Customer Reviews

Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike

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

 

 

I first became a fan of Philip K. Dick shortly after his death, before his popularity had hit its full stride. Picking up his books in the early 1980s was sometimes a bit of a treasure hunt: while a few were readily available (such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle), others were quite elusive, like The Man Who Japed or The World Jones Made. Eventually, I would get them all, but there were still his unpublished books to get: Mary and the Giant, Puttering About in a Small Land, etc. One title always stood out among these works: The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike. At long last, I have had a chance to buy and read this book.

Like much of PKD's posthumously published books, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike is not a science fiction novel but rather a mainstream story of life for a pair of 1950s Marin County, California couples. Leo Runcible is a successful real estate agent who likes to think of himself as liberal: when a neighbor has a black man as a dinner guest, Leo defends the neighbor's right to do so, at the cost of a friendship and a business deal. Nevertheless, Leo is bitter at the neighbor, Walt Dombrosio, for creating the provocative situation, and soon gets his revenge by getting Walt arrested for drunk driving.

Walt loses his license and is dependent on his wife to transport him daily to work. For Walt, this will cause damage to his marriage and eventually lead him to his own revenge against Leo, which will have consequences no one could have anticipated. The wives, meanwhile have their own issues to deal with. Leo's wife, Janet, is almost pathologically neurotic and has an uncanny ability to make any situation worse. Sherry Dombrosio is the only reasonably well-adjusted character among the four, but saddled with the brutish Walt, she will also be the one who suffers the most.

Was the book worth the quarter-century wait? Well, it's good, but it's not THAT good. As with much of PKD's posthumously published books, this is not quite Dick at his best, which is probably why it never was published earlier. Also, for those fans expecting his wonderful science fiction, this work could be disappointing. For PKD completists, however, this should be a worthy addition to their collections.

Set in California, a man plays a prank on his neighbours by faking a hominid skull in his back yard.

The archeological find turns out to hide a sinister truth about the area, an ancient ill that has been forgotten and that threatens the lives of the new residents of the area.

Dick's novel is not one of his greats but is certainly worth a read. It is a nice example of how a prank can backfire and end up working for the good of all.

I read this book after being very impressed by PKDs Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, which was the first non-science fiction book of the author that I had read. Again I am very impressed by the way the book is written.

The story takes place in the early 60s in a rural community. Interesting as this set-up might be for a European born in 1986 this is admittedly not the most fascinating time and place. However this would not be a PKD book if all of the people living in this rural community wouldn't be paranoid, miserable or, most often, both.

The brilliantly written thought patterns of the characters in this book is so enticing that the main story line about the man whose teeth were all exactly alike is not even that important but more a way by which the author drives the characters into certain thought and action patterns that cause them to be ever more distrustful and destructive to themselves and those around them.

While not the happiest of books (like many of PKDs works) it is wonderfully written and very enticing. The time and place, with for example the pressing idea that women should be at home and men should be earning money made the story all the more interesting.

Highly recommended

Well, it certainly sounds like a science fiction title, but this is not a science fiction novel. Philip K. Dick fans know that the man's dearest professional ambition was to establish a dual career, as a writer of both science fiction and mainstream novels, but that he never quite made it; mainstream titles account for only two of the more than thirty published during his lifetime. The rest of his mainstream work began coming out shortly after his death in 1982, when the success of the movie "Blade Runner" attracted commercial publishers, and this book was published the following year.

So you read PKD's non-sf work and you have to ask yourself the question; If he could not find a place for himself in the mainstream market, was that the market's fault or his? That is, was his mainstream work any good? Based on this novel, the answer is an unqualified Yes.

It concerns the conflicts and struggles of the people of Carquinez, California, a real place north of San Francisco not far from the Pacific coast. And what are they struggling about? Well, pretty much everything, it seems. None of them seem to like each other very much, and that includes the individual members of the two married couples. It's one of PKD's best tricks to make you care about them anyway.

Another of his best tricks is borrowing current events for the issues dividing the people of Carquinez. Unlike some other novels, this one manages to comment on historical movements like civil rights by dealing solely with the lives of its characters. So Leo Runcible, a local real estate broker, runs afoul of Walt Dombrosio, a commercial designer, because Walt invites a black man to dinner and Leo is afraid that people will see and refuse to buy homes in the neighborhood. Not that he's a racist - he's actually a Jew, proud of his World War II service and quite prepared to throw an old and valued friend out of his house when that friend reacts badly to the presence of a black man next door. He's still upset, though, and in retaliation calls the police when Walt drunkenly puts his car in a ditch one night. Things escalate from there until the novel concludes the following Christmas.

When you add in the fact that Leo's wife is an alcoholic and Walt's wife is a harpy, you can see why no one seems happy. Leo also has to deal with some casual antisemitism and Walt has to deal with the first rumblings of feminism in his own marriage, which he doesn't like at all. The man whose teeth are all exactly alike arrives about halfway through the story - he's a fossilized skull that Leo finds on his property, and all of his teeth really are exactly alike. They all look like molars, no incisors or canines. It may even be a Neanderthal skull. Whatever it is, though, it ramps up the heat between Leo and Walt something fierce.

In short, Philip K. Dick the mainstream novelist dealt with the attempts of the suburban postwar middle class to "make it", thus falling somewhere between John Cheever and Philip Roth, only on the other coast and with a lot less money. What sets PKD's work apart is his characters and their motivations, or rather their confusion - Leo, Walt, their wives and the other citizens of Carquinez do things without quite knowing why, whether those actions are useful or destructive. Why on Earth, for instance, would a man throw a chair at his pregnant wife and then tell her he loves her? Unforgivable, to be sure, but also more than enough to keep a reader interested. Fascinated, even. You have to give the author credit for courage, at least; there's no point in being a writer if you're going to flinch from life's ugly realities.

Barry Malzberg once said that PKD's failure to publish most of his mainstream material may have done his science fiction a world of good, since it forced him to deal with his mainstream concerns in his science fiction work and thus produce a brand new style of sf. Maybe so, but on the evidence of TMWTWAEA, that pressure worked both ways. His success as a writer of science fiction gave him the tools necessary to include the unexpected in his mainstream work. I can't think of another author who would have even thought to make an important plot point out of fossils.

That cross-pollination between the author's sf imagination and his mainstream observations shows up especially well when it comes to plotting. I've complained in the past that a lot of PKD's sf novels bounce from event to event with next to no connective tissue and mess up a lot of good ideas that way. Well, real life is often like that, and a similar kind of veering around works pretty well in this novel. And why not? In a mainstream setting, all that confusion is just a day in the life of Leo Runcible - part hustler, part public benefactor. No surprise, really. PKD always wanted his readers to feel empathy for his characters, even the jerks.

When I set myself the project of reviewing all of Philip K. Dick's novels, I considered restricting myself to the work published during his lifetime. Having read "The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike," I think I've changed my mind. Stay tuned for "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland" and the rest.

Benshlomo says, Sometimes you just have to dig for the gold.

In Carquinez, Marin County, Jewish realtor Leo Runcible knows he is out of place amidst the WASPS he sells local real estate to. Still he enjoys making money and he actually cares about the community. His neighbor Walter Dombrosio works in San Francisco as a product designer who loves pranks and dreams of a hoax to rival the infamous Cardiff Giant.

Leo and Walter had a spat when the latter brought a colored person to dinner, which the former insists cost him a potential megabucks deal; Leo blames Walter while he knows he was upset with his potential partner's denigration of Negroes. When Leo notices Walter driving erratic; he calls the cops. Walter loses his driving license which means his wife Sherry takes him to and from work. He gets into a fight with his boss who hired Sherry and loses his job. With time on his hands he creates a fake hominid skull "found" in his back yard where some recent artifacts had been uncovered. However, the joke spins out of control as archeologists descend on Western Marin County only to find something dangerous lurks in the water table.

This is a reprint of an intriguing character study that brings to life the mores of Northern California in the 1950s. The story line is totally character driven with little action beyond incidents that enable the audience to fully understand what motivates Leo and Walt. Readers who enjoy a slice of those Happy Days will appreciate Philip K. Dick's insightful realistic look at a somewhat isolated community with its local societal rules.

Harriet Klausner

"What if you found Neanderthal bones in your back yard? What if it affected the value of your real estate? Only Philip K. Dick could write this peculiar and oddly twisted account of such a problem."

Fascinating character study explores paradoxes in relationships in a small California town in the early 1960s. Hints and harbingers of tectonic social changes begin to fracture the surface smoothness in the town, all occurring in parallel with sub-plots regarding the safety of the town's water supply and some mysterious skeletons located on town property. A seemingly harmless dinner invitation against racial lines ignites a storm of consequences, all unforeseen and unforeseeable.

Notable in the Dick corpus particularly for the contradictory nature of the characters' motives and for the absence of any real heroes or villains. Hate and affection are intermingled and intermix in complex ways.

Style is lyical and haunting. As is usual for all Dick's novels, the ending feels rushed and inorganic.

The edition I had was quite poor: there was no indication of the publishing provenance of this posthumously published novel, which was presumably written in the early 1960s.

One question I had, which my edition did not discuss: why was this not published in the 1960s, when it would have surely been a bestseller, as it squarely but subtly addressed then controversial politics in race relations, abortion, and marital relations? This seems like the single Dick novel of the most widespread appeal, at least in the 60s and 70s, and it is very peculiar both that it was not published and that the modern republishing does not even discuss the background.

Notable also in Dick's lyrical style is his very subtle insertion of key descriptive characteristics, forcing a close reading. Obviously, few modern authors use that style, preferring instead to hammer home every point multiple times for the benefit of today's careless, uninterested readers.

Structure is deftly woven. Each act has multiple antithetical consequences, and the interplay in the streams of anthitheses frames the novel. Water is both life-giving and poisonous; marriage bonds are torturous yet empowering; art is used in the service of commercialism; Neanderthals and contemporary humans interact in paradoxical ways; characters love and hate for one another is commingled in the same act or set of acts. The overall effect is profoundly interesting, the clash and ripples of events and motives throughout.

This is no "Dr. Bloodmoney.." but, then, what is? Maybe, this is a period study of prejudice and disinterest. Perhaps, it is very difficult to discern the author's real purpose of this novel. In any case, Walter Dombosio's almost clever hoax succeeded by sheer dumb luck...Clupper jaw and all. How, Leo Runcible got drawn into the water business is a mystery. And, why didn't he just purchase a moderately expensive home water purification system and just forget the whole thing? Who knows? Anyhow, this novel is an easy ready with no apparent significance by an author of significance. And, don't get carried away, if you find any weird skulls in your backyard.

This is the first straight PKD book I read and I loved it. All the essential themes are there: troubled marriage, competing professionals, theorising, although no androids this time as it's set in the "real world".

As for the edition itself - the book and its font are rather big and it's inconvinient to carry this book around.