Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick

Not again!

It's happening to me again.

The soft-drink stand fell to bits.  Molecules.  He saw the molecules, colorless, without qualities, that made it up.  Then he saw through, into the space beyond it, he saw the hill behind, the trees and sky.  He saw the soft-drink stand go out of existence, along with the counter man, the cash register, the big dispenser of orange drink, the taps for Coke and root beer, the ice-chests of bottles, the hot dog broiler, the jars of mustard, the shelves of cones, the heavy round metal lids under which there were different ice creams.

In its place was a slip of paper.  He reached out his hand and took hold of the slip of paper.  On it was printing, block letters.

SOFT-DRINK STAND

If I read one Philip K. Dick book every year, I won't finish them all for 36 years.  I'll be 68.  There's a comfort in that, I think, the idea that there's an author you'll (nearly) always be able to return to, like Mom's cooking.  And Dick's books are comforting in that way exactly: plotty, fast-paced, engaging, even when they're truly weird.  Time Out of Joint is one of the less weird ones I've ever read (though still, surely, much weirder than 99% of the books that have ever been written) but it's got that flavor, for sure.

Ragle Gumm makes his living solving a newspaper contest called "Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?"  The contest comes with a set of clues, knotty word puzzles like cryptic crosswords.  He doesn't use them.  His method is purely aesthetic: he has a machine that helps him scan for patterns over the course of many days.  He makes a living that way, on the prize money, and his success at the contest makes him a famous man.  He lives comfortably with his sister, Margo, and her husband, Vic, and their son, Sammy, and he's got his eyes on the wife of their next door neighbor.

Hallucinations begin to unravel his life.  Things that seem to be real, like the soft-drink stand, suddenly disappear.  In their place are pieces of paper, mere words where once there were things:

Central problem in philosophy.  Relation of word to object... what is a word?  Arbitrary sign.  But we live in words.  Our reality, among words not things.  No such thing as a thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.  Thingness... sense of substance.  An illusion.  Word is more real than the object it represents.

Word doesn't represent reality.  Word is reality.  For us, anyhow.  Maybe God gets to objects.  Not us, though.

On Sammy's crystal radio, he begins to pick up conversations from a nearby military installation, conversations which seem to be about him.  "Passing over him now," says an airplane pilot over his radio, and an airplane booms overhead.  Ragle's used to fame, because of the contest, but this is new.  He starts to think of himself as the most famous man in the world, so famous, in fact, that reality seems to be structured around him, to sustain him, and perhaps to trap him.  His attempts to escape the town where he lives, to get out of the illusion along with his brother-in-law, are foiled by people who seem suspiciously like actors.  There's a whole Truman Show thing to it.

When he finally does escape, he finds himself in a strange dystopian place.  The world government calls itself "One Happy World," but it seems to be at war with a set of colonists on the moon.  A group of teenagers--who dress like West Africans and talk in a strange, possibly racist, pidgin dialect--finger him as a "lunatic": a moon colonist, from Luna.  (These teenagers are the best omen of just how bonkers Dick's later books would become.)  The year is not 1959, but 1998, and Ragle's newspaper contest is somehow part of the war against the moon.

So much of Time Out of Joint is recognizable in Dick's later works.  He became obsessed with the idea that the time wasn't what it seemed, eventually coming to suspect he himself was trapped not in an illusion of the past but an illusion of the future, and that time really stopped in ancient Rome.  This is one of the key aspects of the VALIS trilogy.  It's explained to Ragle that they only capitalized on his own regression; it was him that wanted to return to the 50's of his childhood, they only helped him complete the illusion.  The irony is that the author himself became very much like the character.  I wonder if the Dick of the 1980's ever looked back at Time Out of Joint and recognized his own fantasies of regression, which became the shape of his own late mental illness.

Part of the charm of Time Out of Joint is that it was written in 1959, and has a 1959 idea of what 1998 would be like.  We've advanced far enough to have colonies on the moon, but we're still talking over the radio, which is what allows Ragle to discover the truth about himself.  And we're still using telephone numbers with the old style two-letter exchanges, like Klondike and Butterfield; part of Ragle's investigation involves calling 1998 exchanges found in a contraband phone book that don't yet exist.  The novel becomes an artifact of retrofuturism that it was not quite meant to be, anticipating the kind of white-bread nuclear family 1950's nostalgia that would become widespread in at the end of the century.  Like that movie Pleasantville, which, of course, came out in 1998.

Book 5: Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov

This is my "reread" for the Read Harder challenge. I originally read Lolita back my senior year of college, for my Cold War Fictions seminar, and while I remember liking it, I definitely don't remember it hitting me like the work of genius that it very clearly is. Probably this is because I had to burn through it to read another book for another class (but it could just also be stunning immaturity).

Lolita is famous enough that I don't really need to get into specifics, which is nice, as it will make for a quicker review. The stuff that Lolita is famous for, however - the relationship between Humbert Humbert and his underage stepdaughter - is really a small part of the novel. Lolita is really just a dizzying exercise in genre, I think - romance to travelogue to almost a noir fever dream in the final third. Throughout, the repellent wit of Nabokov's narrator and the scathing indictment of America's (at the time nascent) consumer culture are the glue that hold the entire thing together.

I couldn't help but think about the impact this book mu
st have had in 1955. A grown man opening lusting after and then dry humping a preteen girl? Constant droll David Sedaris-level sarcasm? Describing the great American highways as nothing more than connecting bumpkin-filled dots on an endlessly repetitive map? None of this fits the narrative I have of 1955 America, even peeling away the rose-colored tint that infects even some of the revisionist histories of the time. And when you consider this criticism comes from an immigrant who had left Soviet Russian and Europe as it was plunging into WWII, it is especially poignant.

(This said, the final third of the novel felt a bit much for me. Judging from a few conversations I've had with others, this isn't a unique opinion. My wife had read the book twice, and for the life of her, couldn't remember who it was that Humbert Humbert killed at the end. I couldn't, either. Honestly, after 200 pages in H.H.'s mind, I was ready to move on. But that's no doubt part of what Nabokov was doing - the charm of this sociopath inevitably has to wear off.)

As a final note, I made the active choice to be reading this book while my AP Language and Composition students were writing an essay in class on Friday - as Donald Trump was taking the oath of office. I found it very fitting to be reading the narrative of a narcissistic, truth-bending sexual predator, as Lolita provides more than a little warning about what could easily become (and what has become) Trump's America, 60 years before it happened. Time and time again, Humbert Humbert fools people who should know better, and even the people who suspect things wind up totally unable or unwilling to stop him. He provides just enough surface-level charm and convincingness to skate by, until finally he doesn't, and the consequences are disastrous for everyone involved. Oh, boy! America!

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

"What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives."

I hesitate to call The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a spy novel, because I think that phrase brings with it certain modern connotations. This book is an espionage novel.

The events in the book occur in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Cold War. The British Secret Intelligence Service asks Alec Leamas to pretend to defect to East Germany and then feed them misinformation that would lead them to believe that one of their men was a British double agent. This is the crux of the story. To make Leamas seem prime for defection, he is unceremoniously sacked and provided with only a meager pension. Leamas is given a job at a small library, from which is promptly gets fired.

By the time the East German Communists decide to come calling on Leamas, he has drunk himself into a hole. What Leamas and British Intelligence did not count on was that someone else would also coming calling on him. Liz Gold, a woman that he met while working at the library is concerned for Leamas, and comes to find him and make sure he is alright. It is unclear to the reader how much Leamas is still in control of his life at this point and--at least initially--if he has actual feelings for Gold. Perhaps Leamas wasn't sure himself. Needless to say, Gold's involvement with Leamas complicates everything.

I cannot think of a a novel with an ending that was more taut than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Rawlins sucked on the cigarette.  They sat for a long time.  Finally he pitched the stub of the cigarette into the fire.  I'm goin to bed, he said.


Yeah, said John Grady.  I guess that's a good idea.


They spread their soogans and he pulled off his boots and stood them beside him and stretched out in his blankets.  The fire had burned to coals and he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.


Well damn.  I didn't know what to think when I started this, and I'm forever grateful to the friends who gave it to me.  I'd read The Road, and knew how lyrical and cold and beautiful Cormac McCarthy's writing can be, but damn.  He loves something about bleak landscapes, or they bring out the best in his style, which is so spare most of the time that it just knocks you dead in passages like this.  John Grady's just fallen for the daughter of the hacendado who owns the ranch he's started working on in nowhere, Mexico, but instead of lovestruck ramblings he feels the earth 'taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.'

It's like Cormac McCarthy uses his protagonists to express something about the ideal of real manhood, and this time the ideal involves stoicism, extreme self-reliance, and riding horseback into Mexico with a rifle and no absolutely no plan.  This may be my new favorite book (I think I say that too often), just because of the lyrical, dark beauty that comes out of an empty, scrub-desert landscape and follows a man and his horse.  If you need me I'll be in Mexico.

The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer

For a YA fiction novel, The Meaning of Consuelo is a rather dark read. Cofer carefully lays out a map for the young reader to navigate through mental illness, suffering, the effects of poverty, and death among other difficult subjects.

Spoilers.

Consuelo is twelve years old at the beginning of the book and living in the more Americanized section of Puerto Rico with her parents and younger sister, Milli. Their family is struggling--her mother's side fighting to keep tradition in tact while her father tries to fit in with the more "progressive" islanders. Beyond their ideological differences creating rifts, Consuelo's father is also quite the womanizer--so much so that his wife has resigned herself to the fact that he will never be entirely hers and helps him get ready for his dates with other women. Distracted by her problems, the mother leaves the parenting of the young Mili to Consuelo. Most of the time, Consuelo keeps a watchful eye on her younger sister and does a good job of keeping her out of trouble. The one time she slips up, though, Mili is sexually abused by a neighbor boy at a carnival while Consuelo is on the ferris whell and what happened leaves Consuelo in constant fear for Mili's wellbeing. She blames herself, especially, when Mili's behavior starts to change and becomes strange... even for a child.

Changing times bring hardships upon the family. Consuelo's best friend and older cousin Patricio begins to rebel, and soon talk of his homosexual lifestyle leaks out after he is caught with another boy near the the resort where Consuelo's father works bringing unwanted attention to the family on the island. While trying to defend Patricio, Consuelo decides to taste rebellion for herself after years of having too much pressure placed upon her young shoulders. When her family forgets her fifteenth birthday, when she's suppose to have an elaborate coming out party called a quinciera, she acts out by having sex with the boy at school she's been fliriting with--which in her town in the 1950s would mean that she would become a shame to her family and be impossible to marry off. Naturally, Wilhelm decides to brag about his sexual conquest to the rest of their school and Consuelo becomes an instant outcast. Her family is too distracted to pay attention to gossip about their eldest, however, when they are trying to figure out what is wrong with Mili and resorting to the help of psychics and doctors. When Mili is diagnosed with schizophrenia, their father protests and says he wants a second opinion from a better doctor and uses the situation as a ploy to convince his family to move to America where there will be medical care that's better capable of helping Mili. The mother agrees only to get her husband away from his mistress.

Right before the family is to move to Nueva York, Mili disappears while at the beach with her aunt and the reader is left only to believe that she has died. Consuelo ends up being the only one to leave as her family had planned and at the close of the novel we see her off to the airport where she will set off to fend for herself where no one knows her troubles.

Consuelo is a well developed character that I couldn't help but pity and cheer on. As a product of negligent parenting who has been tried too often while too young, she still managed to remain a strong and admirable character despite her flaws and mistakes. I think I almost liked her the most while she was doing the things that would cause her pain because she was making a life for herself outside the confines of her family, culture, and environment. She wasn't afraid to test the water and or push the envelope.