Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

But let's put aside theories for now and try first to determine just what happened in 2-3-74 and the months that followed. Be forewarned that Phil's experiences during this time simply do not fall into a neat, overarching pattern--to fashion one for them is to distort them irrevocably. They include moments of doubt, panic, and anguish such as to make them seem all too human. But there are also times of startling sublimity, not to mention sheer breathtaking wonder. They neither prove that Phil was crazy, nor do they establish the existence of a Saint Phil. In fact, the 2-3-74 experiences resemble nothing so much as a wayward cosmic plot from a Phil Dick SF novel--which is hardly surprising, given who the experiencer was.

Philip K. Dick was a twin: his sister, Jane, died in her infancy. Dick never quite got over his sister's death, according to Lawrence Sutin, the biographer who writes about Dick in Divine Invasions. For one, he never ceased to blame his mother for his sister's death. But traces of Jane can also be found in the constant doubling and dissociation of Dick's novels. Jane, Sutin writes, was never far from Dick's mind, and his impressions of the person she would have been had she lived--he imagined her, interestingly, as a lesbian--were a more permanent relationship than any Dick had with real "flesh and blood" women.

This is the first really fascinating thing about Philip K. Dick, and it forms a kind of tentpole with the other thing: a series of visions that occurred in February and March 1974, and which Dick called "2-3-74." Details of these visions were known to me, as they are to anyone who has read VALIS and The Divine Invasion, the novels that deal most directly with these experiences: a belief that time stopped during the Roman Empire, that the modern world is an illusion, that this information was beamed down to Dick in the form of a beam of pink light from a kindly alien divinity somewhere in the vicinity of the star Fomalhaut. But the actual visions were much more complex and varied, and never cohered into a single understanding, as much as Dick wanted them to. The last years of his life Dick spent coldly and rationally dissecting his visions, an effort that produced the 1000-page religious tome published as The Exegesis. They sound like the visions of a mentally ill man--and they almost certainly were--but Dick was well and sober often enough to look at them with a kind of skepticism that resembled the patterns of his books: the humdrum suburbanite who must decide whether his reality is really real. And in the visions, as Sutin describes, with their doublings, their sense of a realer reality that lies inaccessibility, there are intimations of the lost Jane.

Divine Invasions is as thorough a biography as I've ever read. Dick's life between Jane's death and the 2-3-74 visions is, if I'm being honest, not all that fascinating, dominated as it was by scrounging for royalties and a tawdry series of doomed marriages. (If anyone out there decides Dick needs to be canceled, there's plenty of material in here.) But Sutin has gone through it all with a fine-toothed comb, stocking it with commentary from all of Dick's wives, friends, and acquaintances, as well as important passages from Dick's letters and the Exegesis. Sutin has done his homework: he even informs us that, when he played Monopoly, Dick would always choose to the old shoe. But more importantly, Sutin illuminates how the threads of Dick's life become woven into the books themselves. And it ends, as every authorial biography should, with a chronological assessment of all of Dick's writings, each with a ranking out of 10. (Among other things, the ranking of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Dick's best book, is scandalously low at 7.) The overall impression is of a prolific madman--Dick could write a whole book in a couple weeks, apparently, working through the day and night--but also a genius who produced 10 to 15 books of outstanding innovation, and about twice as many that are merely good.