Customer Reviews

Puttering About In A Small Land

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

 

 

I have a soft spot for this bleakly realistic novel about California life in the 1950's. The main characters are little people, anti-heroes, average Joes, but Dick's psychological insights are superb and singular. I remember one character's description of being popular in elementary school for two days because of making ears from breadcrusts and causing everyone to laugh; and a brilliantly believable internal monologue about getting caught in the act of adultery. Dick's evocations are haunting. He truly was capable of finding the unique and the universal in the quotidian realities of modern life, even when disguised by a wacky SF alternative-realm framework (not here, though). PUTTERING is straight slice-of-life.

I wish someone would make this one into a movie. It's bittersweet, evocative--filled with character like an aged burgundy. Read it.

Eight of the mainstream novels PKD wrote in the fifties have now been published. Everyone agrees that CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST is the best; after that, opinions vary quite widely. I'd put this in the top three, but, really, you have to try them and see. This one's an often funny tale of adultery, with terrific characterizations, including one of the most positively portrayed females in all of PKD's work. Like a lot of Dick novels, it explores why we sometimes knowingly and willfully act to bring about our own downfall.

I loved this novel. The reactions the adulterers experience after their one 'affair' are so atypical of drama, film, TV but I suspect so accurate of human life. We can all learn many things from reading Dick's novels - both SF and otherwise. Somehow - even in extreme environments (which this novel does not show) - he shows everyday reality of the human mind.

Puttering About in a Small LandCritical opinion informs us that in his 1950's and early 1960's non-sf work, Philip K. Dick dealt with suburban life on the west coast. How many besides me automatically assume that any novel from that time, set in the suburbs, must necessarily deal with adultery? Show of hands, please - yeah, most of us. Well, "Puttering About" certainly deals with cheating spouses, to a greater extent than maybe anything else PKD ever wrote. On the other hand, this author never treated classic stories in a classic fashion. Let's see how he handled a story about musical beds.

Here's the setup - Virginia and Roger Lindahl, a squabbling Los Angeles couple who own a television shop, enroll their young son Gregg in an Ojai boarding school. They agree to share weekend driving chores with another set of parents, Chic and Liz Bonner. Ojai is about 70-80 miles from Los Angeles, and the husband of one couple finds himself on a long road trip with the wife of the other couple. Hijincks ensue.

As I hinted above, this is pretty typical stuff for a certain kind of late-50s American storytelling. On the other hand, "Puttering About" does not restrict itself to the story of the affair. You get a wide spectrum of postwar American experience, including some flashbacks to the Lindahls' lives before and after their marriage. They have lived through some big changes, moving with America from a more rural lifestyle to a more urban one, and moving with America through World War II and the postwar economic boom. Like a lot of fictional characters in the same circumstance, and probably a lot of real people, Virginia and Roger find themselves discontented and looking for excitement when the Bonners come along. I'm not entirely sure why this search for meaning seems to involve adultery so often in American letters, but it's one of PKD's gifts that he can make it seem almost sensible.

This is not what makes this novel special, though. PKD made the bizarre seem plausible, and vice versa, in a great many of his writings - that's nothing new for him. "Puttering About" stands out in his work for two very particular reasons.

First, although his understanding of women sometimes left something to be desired, PKD made a serious attempt in "Puttering About" to describe a woman's sexuality, from as close to the actual experience as he could imagine. Since he was a master of the imagination pretty nearly all his life, the attempt is a notable success. Mind you, it may not be accurate (I suppose that only a woman could judge), but it's at least plausible, and it may be among the earliest writings to question the idea that a man "gets" a woman in sex. For a man who went through five marriages and God knows how many relationships, PKD deserves some credit for even making the attempt to empathize with a woman's experience, especially since it obviously cost him some effort in the writing of it.

Second, "Puttering About" contains some engaging structural experiments; PKD usually let his stories drift wherever they would, but this novel shows signs of more careful construction. For instance, he uses the scenery between Los Angeles and Ojai, and the behavior of the Ojai birds, to reflect on the characters' sense of liberty or constraint in their lives. And as I said earlier, we get a number of flashbacks, mostly from Roger's point of view, that comment on his actions in the novel's present moment and on the way the other characters react to him.

This experiment doesn't always work; it stops dead about halfway through the book, and there's no clear relationship between the activity of the main plot and the content of the flashbacks. That is, when Roger reminisces about his childhood on an Arkansas farm upon seeing the horses at his son's new school, you can see why; he's on another farm. It's another matter when he recalls the bar fight he got into shortly after his marriage, in which he lost some teeth; this doesn't seem to have any bearing on the main action surrounding it. Loose scenes like that drifting around, well-written though they are, seem like no more than a kind of psychological backdrop to the story, and as such rather unnecessary. Particularly in view of the fact that PKD almost certainly put more work into "Puttering About" than into a good bit of his sf, you would think it would be more effective.

Be that as it may, I remain impressed that the man had the gumption to play around with his work in this manner. What's more, for a novel that starts out like so many suburban-adultery stories and revolves around some frankly unpleasant characters, "Puttering About" gives us a nice ambiguous conclusion. The title comes from the manner in which Virginia characterizes her husband's life and work, and it's fitting; the environment seems to have all these characters pretty well trapped. Then Roger and Virginia take some actions that completely break things open, and the story just doesn't end up the way you expected. But then, as I've said before, this is PKD.

Turns out that this is much more than a story of adultery - most such stories probably are, anyway. In this case, what we actually have is a conflict between two visions of a good life. According to one character's notion, a good life consists of success in a large ambition, a big plan. According to another's, a good life consists of the freedom to do as you please. I'll leave it to you to discover which character pursues which dream, not to mention determining which dream you like better. Figuring that out for yourself is, of course, one reason to read books like this.

Benshlomo says, Choose your road carefully - you never know what you'll find on it.

The title of this realist novel, written in 1957 but not published until 1985, refers to the "small land" of Roger Lindahl's TV repair shop. His wife, Virginia is ambitious, and ends up taking control of the business and expanding it into a large appliance store; but she, as much as Roger or any of the other characters, exists in the small land of her own mind. California, the land of opportunity which had lured the Lindahls from the East coast, is small in its own way: the deadening conventionality of 1950s manners and morals contract the range of human happiness there as elsewhere. Into this wasteland a fertilizing influence appears in the person of Liz Bonner. Roger finds her refreshingly uninhibited and sensual. In its concentration on the triangle of Roger, Liz, and Virginia, Dick fully develops the psychological dynamics of marital and extramarital relations. His sometimes fantastic descriptions of the wasteland of the "small land" of this novel anticipate the entropic landscapes of his later science-fiction novels such as Martian Time-Slip and Ubik.

'Puttering' simultaneously details the breakdown of the marriage of the protagonists and how they first met and came together. What I find interesting in PKD's mainstream novels in the historical info about the time and the place. His futures were often sketchy but his presents were always rich, and this is a book where this comes to life. It is a book about relationships and adultery, and is one not to miss.

"An overwhelming indictment of Los Angeles suburban life in this sensitive and catastrophic story of two couples and their children. Many of Dick's stories have been produced into very successful movies such as Blade Runner, but this is the frightening society that Dick is warning us about in his other novels."

Pretty slow, but full of utterly believable characters that I really cared about (even though they're pretty messed up people).

This book, a story about a TV repairman and his family in 1950's California, contains many of the elements contained in Dick's science fiction novels: bleak emotional landscapes; the aggressive wife; the everyman character stuggling to get by in the world. But it's missing the inventiveness, the creepiness, and also the humor of his SF work. This one dragged for me, a bit, though it does contain some memorable characters.

This is one of several non-science fiction novels Dick wrote in the 1950s in an attempt to gain recognition as a serious writer. It didn't work (while he was still living), and he went back to solid SF at some point. This one is worth reading for sure if you like PKD, but it's not up there with his very best science fiction.