Voices From the Street

“[Dick] reworks the territory of soured domesticity (à la Richard Yates and John Updike) in a working-class milieu anticipating Raymond Carver. Decades later, his oeuvre (like Philip Roth's) is lovingly enshrined in our national pantheon.”—Los Angeles Times

"It may be hard for some to accept that the same writer who recently snuck into the American canon as a visionary and paranoid pop surrealist also penned a half dozen or more proletarian-realist novels set in the California of the '50's and early '60's, the best of which occupy a region demarcated by Richard Yates on one side and Charles Willeford on another. But accept it."—Jonathan Lethem

“Far from the cyberpunk razzmatazz that earned Dick fame, this heretofore unpublished 1953 novel is an apprentice work of social realism. Stuart Hadley mopes. Despite his pretty wife and pretty baby (hey, he's pretty pretty himself), Hadley throbs from his wingtips to his Wildrooted hair with '50s existential angst, the same mind-freak that afflicted characters in Ray Bradbury stories and Rod Serling TV shows. He's an Ike-era prole, a Philco salesman at Modern TV who gets beat up in a bar fight by goons calling him 'a Red.' He isn't really, despite a flirtation with progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace, but Hadley's hip enough to see the American Dream as a con. Sure, he fantasizes about success, a swinging pad with 'modern prints on the walls, cushions on the floor, Chinese mats, Bartók playing in the background on a custom-built phonograph,' but he's stuck in a drab marriage to Ellen, 'a ripe moist melon within panes of glass.' Itchy for deliverance, Hadley strays with Sartre-spouting bohemian Marsha, editor of Succubus, a sort of Jungian-fascist magazine cluttered with anti-Semitic editorials and artsy photographs. Very strange. But no stranger than Marsha's squeeze, Theodore Beckheim, a black Billy-Graham-meets-Ayn-Rand evangelist who's convincing San Francisco that the End Times are nigh. Enthralled with Beckheim, Hadley ditches his left-wing pals from high school, the Golds (too Jewish!), and his Donna Reed-ish sister and her go-getter hubby (too bourgeois!). A Dark Night of the Soul ensues before Hadley wakes up (a changed man!) and returns to his wife's arms.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Previously unpublished, this 1953 mainstream novel by the late sf author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner) is remarkable for its very mundanity. No androids or electric sheep here, just a depressed television salesman in Oakland, CA. At 25, Stuart Hadley yearns for a life befitting his intellectual pretensions—he had dreamed of being an artist—but must instead work at a humdrum job to support his wife and infant son. As he falls deeper into depression, he nearly destroys himself and everything in his life, but in the end he finds that it's the simple things that matter most.”—Jenne Bergstrom, San Diego City Library, Library Journal

“This previously unpublished novel is remarkable for a number of reasons, probably the least of which is novelistic merit. Stuart Hadley is a young man born to privilege; he is handsome and educated; his pregnant wife is devoted to him; he has worked his way up from salesman to manager of a television and radio shop, but he wants more. The more he wants is not clear, even to him, and his existential crisis involves him with a shady, quasi-religious sect, the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, led by a charismatic evangelist. Stuart's flirtation with the movement soon leads him away from his placid middle-class life into a sinister association with a mysterious femme fatale, Marsha Frazier. His decline is accelerated by psychotic depression that spirals into life-threatening self-destruction. Like much of Dick's fiction, the plot skims ambiguously along an abstract surface, only occasionally revealing concrete motivation or linear connection. But that's what endears Dick's novels to millions of readers nearly 25 years after his death, and that's what makes him a significant postwar American novelist . . . Echoes of Dick's contemporaries such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Yates, Rod Serling, Raymond Chandler and early Kurt Vonnegut Jr. resonate, and a bonus exists in Dick's impeccable eye for detail. Apart from creating an ambience that complements the novel, he provides a veritable literary museum of the early 1950s, replete with the period's social and political attitudes and dozens of references to everyday items, commonplace practices that underscore and illuminate this significant transitional period in American culture. Literary critics will have a field day; Dick fans will be in rapture.”—Publishers Weekly