Customer Reviews

Voices From the Street

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

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, though I have to say it has disturbing moments (some may not "enjoy" being disturbed in reading, I have to say that I do).

I found myself both identifying with and repelled from Stuart Hadley, the centerpiece character in the novel. This created moments of reading the novel that were surprising and moving. Though the overall tone of the novel is dark, and much of Dick's characteristic humor is not as overtly drawn as in other novels, the subject matter will interest fans of his work, especially fans of his posthumously published "mainstream" novels. (Mainstream? Hardly. That was the problem for publishers!)

My guess is that this was written in the Point Reyes Station period, around "The Man in the High Castle" and "The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike" (maybe this should be titled "The Man who Was So Afraid to Risk" or some similar title!) The writing I feel is a superb example of what Dick was capable of creating with patience and passion. Descriptive passages evoke sudden moods, action sequences race or crawl appropriately with swift shifts that jar and disturb. I am not sure if there was much editorial revision or intervention at play in this manuscript, I suspect perhaps not, and it may well be better for it. It seems to take just the right path and pace to unfold.

Recommended for Philip K. Dick fans. I view it (right at this moment) as one of his best. (Scandalous?)

The characters are almost uniformly annoying; there were many points in the book where I wanted to throttle one of them. It's a depressing story with a depressing ending.

Nonetheless, this was a captivating book, quite well written. Watching these nuanced characters try to make a buck, try to figure out the world, try to figure themselves out, was fascinating. I would recommend it to Philip K. Dick fans and to others. I don't think I'd put this book among Dick's absolute best, but it is quite good.

(In case someone reading this thinks PKD only wrote science fiction: that's not the case. He wrote a number of books that are not even remotely science fiction, and this is one of them.)

Early in the book there are various anti-Semitic and racist comments that I found jarring. I initially dismissed them as products of the time. They turned out to be precursors to important plot points. Lots of issues are explored, agonized over. Few if any are resolved. The book stimulated a lot of confusing thought for me, part of what I really liked about it.

Stuart Hadley is a nice-looking young TV salesman who hates his job and everything else. Jim Fergesson is the owner of the store where Stuart works. Ellen is Stuart's long suffering wife. A number of other characters buzz in and out of Stuart's life, as he grows increasingly dissatisfied, yearning for something he can't name. For a brief time he thinks he's found the answer in a millenial Christian cult, but that doesn't last long. Stuart treats the people in his life abominably. Eventually he flames out in an orgy of violent, self-destructive rage. In the last chapter, after an enforced period of psychiatric treatment, Stuart is just beginning to get a grip. He's badly injured, but for the first time he is content to work on small, realistic goals.

There's not much more to say about the plot. There are many characters, all terribly flawed and with few redeeming features. The author seems to have little affection for any of the characters and it was hard for this reader to like them either.

Apparently this is one of PKD's early novels, never published in his lifetime, and now available to the public for the first time. I could see why it wasn't published earlier. Except for the author's well-deserved fame, it would never be published now. It's poorly written, loaded with cliches, bogged down in long, rambling conversations that are hard to believe, one-dimensional characters without depth, and a lead character who inspires little empathic response from the reader. Why is he so unhappy? Why does he whine so much? Still, there are flashes of the great author's later brilliance. And powerful descriptions of the time, the place, and the ambience. I kept reading, hoping things would get better, and eventually, in the last few pages, they did. Sort of. If you're a PKD fan, you might want this one to complete your collection. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Based on some of the other reviews, I think a lot of people will miss the whole point of this novel. I think the underlying cause of Stuart Hadley's discontent with his world is that he is mentally ill, more than likely clinically depressed. I have the same condition and I identified with Hadley's character a lot.

Everyone in Hadley's life is trying to stuff him into a box from his wife at home, his sister and brother-in-law, to his boss at a television store. Hadley doesn't know what he wants out of life and everyone around him tries to make that decision for him - which, if you know anyone with severe depression, is the worst thing one could do for a depressed person. It only pisses them off more.

His mental illness amplifies everything he does and how he thinks. He goes to extremes in thoughts and deeds, trying to find something that satisfies him. Some reviewers say that the character whined too much. Hadley does whine a lot but in my opinion, that is another indication of his emotional ailments.

Hadley is a lot like the alcoholic who tries to switch from liquor to beer to wine to try and find a way to face life and the ups and downs that go with it. He throws himself into a religious cult, an affair, and eventually, a plan to completely reinvent himself. His descent into madness is violent and destructive. Call me crazy (hah, I would), but I think a lot of people have acted like Hadley at least once in their lives but would be too self-conscious to admit it and that is why they find Hadley so distasteful.

The one thing in the novel that I would criticize most is that Philip K Dick cannot write realistic women characters. But that is true for a lot of his novels. All of Dick's female characters seem to be these neurotic, half-witted twits.

This book is NOT science fiction although it can be found with all of Dick's other sci fi novels in your big box bookstores. There is nothing science fiction about it. If you're expecting Dick's characteristic science fiction, you won't find it here. Reviewers have said that a bad thing about this novel is that it's depressing. Yeah, it is but then again it's about a very sick man. Whoever would expect this novel to be light-hearted and fun should skip reading it and go back to watching TMZ.

I've been reading P.K. Dick since 1975. I read his 'Confessions of A Crap Artist' in the late 1970s and loved it, but thought it was more or less a kind of one-off mainstream novel. And now we have 'Voices From the Street', 'Humpty Dumpty In Oakland', and 'In Milton Lumky Territory', the last two of which I haven't yet read. One might hope this particular posthumous Dickien mainstream vault was bottomless because the stuff is so good, however the introduction to 'Voices' seems to indicate that this novel is it, the last one. Too bad. This is a brilliant book. Not perfect by any means, but withering and harrowing in its honest and uncompromising points of view, devastating in its portrayal of America, that supposed materialistic paradise, in the early 1950s. The writing is wonderful. The characters are fascinating, if anything but sympathetic, and it is impossible to predict exactly what is going to happen, although there is a definite aura of doom about the book from page one. The time and setting of the novel are evocative and even nostalgic in a perverse kind of way; you might think of it as a kind of subversive mid-20th Century West Coast time capsule. Just about everyone in the book is lost or floundering. The ones who haven't sold out and are clinging on grimly to cheap materialistic values take desperate lunges for that something missing in their lives, but they for the most part end up unhappier than the duller, more plodding majority. The most basic, simple human relationships don't seem to work. There is fear, hostility and outright hatred between races, and between those with differing political and religious beliefs. Violence seethes just below the surface. The whole society is sick. Maybe the whole world is sick. After reading the first chapter, I felt the author was making a pretty good case for there being something wrong with life itself. One of the most pathetic characters in the book, Horace Wakefield, a middle-aged recluse who works in a flower shop and belongs to a Jehovah Witness-type cult that reveres a charismatic black man with an end-of-the-world message, actually comes across in the end as one of the most grounded people in the book,
'Wakefield winced. Fingers trembling, he straightened his tie, smoothed down his coat; he pulled himself upright and faced Hadley. "You can't," he said hoarsely. "You're living in a crazy world Stuart. It isn't possible to cut out a neat little pattern; this is a world of war and lunatics, and you're in it whether you like it or not." Leaning towards Hadley, he grated: "In a crazy world, it's the nuts who know what's going on".'
And yet the gloom is relieved by scintillating angles of dark humour that flash by when least expected. With Dick the unexpected is always expected and that saves a gritty, uncompromising work like this from being oppressive. This book compares well with Richard Yates' 'Revolutionary Road', which was written at about the same time but set on the East Coast. The fact that Dick's novel didn't get published at the time says something about the publishing business, not that any more evidence is needed to prove that it is severely dysfunctional. On the other hand, if they had printed it in 1952, maybe we wouldn't have been able to enjoy all of those great mind-bending Science Fiction works Dick would go on to produce. With these wonderful mainstream novels seeming to come out of nowhere, it almost seems as if we are getting the best of both worlds. Say, you don't suppose that the P.K. Dick from a parallel universe, the one where he was a successful mainstream author and where he didn't write much SF, has now made contact with this universe and is slowly feeding us the novels he wrote there? Oh well, we can only hope.

I've read six of Philip K Dick's mainstream novels and found them all rather depressing. This one is depressing too.

Set in California in 1952, the story revolves around Stuart Hadley, a university-educated young man with an artistic bent from a middle class family. At 25, he finds himself working as a salesman in an electrical goods store with a wife and young child at home. His life is unfulfilling. He takes solace in alcohol, seeks meaning in a religious cult (and doesn't find it), and has a rather baffling relationship with a woman political activist. Eventually he cracks up.

As I said, all rather depressing. What interested me most in this novel were the social and philosophical undercurrents. The 1950s were a time of prosperity and optimism. Stuart Hadley's story is a sad counterpoint to that prevailing mood. Indeed, all Dick's mainstream novels strip away the veneer of the times to reveal lives of struggle, angst, emotional dysfunction and apparent meaninglessness. Perhaps this is why he couldn't get them published at the time - because publishers believed that the reading public wouldn't buy books that threw so much cold water on the American dream.

Dick paints Hadley's California community without affection. It is populated by small-minded people who are racist, sexist and generally not very likeable. Even the 'outsiders', Hadley's left wing friends, are pathetic and ineffectual. And his brother-in-law is almost too obnoxious to be real. Indeed, there's not an attractive character in the whole book. The Korean War is there as a kind of political backdrop, and there are also some glimpses of the existential issues that so obsessed Dick in his later life, but sadly they aren't developed to any great extent. This could have added something really substantial to the story.

Voices From The Street isn't great literature. The pace is inconsistent, the characterisation a bit thin, and its unmitigated gloom makes reading it a less than edifying experience (despite the faintly optimistic ending). Nonetheless, as a piece of social commentary, it's fascinating in a morbid kind of way.

I first started reading Philip K. Dick in 1983, back when he was just beginning to get some real recognition. Since then, I have owned and read practically everything he's written and enjoyed most of it. Some of this was posthumously published, typically works from his early writing days that had never been printed: books like Mary and the Giant or The Broken Bubble, which are not science fiction. Voices from the Street is another such novel, and according to the book jacket, is the last unpublished novel of Dick's.

The protagonist in Voices is Stuart Hadley, a television salesman in 1952 Oakland. It is in some ways, a troubled time on the world stage, with the Korean War raging on and the threat of nuclear war hovering over everyone. These events are just part of the problems plaguing Hadley, who is alternately bored and frightened by his life. Superficially, things should be good: he has a loving wife, a child soon to arrive and a decent - if rather low-paying - job that may offer better opportunities.

Seeking to fill a void in his life, Hadley attends a religious service held by a small, apocalyptic sect led by a charismatic preacher. This in turn will eventually connect him with a woman who simultaneously attracts and repels him. But answers to the depression that hangs over him will not be easily obtained, and things gradually fall apart.

Hadley is a typical Dick hero, a middle-class, rather ordinary man whose life begins to get more and more out of control. He is occasionally rather unlikable, due to his petty bigotries and sullen attitude. In other words, he is a three-dimensional character, as are the other people in this tale.

So why did Voices from the Street remain unpublished? I'm sure part of the reason is that it doesn't belong to a genre and may have been harder to sell. Also, it may not have been good enough to merit publishing; the only reason it is in print now is because of who wrote it. It is essentially a book for Philip K. Dick completists only; while not bad (I would rate it a low four stars), it only has bits of what made Dick so great. However, if you are a Dick fan, this is a good look at his early writing.

It interests me how an author first gets published. There are so many instances of - in the end - profoundly successful writers having such a great deal of difficulty in getting a start. And then there are so many instances of real duds getting published. The art of publishing is just one more thing a writer has to contend with.

'Voices from the Street' is not a bad novel; easily equivalent to a lot of disappointing novels that I've read that were published - at least that's my view. It's not a great novel either - a bit shapeless, a bit rambling.... I can understand why PKD was unsuccessful in getting it published - I'm less certain about some of his other pre-SF novels; 'Puttering About in a Small Land', 'The Broken Bubble', 'In Milton Lumky Territory'....., none of which he was able to get published.

So PKD turned to writing SF short stories to make a pittance of a living, and to hone his craft. And from there he started writing SF novels, which have become icons of the genre, some perhaps even of literature. But what might have happened had a publisher with insight published one of those early novels - maybe he would never have turned to SF - what might we have now in the PKD legacy?

I am currently reading 'The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad' by John Stape. It exposes the pressures put on authors by publishers and, in Conrad's case, to the detriment of the quality of the final product - as the author saw it (and in many cases the critics too). In PKD's case a lack of responses to his early fiction saw him move to SF writing. It is my good fortune that I liked SF from an early age, which gave me the great reward of experiencing the vision of an extraordinary writer.

other recommendations:
'The Broken Bubble' - PKD
'Almayer's Folly' - Joseph Conrad (his first novel which he did get published)
'The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad' - John Stape

It sounds like some sort of revolutionary manifesto. Actually, this title is a reference to a scene where one of the characters notes the sounds of machines and people passing by after a horrible accident. As a reflection of the story contained in this novel, it doesn't work very well. Then again, a lot of Philip K. Dick's titles seem rather arbitrary. Which is interesting in itself; "Voices from the Street" was PKD's second completed novel, and in addition to the arbitrary title, it contains a lot of things that would echo down the man's entire career.

Like several of PKD's subsequent protagonists, this novel's Stuart Hadley is a television salesman. He works for a man named Jim Fergesson at Modern TV. He doesn't get along too well with his wife, and he is prey to some horrible paranoid fantasies, especially when under the influence. He struggles to find a deeper, more spiritual meaning to his life, going so far as to explore a cultish religious organization. Not to give too much away, but nothing seems to work - although there are hints of an ambiguous redemption for Hadley at the end, the immediate results of his dissatisfaction get pretty violent.

The paranoia, spiritual yearning, altered consciousness, difficult relationships and hope all show up regularly in PKD's later work. He was not, however, one of those writers who springs into full-blown excellence right away. "Voices from the Street" came about two years into his career. He had just sold his first short story. It would be three more years before he sold a novel. "Voices from the Street" didn't come out until 55 (count them, 55) years after he wrote it and more than 20 years after his death. With all due respect to the genius he became, there's a reason for that delay.

Not all novels have a classical shape, of course, where the opening shapes the conclusion; some very good novels just pick up and go until they come to a stop. "Voices from the Street" does that, but it's not one of those very good novels. Whatever peace Hadley finds at the end of his story (and even his wife isn't sure it's real), he seems to find it more or less by accident. He gets excited about a religious group, then abandons it upon meeting its leader, who doesn't measure up to his messianic expectations. He meets up with his sister and brother-in-law for the first time in two years, stranding a couple of friends in San Francisco in the process, and finds them disappointing, too. He develops some ambitious plans for his place of employment, but drops them when he gets the opportunity to implement them. He even gets the chance for an extramarital affair with a woman who believes in his ability on very little evidence, and devolves into a rapist and car thief. Let's face it, this guy is a loser.

Again, there are good novels about losers, but this isn't one of them. I've said before that PKD was not a particularly good stylist, but at the very least he developed into an concise and imaginative writer. In "Voices from the Street", he hadn't gotten there yet. All too often, he falls victim to that occupational hazard of imaginative writing, the temptation to describe everything two or three times. Take so simple a thing as a suit of clothes: "...rumpled and threadbare, a hard suit, very ancient, stiff and formal, too tight around the wrists, too short at the cuffs." Too many adjectives, too much metaphor. "Voices from the Street" is one of PKD's longer works, and the excess verbiage slows it way down.

As the plot and style are overstuffed, so is the theme. The book includes a few dozen different discussions on religion, antisemitism and racism, business principles, ontology, and a great many other things that PKD took an interest in. All of them interesting in their own right, all of them occupying eight to ten pages, and all of them utterly gone once the scenes that include them are over. The book doesn't even partake of this author's gift for humor, which showed up all over his science fiction but often got lost in his mainstream work. PKD improved over time at choosing one thematic line and sticking to it, but it looks like he had to throw in the kitchen sink at least once before he learned that lesson.

The book's supporting characters, too, appear and disappear at random, such as that religious leader, another of the leader's adherents, Hadley's would-be mistress, his sister and brother-in-law, and a few bartenders and waitresses and assorted hangers-on. This abundance of character and subplot figured heavily in PKD's later work, and functioned pretty well, especially once he learned to tell one story. Not so much here.

In short, "Voices from the Street" may be PKD's most fractured narrative of all, which is saying something. And yet, as frustrating and shapeless as this novel can be, it has some magic about it, maybe because Stuart Hadley never gives up no matter how awful things get for him. We might say of early PKD what Hadley's wife says of her husband - that there was at this time something wonderful in him trying to find expression. If it had remained pent up, "Voices from the Street" would be no more than a curiosity. As it is, this novel is one of the pieces that eventually gave rise to "The Man in the High Castle" and "A Scanner Darkly" and the rest. We can put up with it out of gratitude for that, if nothing else.

Benshlomo says, The wise learn from their teachers' mistakes.

In 1950s Oakland, California affluent Stuart Hadley lives the American dream. He owns a nice home; has an adoring pregnant wife; and recently was promoted manager in a television and radio shop. Stuart Hadley is dissatisfied with his near perfect life as he wants more but has no idea why this is the season of his discontent. He turns to alcohol and sex to dull his anger at middle class existence but that only makes him internally rage more; and he wants to reject the respective adulation of his wife and his boss as that frightens him because once gain he does not know why.

Stuart turns to the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus for salvation. At the sect he meets Marsha Frazier, who he desperately craves. However, Stuart fails to find solace with his new religious order; instead he spirals deeper into depression and begins to destroy his life by tearing down his relationships and losing the respect of his wife and his boss.

VOICES FROM THE STREET is a complex character study of a person living and rejecting the American dream as pronounced during the Ike era. Not an easy read as the story line is somewhat murky and convoluted, but fans of Philip K. Dick will appreciate the rich look at the unhappy days of the 1950s through the increasingly psychotic mindset of the prime protagonist.

Harriet Klausner