing term papers for the Columbia students of the 1970s. He lives by his wits, just above the poverty line, and he is going bald. He is also losing his ability to read people's minds -- and with it his entire past life, his very sense of self. In the course of "Dying Inside," Selig meets one other person who can read minds, with whom he forms an uneasy friendship. Neither can transmit thoughts, only receive them. But whereas Tom Nyquist uses his power to make easy money on Wall Street, perceive the secret desires of any woman he fancies and generally enjoy a sybaritic lifestyle, Selig is utterly miserable. He has hidden his extraordinary talent from almost everyone. More often than not, to use it makes him feel a scummy, perverted voyeur. Paradoxically, his easy awareness of people's inner lives has left him isolated and alone. "Without it I might have been a happy nobody instead of a dismal one." Only when he probes deeply into a person, down past the surface personality into the unconscious, does Selig find that his power brings him an experience of nirvana-like, oceanic oneness. Yet now his special gift has grown temperamental, as variable as the weather. But what can he do? "Powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies." Now widely regarded as Robert Silverberg's masterpiece, "Dying Inside," first published in 1972, has just been reissued in a handsome trade paperback with a new preface by its author, one of science fiction's most distinguished writers. Yet this book is hardly what most people think of as science fiction. As a character, Selig has more in common with Philip Roth's Portnoy than with the more typical superwarriors of, say, Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." Instead, Silverberg's novel offers an eerily evocative picture of New York life in the late 1950s and '60s: a time of bisexual professors, swinging singles, Black Power, psychedelic drugs and all-round social and political upheaval. Given Selig's bookishness, the novel is also suffused with buried quotations from T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and many other literary eminences. Above all, though, "Dying Inside" is a pleasure to read, full of that dry humor so common to melancholic intellectuals. Selig's taste in music, we learn, runs to "pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you'd be likely to whistle after one hearing." At one time he contemplates writing a novel about -- what else? -- alienation in modern life. Most of the time David Selig addresses the reader in a self-pitying first-person voice, though some sections seamlessly switch to third-person narration. Silverberg is a master of multiple verbal registers, catching perfectly the tone of a term paper on Kafka, the period jive talk of a black basketball player, the flirtatious chatter of cocktail parties, the back-and-forth snapping of a brother and sister, the Yiddish idioms of Selig's parents, the earnest fogyness of a Columbia dean, even the stream of consciousness itself. Some characters, like Selig's promiscuous sister, Judith, and a racist basketball player, are especially vivid creations. Or take the hip French professor Claude Guermantes: "He is about 40, just under six feet tall, muscular, athletic; he wears his elegant sandy hair done in swirling baroque waves, and his short goatee is impeccably clipped. His clothing is so advanced in style that I lack the vocabulary to describe it, being unaware of fashion myself: a kind of mantle of coarse green and gold fabric (linen? muslin?), a scarlet sash, flaring satin trousers, turned-up pointed-toed medieval boots. His dandyish appearance and mannered posture suggest that he might be gay, but he gives off a powerful aura of heterosexuality. . . . His voice is soft, purring." Selig ultimately judges Guermantes to be monstrous, and yet many of the man's characteristics -- the carefully tended goatee, the dandyism, the voice -- are clearly borrowed from Silverberg himself. It's insane that "Dying Inside" should be subtly dismissed as merely a genre classic. This is a superb novel about a common human sorrow, that great shock of middle age -- the recognition that we are all dying inside and that all of us must face the eventual disappearance of the person we have been. More and more, as time goes by, our bodies break down, our minds start to lose their quickness, and, suddenly, inconceivably, our best work is behind us. Early science fiction was frequently hopeful, celebrating eye-popping technology or the acquisition of special mental powers. But by the late 1950s and early '60s such naivete was a thing of the past. Philip K. Dick described a future where everything was rusty or broken, and Daniel Keyes left us in tears at the end of "Flowers for Algernon." Since then, flawed or wounded superheroes have become the norm: From Batman to the Watchmen, they are usually all too human, or even less than human. As his power leaves him, Selig writes: "I make lists now of the things I once could do that I can no longer. Inventories of the shrinkage. Like a dying man confined to his bed, paralyzed but observant, watching his relatives pilfer his goods. This day the television set has gone, and this day the Thackeray first editions . . . and tomorrow it will be the pots and pans, the Venetian blinds, my neckties." In the end, as Shakespeare said long ago, we are left "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

“One of those rare novels that manages to be at once dazzling and tender.”—Michael Chabon on Dying Inside

“Dying Inside is an artist’s summit that doubles as an intimate allegory of the artist’s quandary.”—Jonathan Lethem

"Now widely regarded as Robert Silverberg's masterpiece, Dying Inside, first published in 1972, has just been reissued in a handsome trade paperback with a new preface by its author, one of science fiction's most distinguished writers . . . It's insane that Dying Inside should be subtly dismissed as merely a genre classic. This is a superb novel about a common human sorrow, that great shock of middle age -- the recognition that we are all dying inside and that all of us must face the eventual disappearance of the person we have been."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“Silverberg has written the perfect science fiction novel for people who don’t like science fiction.”—The New York Times Book Review on Dying Inside

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Orb Books; Second Edition edition (March 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765322307
• ISBN-13: 978-0765322302
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #89,453 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Out of print? WHY?, December 2, 1999

By	Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Dying Inside (Paperback)

Bear with me briefly while I go on a bit of a rant (part one of it at least) here, this book here represents only a very small part of what may be one of the greatest single spurts of output science fiction or the literary world has ever known. You see, during the seventies, Mr Silverberg came up with no less than thirteen masterworks of science fiction, not a sequel or connected book in the lot, each one a completely unique and searing study of people and the possibilities of science fiction as a whole. Once I heard about these, I knew that I had to get as many as I could and so I go to find them and lo and behold, how many do I find in print. Exactly none gentle reader. None at all, and the horrifying part is that at least two of these are Hugo winners (Time of Changes and the book I'll be reviewing in a moment). Why is this? What is this? Oh well, more on that as I chug along with the four classic period books that I own. This is the first one I read here, Dying Inside in case you've forgotten and it simply made my mouth drop open. The story is one that we're partly familiar with, man has great powers, uses them in a silly fashion and then realizes that he's losing them. Flowers for Algernon is another gem on this theme but in a lot of ways David Selig is even more of an innocent than poor Charley. No matter how many women he beds, no matter how many minds he reads and lives he lives vicariously, no matter how much he can shield himself with his armor of cynicism, inside is a man crying for the release of his power so he can be a normal man and yet he's desperately afraid of what will happen to him if he loses it because it has defined him and made him who is his entire life, he fears that instead of becoming a normal man, he will become even less than the rest of us. And Silverberg portrays this all and lets us into the head of this tormented man with pointed, searing prose, with a focus and poetry that is rarely seen in his work and an intensity that is rarely seen anywhere. You may not like David Selig and you may not agree with him but you will know him more intimately than almost anyone else by the time you close the pages on this all too brief book. The thing that to me is the most poignant is the closing to the book (hint: stop reading if you don't want an even vague idea of how it ends) with David having lost his powers and considering his place in the world, he has to start all over again, and a lesser writer would have gone the easy way and given us the hint of a new love in his life, or some ray of hope. But David has to start over and just like the rest of us, he's unsure and cautiously hopeful but unsure nonetheless. In the end he's more like the rest of us, both before and after, than either him or everyone else would care to admit.

45 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Undeniable proof that SF isn't considered serious literature, January 5, 2002

By	"jackaroe" (Stanford, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dying Inside (Hardcover)

Robert Silverberg's "Dying Inside" is one of the great classics of SF literature. The protagonist, David Selig, is a telepath whose rare talent has brought him no pleasure. He leads the life of an outcast, a voyeur, with his gift as his keyhole. When his telepathy deserts him he is left stranded-

(Pauses). (Sits silently, head bowed). (Finally, sighs forcefully). (Prepares to whip self to indignant frenzy).

This world just isn't fair. You know that, you don't need me to tell you. But every so often an injustice so flagrant and so heinous occurs that I need to grab the nearest passerby and scream it at him. You're here, and I'm mad, so put down that mouse and listen. Have you read this book yet? Have you read "The Catcher in the Rye"- you know, "the coming-of-age story against which all others are judged," etc., etc.? Go read them. I'll wait- done yet? Good. What do you think? They're both excellent, aren't they? You really feel the turmoil and pain and angst of both Caulfield and Selig after reading them. So why has this book attracted only a handful of reviews, while "The Catcher in the Rye" has attracted- let me check- over 1000 reviews? Why does "The Catcher in the Rye" appear on all the "100 Greatest Novels of the Century" lists while "Dying Inside" doesn't? I'll tell you why- look at your copy of "Dying Inside," and look for those damning scarlet letters "Science Fiction." That's why. "The Catcher in the Rye" is serious literature; "Dying Inside" is science fiction. Never mind that David Selig is as vividly realized as Holden Caulfield, that the prose of "Dying Inside" is as smooth as silk and as scorching as a brush fire, that "Dying Inside" is to middle age what "The Catcher in the Rye" is to adolescence. One is "truly one of America's literary treasures," and one is not. There ain't no justice, is there, Larry?

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A stellar example of "soft" science fiction, April 6, 2005

By	trainreader (Montclair, N.J.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dying Inside (Paperback)

One of the two Robert Silverberg books that I try to re-read every few years (the other being "The Book of Skulls"), "Dying Inside" tells the story of David Selig, a middle aged man, who is losing his ability to read minds, and consequently, his identity as well, which lacked clarity in the first place. What, at first blush, might seem like an enviable gift, turns out to be Selig's addiction and curse. From early childhood, Selig discovers that others, including his parents, do not always have pleasant thoughts about him. But more depressing to Selig, is the prospect of losing this ability and living alone in his own mind.

Silverberg does a masterful job at showing us David Selig's plight, in both his use of his ability and his gradual loss of it. The book has a number of memorable scenes, for instance when David uses his powers to win a fight against a much stronger bully, or when David becomes obsessed with a woman from whom he is "blocked" (i.e. he can't read her mind). As an example of his wasted life, David earns a living by reading the minds of plagiarizing college students so that he can better prepare academic papers on their behalf.

David Selig has wasted his life and squandered his only talent, but really, could there have been any alternative? But his mind reading, though destructive, has become the defining part of his life. Silverberg has once again demonstrated why he must be considered one of the giants of the "soft" science fiction genre.

Highly recommended.