Customer Reviews

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (Paladin Books)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The last of Dick's early realist novels, written in 1960 but not published in 1986, this is an excellent book, full of ambiguities. We view its events mostly from the point of view of Al Miller, a used-car salesman who is discontented with his life. When Jim Fergusson, an older man who is like a father figure to him, sells the property Al's lot is on, Al becomes unhinged. He becomes convinced that Fergusson's friend Harman is a big-time crook and tries to warn Fergusson and his wife Lydia to avoid a real estate deal with the man. We are so involved with Al's perspective that it is not clear until the end of the novel that the only con being perpetrated is Al's own deception of himself. We may see through his stupidities and misperceptions, but we are not inclined to judge him harshly. For Dick has not let us be complacent about what reality really is: there is no absolute certainty about how to interpret the novel's events.

It's not exactly a major plot point, but what struck me most about this book was the way the African-American characters fit into it. Philip K. Dick wrote "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland" in 1960, just as the civil rights struggle was gearing up, so it's probably not an accident that race relations tell us a lot about the characters, if not the story itself.

Not that the story is at all uninteresting; it's one of the relatively few tales where economic pressure moves events along, rather than political or social or military pressures. As the story opens, Jim Fergesson has just sold his garage for health reasons. The move worries Al Miller, who rents from Jim a vacant lot next to the garage for his used-car business and is likely to lose his spot because of the sale. At the same time, one of Jim's regular customers suggests that he use the sale proceeds to buy into a housing development across the San Francisco Bay. This customer looks like a crook to Al, who spends most of the rest of the novel trying by various means to keep Jim from spending his money.

So far, it looks like Jim and his customer are the good guys, and Al nothing more than a spoiler with a bad case of sour grapes. This is where the racial issue comes in. Turns out that Al has a number of black friends - real ones, not the kind some people have just to prove they're not prejudiced. Jim, on the other hand, avoids "the colored" whenever he can, and his customer is an out-and-out racist who seriously believes there's some sort of black conspiracy to take over all the nice neighborhoods.

Al is still a loser, his cars are worthless and his wife loses patience with him on a regular basis, but what impact does his racial attitude have on how he comes across in this novel? It's not an easy question, particularly because "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland" sometimes falls prey to that weakness we still see in a lot of work that deals with racial issues. The black people here bear an unfortunate resemblance to the kind of noble "primitives" you see in certain movies; they seem to have access to a kind of unsophisticated wisdom that the white folks lost a long time ago. Unlike most people in PKD's novels, including a lot of his black characters, these folks are not so much characters as types. It's been pointed out before that this is a kind of reverse prejudice, but in 1960 it might have been the best anyone could do, even a master of the imagination like PKD.

So he could have done a better job with some of these characters; with others, I have no such complaints. PKD was good at putting characters into unusual situations and watching them react the way a real person might, whether he was writing science fiction or mainstream; what happens in a novel like this may not be very pleasant all the time, but as long as it rings true, it can be exciting or even inspiring to read.

Suppose, for instance, that you're an old man with a heart condition, wanting to have a look at a development you're considering as an investment. You drive to the site, but find yourself in the middle of a construction zone, totally lost and surrounded by heavy equipment and angry operators. Even without actually being there, you know how you'd feel, right? So does PKD; when Jim Fergesson finally got back on the highway headed for home, I breathed a sigh of relief.

This, by the way, is where the economic pressure really starts to move the story along. If you've been to a construction zone, you know it's difficult to tell how successful it will be just by looking, unless you're a specialist of some sort. Jim Fergesson is no specialist, but decides to make the investment anyway, and the way PKD wrote out his thought process, you can tell his decision has nothing to do with economic realities and more to do with his ego. Al Miller's decision to try to intervene also has nothing to do with whether or not the investment is good; he knows even less than Jim does. Let's face it, these guys are a couple of fools in a lot of ways, and yet the story is fascinating just because it's so real.

Sounds depressing, doesn't it? Well, it's not as entertaining as those semi-pornographic suburban soap operas you find next to the cash register at your local mall bookshop, to be sure, but there's something sort of encouraging about this story. I have not yet mentioned Jim's wife Lydia, a woman from Greece whose English is like off-key music and who remains active and strong no matter what life throws at her - this book is worth reading for her presence alone. And the truth is that Jim and Al, and Al's wife Julie, all partake of the same determination, however much they complain. Inspiring, like I said.

And by the way, the title is a trifle misleading. One of Al's friends calls him a "humpty dumpty" at one point, by which he seems to mean that Al goes through life watching and waiting for things to happen to him. This doesn't have much to do with Mother Goose's Humpty Dumpty, the one on the wall (although someone else in the story actually does take a bad spill), but neither does Al or any most of the other characters. Many of them fall - almost all of them get up and put themselves back together. Now, that's worth reading about, isn't it?

Benshlomo says, Life is only a tragedy if you act like it is.

When I first started reading Philip K. Dick in the early 1980s, he was just on the cusp of fame, the result of the movie Blade Runner as much as anything. Now, in fact, he is considered one of the greatest science fiction writers (and maybe writers in general) of his era. Unfortunately, Dick - who had lived a rather unhealthy lifestyle - would die just as his writing was being noticed outside the narrow confines of the science fiction community. This new-found fame would not only result in re-releases of his science fiction novels, but also the first-time publication of some of his early, mainstream fiction.

This is both a service and disservice to Dick's fans. On the one hand, for someone like me who's read practically everything he's written, this is a chance to read something new. On the other hand, there's often a reason that this work is unpublished. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, one of his posthumously released works, is not bad, but I'm not sure if it would have been published if not for who wrote it.

The novel focuses on two men: Jim Fergesson is a successful auto mechanic who is selling his shop due to a heart condition (Jim is constantly described as old, though he is only in his late fifties; this must have seemed elderly to the young PKD who wrote this, and ironically, he would never reach the age of his protagonist). Al Miller is the young used car dealer who rents space from Jim and whose livelihood is threatened by the garage sale.

One of Jim's customers, Chris Harman, is an entrepreneur who turns Jim onto a business opportunity, but the resentful Al suspects Chris is a con man and passes on his suspicions. The relationship between Jim and Al gets more and more strained which threatens Jim's fragile health.

As is typical in Dick's stories, there are no true heroes or villains. The main characters are distinctly flawed individuals, always seeking a happiness that eludes them, often because they don't even know what will satisfy them. This is a decent enough novel, but I think it will most likely only appeal to those who want to complete their Dick collections. For others, this is not where to start with Dick's work to get a good feel for his writing; instead, it's better to go with one of his classic science fiction works.

Philip K. Dick's Humpty Dumpty in Oakland is classic PKD. It tells the intertwined stories of used-car-lot operator Al Miller and garage owner and mechanic Jim Fergusson. When the aging Fergusson decides to sell his garage, and the adjoining lot leased by Miller, Miller's life is thrown into turmoil. When Fergusson then considers investing the sale proceeds in a new and uncertain venture, Miller inserts himself into the process in a way that brings into focus the delusions of both Fergusson and Miller and that perhaps unearths a tremendous conspiracy.

The book is devoid of SF elements and is both subtle and nuanced. While it contains many familiar PKD elements--psychological realism, paranoia, conspiracy, religion, and ethics--in Humpty Dumpty Dick tickles with the feather rather than pounding with a hammer. Other reviewers have commented that this is the popular PKD in nascent form. Upon my reading, it appears rather that popular PKD is the equivalent of Humpty Dumpty with all subtlety deleted. Successor PKD books read almost as if the author threw up his hands and said to himself, "Look, they're not getting it--I'm going to have put these ideas in the future and in the foreground." The closest "popular" PKD book to Humpty Dumpty would, in my opinion, be The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, 90% of which is pure social-psychological realism and 10% of which is self-debunking SF and/or supernaturalist--if you liked Transmigration, you'll find a similar style in Humpty Dumpty.

Symbolically, Humpty Dumpty is about the tiny push that it takes to shove the ordinary person off the perch of the everyday, creating a shattering effect that neither the kings horses nor the kings men will remedy again.

When I first penned this review, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full was the best selling book in the country, a huge success critically and commercially, while Philip K. Dick's Humpty Dumpty in Oakland was not published during his lifetime, and has been little noticed since (though a new paperback edition is coming to Amazon in September '08). Wolfe's is a large book, sprawling, with dozens of characters, while Dick's Oakland book is small in scope. Yet the connection is there: both books contain thematic elements in common, and as American novels both are rewarding and worth reading.

Like its famous predecessor, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full is an attempt to capture the zeitgeist of The Way We Live Now. (Come to think of it, Trollope's novel would also make a worthy comparison.) The bull-like 60 year-old former Georgia Tech football hero and real estate developer Charlie Croker is in trouble: he's upside-down to the tune of 850 million dollars, and things are starting to unravel.

The first thing I noticed about the book is its cinematic quality: every chapter plays out like a dramatic scene in a movie. Here's a thought that ran through my mind: "It would be a no-brainer to make this into a great film. Of course, that's what they said about Bonfire too. Tom Hanks to play Charlie Croker, anyone?"

Charlie owns a 29,000 acre plantation down in Baker County (well, actually his corporation, Croker Global, owns it) along with numerous corporate jets and planes. And Charlie's firm also owns the big white elephant that's to blame for his "situation": Croker Concourse, a huge mixed use development with a nearly empty 40 story tower, north of Atlanta in Cherokee county, beyond the ring road. Charlie was too far ahead of his time: you can see Atlanta's skyline from his tower, but you can't get there from here.

An early scene sets the stage for Charlie's humiliation: a "workout meeting" at his primary lender, PlannersBanc. Charlie arrives at the meeting with a huge entourage, planning on bluffing his way through a minor annoyance, but instead finds out that his status has been dramatically downgraded, from customer to "s***head." It is the job of the bank's workout team to issue a wakeup call to large debtors-in-denial, making them sweat until their dripping shirt hangs like saddlebags. This is just one of the many brightly-lit scenes that is larger than life, and perhaps destined for the big screen.

Dick's book, on the other hand, is small screen, in black-and-white: a period drama set in the late `50s, the kind of thing Rod Serling was so good at, in Patterns, or Requiem for a Heavyweight. Like Wolfe, a story about people on the way down, except these are not millionaires. Jim Patterson owns a garage in downtown Oakland that he's selling for health reasons. He is afraid of having a heart attack under a car, where no one can see or help him. Jim leases out part of his parking lot to Al Miller, a small time used-car salesman, whose life is thrown into chaos when Jim sells out. They become strangely involved with a prominent businessman named Harmon, who owns a record label. Is he aboveboard, or a swindler?

Strangely, both books offer a vision of the Bay Area, though Wolfe's book is set primarily in Atlanta. After the workout session, Charlie decides to appease the bank by laying off 10 percent of his workforce in Croker Global' s frozen food business. Cut to: the frozen food warehouse in El Cerrito, CA: a surreal world of frozen breath and nose icicles, as big-armed workers in spacesuits toil in a freezing zero degree warehouse for eight hours, hefting heavy cartons off pallets of frozen food for the truckers waiting in warmth and comfort beyond the serrated plastic curtains, destined for customers like the Santa Rita Jail in Pleasanton. In a horrifying series of misadventures, an inoffensive young character named Conrad Hensley finds himself thrown out of work at Croker Global, and ends up in that very frightening penal institution.

Meanwhile, Dick's Oakland exists 50 years in the past, a time remote and different from ours, yet showing all the guideposts that led to the present. Back then, Oakland was a white city, with "Negroes." A middle-class man like Jim, the garage owner, would deal only with whites, while lower middle class Al's best friend happens to be colored. Over in Marin county, north of San Francisco, Highway 101 is extending further northward, to Novato and beyond: the public housing projects in Marin City have just gone up. The freeway system in the East Bay is already in place along the bayshore, and smog and traffic is already noticeable in 1958.

The resolution of Wolfe's book, and the intersection of Charlie and Conrad, involves an almost-Dickian device: their conversion to the religious philosophy of Epictetus: Stoicism. The powerful applicability of this to their situation lends the force of Greek drama to their story, and ultimately offers a kind of calming closure to the book.

I find Dick endlessly fascinating. Certainly, the author was fascinated with mental illness (Clans of the Alphane Moon, et al.) and was able to portray it dramatically. He foreshadows Jim's fatal heart attack with eerie scenes of his "losing it," and Al's chronic lying and inaction are also far from healthy. In addition to his character's weird internal lives, the other aspect of Dick's exploration of insanity is in his surreal and self-referential plotting. For instance, when Jim visits Marin County Gardens, (echoes of "Chicken Pox Prospects" in Palmer Eldritch,) the salesperson is reading Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, and rants about pot-boiler science fiction.

I felt a palpable sense of shifting from the real world to an alternate reality when Al Miller gets a job at Teach Records (named after the real Blackbeard, Edward Teach, since it is a "pirate label,") and was assigned to record electronically-enhanced Barbershop quartet music, since it was projected to be the next big trend in American music. (!) One of the most frightening scenes, when Al gets off the bus in Salt Lake City and is immediately arrested and flown back to Oakland, is an echo of numerous similar paranoia-inducing developments in other books. It happens to Decker in Androids, and is intimately related to the famous scene in Time Out of Joint when the hot dog stand disappears before the protagonist's eyes, replaced by a fortune cookie-sized piece of paper reading: hot dog stand.

You won't have any trouble finding Wolfe's large and popular book, and now Humpty Dumpty in Oakland is also reprinted (virtually everything Dick wrote is now back in print!) and available on Amazon. I recommend them both.

A fascination with men and machines and mind-altering substances -- it's all here in this previously unpublished early effort by Philip K. Dick, but in raw form and lacking the focus and clarity of vision of Dick's later works. "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland" was written before the visionary found his signature style and in a more realistic vein than his best novels and short stories, which most bookstores shelve under science fiction. But where Dick's most memorable creations used the SF tag as a point of departure, "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland" feels constrained by its crime fiction plot and the genre's conventions. Diehard PKD fans will no doubt find this readable thriller an interesting companion piece to Dick's canonical ouvere, and will delight in spotting eventual Dicksian obsessions with the nature of reality and paranoia in their early stages. But initiates should be warned that the novel isn't representative of and doesn't make a good introduction to the writer's compelling world. You can see where Dick is going, but he hasn't gotten there yet with "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland."

Philip K. Dick died in 1982 on the cusp of science fiction fame, but his real ambition when he began writing more than thirty years prior was to become a successful and acclaimed mainstream writer. To this end he wrote about half a dozen contemporary realist novels through 1960, the rejection of which led him to turn full time to SF. Only one of these works (Confessions of a Crap Artist) came out during his life, and he surely died thinking they would never see light. However, the immense rise in his commercial and critical reputation that began almost immediately after his death has led to the eventual publication of all his fiction. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, his last realist novel, was published in the United Kingdom in 1986, where it got almost notice. American publication finally came in 2007, where it received renewed attention by the ever-growing legion of Dick fans and critics.

Its publication is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, of course, it is a treasure for fans and scholars who want to read everything the master wrote. It also helps further move Dick beyond the science fiction stereotype, showing his range and an important point in his writing development. Conversely, it is a very minor work that adds little to his canon artistically. Unlike some of his other recently published realist work, which were among his first novels, this was finished in 1960 - after Dick had several science fiction novels and many SF stories. The last of several in a row, his continuing to write mainstream novels despite a growing SF reputation shows his determination. Humpty was in fact written just before The Man in the High Castle, which established his reputation as an SF master though it really had no SF elements other than being alternate history. This unsurprisingly convinced Dick to concentrate on SF, which he did not really begin to leave until his genre-bending late works.

One can tell that Dick had learned a lot about writing by comparing this to early realist works like Voices from the Street. Humpty is significantly more concise and focused; it seems to have far more of a purpose and is tightly concentrated on a small number of themes that came to dominate Dick's writing. That said, those who read Voices, first published earlier in 2007, before this will suffer strange déjà vu because it starts out very similarly with a character of the same name doing nearly identical activities in an apparently identical setting with repeated descriptions. It turns out not to be the same person, and the setting is not admitted to be the same. Dick was probably consciously recycling from a book already abandoned, but it ironically gives a strong sense of the unreality prominent in his best writing.

There is little to recommend Humpty in itself; it is below not only later greatness but even much of the SF Dick had already written. The book has almost no plot, the dialogue is bland, and it offers no major artistic innovation or overarching message. Even Dick's biggest fans can admit it is the work of a young writer still getting his proverbial feet wet. It would be hard to deny that those who declined it were right, and the book almost certainly would never have been published without interest in Dick having grown so exponentially. Indeed, it says much that wide publication took as long as it did even with this; certainly it would not have come out under almost any other name.

However, it has much to offer fans and scholars. Several Dick trademarks are already very prominent. There is an incredible abundance of black humor in both dialogue and action; this may even be Dick's funniest book. Thematically, there are many familiar elements, including paranoia, the existential problem of individuality vs. the unseen vastness of the powers that be, poverty, mental illness, etc. Typical minor factors - a focus on non-mainstream music, low-grade businesses, etc. - are also to be seen. Even the title is deliciously representative Dick weirdness - though here it almost seems weird for weirdness' sake, as it has little real relevance, and the one reference to it in the text is almost comically contrived. The paranoia theme, dramatized so brilliantly in later Dick, is particularly well-done; we can see more than an inkling of later masterworks here. Like many Dick protagonists, Humpty's Al Miller is a self-consciously humble, depressed, mentally unstable less-than-Everyman who stumbles on a world beyond his understanding, much less his experience. In contrast to SF Dick, it is the relatively mundane corporate world of financial mystery, but Al, again like many Dick characters, believes he sees a conspiracy behind it. Indeed, in contrast to Dick's other non-SF fiction, "realist" is really a misnomer here. The coincidences are improbable, and Miller's actions, especially their effects, become more and more unbelievable. This is in strong contrast to, say, Voices, which is so realistic as to be dull at points. Humpty sometimes threatens to recede into this with extremely detailed descriptions of mundane events such as driving, but one can at least argue such scenes have a purpose, e.g., showing characters' inner instability. Dick was clearly moving away from conventional realism and working toward a sort of synthesis with, if not SF, at least some of its elements - which many think he perfected in The Man. His primary goal may have been to depict mental instability, always one of his core concerns, particularly how a large, powerful organization can be seen through the eyes of a desperate, paranoid. He succeeds to a large degree, and though it hardly makes a conventionally compelling novel, it gives a fascinating peek into his methods and development. As usual in Dick, the existence or non-existence of the conspiracy is never established with anything like clearness, and we are left wondering just how mentally unstable some of the characters are. Dick buffs will enjoy this and will enjoy even more the glorious sense of unreality when Miller is being told about his new job - a semi-realist version of how solid reality suddenly disappears in many a Dick SF work, leaving protagonist (and reader) in disconcerting shock. A more overt SF connection will delight fans - a hilariously tangential segment where a minor character goes on a rant about the pros and (mostly) cons of pulp SF. It is an excellent in-joke and an interesting self-rebuke. On another front, though depressing, Humpty is less so than his other non-SF books, which also shows change.

There is also more than a little for non-Dick fans, even if there is not a great book. Humpty can now almost be seen as a historical novel, a first-hand look at the San Francisco Bay area of the late 1950s/early 1960s. This time and place has been almost entirely overlooked historically and otherwise because of the area being the headquarters of the hippie movement a few years later. Dick's near-pedantic realism in geographic and other minutia thus has a certain value where it would probably have been nothing but dull at the time. There is much valuable material about how it looked and what it was like to live in, and it is fascinating to see how passing descriptions of things like construction turned out in reality. This is particularly so since, like Dick's other non-SF fiction - nay, like nearly all his writing - it deals with society's dark underbelly, which was not even admitted to exist and is still widely denied by the many who see the 1950s as a sort of Golden Age of economic prosperity. Most of the characters are in dire poverty, and there is much valuable commentary on the psychology of such individuals as well as a strong undercurrent throughout that can be called at least semi-Marxist. More importantly and interesting, Humpty deals quite overtly with race - particularly notable considering when it was written. There are many black characters and, while they are certainly not politically correct by our standards, Dick was surely trying to portray them in a way he thought was accurate. Much sympathy shines through for them, however unconventionally. Insightful comments about their plight are present, and several of the black characters are not only absorbing but quite likable, including the hilariously perverse Tootie. This is now near-obligatory for PCness but almost remarkable for the time. The book indeed ends with Miller finding at least temporary salvation, perhaps even love, in a black character he has long admired. A Greek character is also beguilingly, if far less sympathetically, portrayed - a potential goldmine for fanatics, given Dick's many Greek connections, including one of his wives. It would have been very interesting to see how all this was taken if Humpty had been published.

These factors give historians, sociologists, and others with no interest in Dick reasons to read the novel. Fans and scholars will of course do so anyway - and will be significantly rewarded. The casual and curious should certainly read Dick, but this should be one of their last stops.

In 1950s California bone tired as he still recovers from a heart attack garage owner Jim Fergesson plans to retire. Meanwhile one of his customers used car salesman cynical Al Miller learns that Jim is investing his retirement fund in a shaky real estate deal that in all probability will wipe the elderly man out.

Miller decides to help his friend by getting Jim not to invest in a loser. He obtains a job with the party he believes is conning Jim. However even Miller who believes almost everyone is a low life shark out to get you is stunned with what he finds while working undercover. He has landed in the middle of a colossal fraud that targets the ailing elderly.

As with the recently reprinted IN MILTON LUMKY TERRITORY, HUMPTY DUMPTY IN OAKLAND is a 1950s contemporary, but has the deep feel of a well written character driven historical that feels even more apropos today with the economy. The full vivid picture of those "Happy Days" is showcased as two Americas; a middle class enjoying the fruits of a growing economy while the other is a victim of prejudice unable to reach the lowest hanging fruit. Fans of Philip K. Dick will observe one of the author's prime themes of an overwhelmed individual battling against the avaricious status quo power brokers.

Harriet Klausner