The Penultimate Truth

If this is how one of the man's vassals speaks of him, in public, in his lifetime, Lasch's case--and Dick's--seems fairly unassailable. Of course, those intellectuals who promoted Ke

I met Jack Ke

In every respect but one _An American Dream_ is a more accomplished novel than _The Penultimate Truth_, but that one respect was crucial to its (failed) ambition. _An American Dream_ does not succeed as an evocation of the zeitgeist of the dawn of the assassination era--for the sufficient novelistic reason that Mailer has murders to discuss much closer to his own heart. However, both novels share the same courtier's fascination with the intrigues presumed to be the reality behind the myth of Camelot/Talbot Yancy, and both find something glamorous in the ruthless exercise of power by well-placed criminals.

It must be admitted, however, that the hugger-mugger surrounding the Machiavellian schemes of the smarmily villainous Brose and the Byronic David Lantano is the central weakness of _The Penultimate Truth_. Brose's plot for entrapping Runcible is so u

I'd like to intrude a long parenthesis here concerning the faults of the book, which are, pretty obviously, the result of Dick's chosen ma

I wonder why you say I write so much; that is, produce so much. My anxiety is that I produce too little--that if I bore down I could produce a lot more. Most of the work, for me, lies in the pre-typing stage, in the note-taking. I generally spend five to six months doing no typing, but simply outlining. At best I can now bring forth no more than two novels a year... . Under certain conditions, however, I can write very fast, even without notes. The Lippincott book was written in two weeks, proof read and then retyped in two more... . My work tends to force a pace on me; I'll do forty to sixty pages a day for days on end, until I'm exhausted, and then not uncover the machine for several months... I wait until I am sure of what I want to put down, and then away I go.

After wi

The downhill-racing style of novel-writing is not uncommon in science fiction or other genres, and when it is brought off well, there is a fizziness and exhilaration to such books that is not to be found in more carefully wrought novels, however favorably they might otherwise be compared. Often, however, speed-written novels run out of steam sporadically. Forty to sixty pages a day means a week's continuous work for a novel the length of _The Penultimate Truth_, and it is difficult to scintillate virtually non-stop for an entire week. Often it is all that bleary eyes and weary fingers can do to type coherent sentences. Take as a for-instance Chapter 14, four labored pages of dialogue in which two minor characters rehash a situation the reader is already well aware of, arrive at no conclusions, and can't refrain from dropping hints right and left as to how low Phil Dick is feeling at that late hour, after his seventeenth cup of coffee: "A Yance-man, female, named Arlene Davidson, who has a demesne in New Jersey; the Agency's top draftsman. Died of a massive coronary during the past weekend. Late Saturday night... . She may have been given a deadline for something major; overworked. But that's conjecture..." And then, a page later: "Still shuffling his documents, trying to come up with something of use, trying and unhappily failing, the abstract-carrier Footeman said, "I wish you good luck. Maybe next time... ." And he wondered if, for Runcible, there would be a further report. This inadequate-- admittedly so--one today might well be the last..."

The wonder is how often Dick was able to produce work of real interest and wit in these marathons of typewriting. For readers who read at a pace proportioned to his speed of writing (as most sf fans learn to do, or else cease being fans), the dull patches disappear into a haze of white powder as they careen down the slopes of the narrative. It is the _ideas_ they are after, and Dick always provides more than a sufficiency of these.

Indeed, for slower readers like myself, who are so old-fashioned in their tastes as to demand some kind of consistency and continuity in the plot of a book, this profusion of ideas often is a bigger stumbling block to the enjoyment of Dick's lesser novels than the chapters written on automatic pilot. Take the way Dick picks up, and throws away, and again picks up, the idea of time travel in _The Penultimate Truth_. First he posits a "time scoop" that can propel objects back into the past, a device Brose intends to use to plant false archaeological "proofs" of an extraterrestrial invasion of fifteenth-century North America. Brose's plot comes to nothing, though several chapters are devoted to its preparation. Then, fudging the explanation like mad, Dick asks us to believe (1) that one of the yance-men, David Lantano, is actually a Cherokee Indian who has managed to ride the (now two-way) scoop back into the twenty-first century; (2) that in a ma

None of which has much to do with what the book set off to be about, nor does it impinge very much on the resolution of the plot. Yet, it is clear from scattered footprints, broken twigs, and other spoor of the downhill-racing novelist what Dick would have _liked_ this stew of impossibilities to accomplish. Lantano first appears as the yance-man most likely to succeed--and to succeed the hero, Joseph Adams, as The Agency's most accomplished speechwriter. Adams envies the way Lantano, in one of the speeches he has written for the Yancy simulacrum, is able to "openly discuss the fact that those tankers down there are _systematically deprived of what they're entitled to_." Here is how Dick, using the mask of Lantano (who is using the mask of Yancy), describes the characteristic deprivation of the tankers' (i.e., working class) lives:

Your lives are incomplete, in the sense that Rousseau had meant when he talked of man having been born in one condition, born brought into the light free, and everywhere was now in chains. Only here, in this day and age... they had been born onto the surface of a world and now that surface with its air and sunlight and hills, its oceans, it streams, its colors and textures, its very smells, had been swiped from them and they were left with tin-can submarine--figuratively----dwelling boxes in which they were squeezed, under a false light, to breathe repurified stale air, to listen to wired obligatory music and sit daylong at workbenches making leadies for a purpose which--but even Lantano could not go on here.