2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
All the Car Dealer's Men, May 8, 2009
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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Early Dick rediscovered, June 16, 2008
This review is from: Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (Hardcover)
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.
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