The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
I’ll probably have to buy this. Definitely an in-small-doses only affair. I marvel at Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem’s ability to edit the mountain of Philip K. Dick’s “2-3-74” documents down to under a thousand pages (not to mention creating an index of them!) without going mad—or being picked themselves for visitation from another demension, as Dick suspected he might have been.
This is not a work of imagination. It’s a work of psychological, psychoactive, sigh-inducing overwhelmth. It’s dense and dangerous yet alarmingly enjoyable. It’s full of puns and deprecation:
“Claudia, on this day we must count our cursings.”
“’The three lights coming on indicate the return of Christ.’ And the lights are in my TV set. A circuit few people know about. Nor are they interested.”
“Here my study ends. Except to add: My god, each step is a further fall.
This book would have blown my mind, as did Dick’s fiction, when I was in my teens and 20s. Now, it makes me want to revisit his novels, then sparingly take careful plunges into this most inward and mathematical of memoirs.