The High Castle comes down to Earth

Blade Runner director Ridley Scott is going to turn another Philip K. Dick book, The Man in the High Castle, into a BBC miniseries. High Castle is probably my favorite of Dick's books. Here's a piece I wrote on the inclusion of the author in the Library of America:

Canon Fodder
BY KELLY JANE TORRANCE

National Review, May 28, 2007

Four Novels of the 1960s, by Philip K. Dick
(Library of America, 900 pp., $35)

In 1981, less than a year before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote that managing to publish only one of the many non-genre books he had written was the “long-term tragedy” of his creative life. The science-fiction writer published over 30 novels and more than three times as many short stories in his lifetime, but the mainstream success he craved always eluded him. Like many American originals, Dick was taken seriously by the French — some even suggested him as a Nobel Prize candidate — before his own countrymen understood his talent. Even after his death, his reputation didn’t increase at the same rate as his name recognition: Hollywood turned Philip K. Dick into an identifiable brand, but one that was best known for providing a brainy basis for big-budget action flicks.

If only Dick, born in 1928, had lived to 78 instead of just 53. A quarter-century after his death, he is finally considered not just a serious American writer but one of the century’s greatest. At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from Dick’s inclusion in the Library of America: the first science-fiction writer to be so canonized in what is the closest thing to secular sainthood in American letters. Best known for collecting the works of such titans as James and Faulkner, the Library of America presents “America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions.” And Dick has been included not for his realist books, which finally started appearing in print posthumously, but for some of his most outlandish sci-fi creations.

Some may complain that a genre writer has beaten Hemingway and Upton Sinclair into the Library of America. But these four novels — The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik — are not simply outstanding examples of their form. With their haunting evocations of alienation, thoughtful meditations on reality and religion, and vivid prose style, they are among the best American novels written in the last century.

The sci-fi genre, in fact, was just a colorful trapping Dick used to frame his tales of ordinary people caught up in situations they can barely understand, let alone control. As one character in The Man in the High Castle says of that book’s novel within a novel, “He told us about our world. . . . He wants us to see it for what it is.”

High Castle is barely even science fiction. It’s alternate history, an imagining of what the world would have been like if the Axis had won World War II. Japan has control of the West Coast of the U.S. and Germany has control of the East Coast, while the Rocky Mountain States serve as a semi-autonomous buffer between the two. The novel follows a loosely connected cast of characters from all three regions. Robert Childan is the owner of American Artistic Handcrafts, a San Francisco store selling artifacts of American history — Civil War arms, Mickey Mouse watches — to Japanese clients who worship the remnants of the culture they’ve destroyed. Among them is Nobusuke Tagomi, a high-ranking bureaucrat who undergoes an acute mental crisis on being faced with the deeds of his German colleagues — they’ve emptied Africa of the Africans and New York of the Jews. Frank Frink, meanwhile, is a jewelry designer trying to sell his wares to Childan, who has no interest in anything involving current America. Frink is a Jew who’s changed his name — the Japanese may themselves not kill the Jews, but they sometimes send them back to the Germans.

High Castle has some of Dick’s most sharply drawn characters. Like most genre novels, his are usually strongest on plot. But in High Castle, it is the journey and not the destination that matters. Each character grapples with the difficulty of living in a world of evil — an Axis-ruled America being just an extreme version of our own flawed world.

This world, some characters realize, doesn’t have to be so wicked. A banned book making the surreptitious rounds is an alternate history imagining a world in which the Allies won World War II. (Dick could be as meta as the most literary of experimental novelists.) This novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, doesn’t exactly mirror the real world — after winning the war, America also solved its race problem. But in showing a world in which Americans didn’t adopt Nazi anti-Semitism, Grasshopper suggests to the despondent that it might still be possible for men to do good.

Dick’s books are known for their dystopias. His futures are filled with technological innovations that have alienated the human beings who created them. But what many commentators miss is the sense of hope that, without fail, shines through.

Nowhere is hope more needed than in the outrageously imagined world of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Global warming has made Earth almost unlivable; there still exist bores who accost you on the subway with, “It’s going to be another hot one.” The United Nations drafts unlucky citizens to colonize nearby planets, where conditions are even worse: Facing such barren landscapes, the colonists don’t even want to leave their hovels, and keep from killing themselves by taking a hallucinogen that simulates the Earth world they know and love. But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch comes back from the outer reaches of the solar system with a competing drug, this tender equilibrium is disrupted. The new product’s slogan is: “God promises eternal life. We can deliver it.” But that eternal life — or the hallucination of it — comes with a price: the manifestation of the godlike Eldritch in everybody who takes it.

Palmer Eldritch tackles what it means to be human: Colonists seem happy enough to give up their humanity if it means an escape from a world too cruel to bear. Again Dick explores good and evil in a desolate world, finding, as in High Castle, that man can counter original sin and reach the divine that’s in all of us through empathy, “grasping another, [but] not from outside.”

Empathy plays a crucial role in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book that inspired the film Blade Runner. The marital spat that begins the novel might find a place in any realist novel, except for the fact that the couple is arguing about the use of a “mood organ” that programs feelings in its users. “I can’t stand TV before breakfast,” Iran says. “Dial 888,” Rick tells her: “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.” “I don’t feel like dialing anything at all now,” she responds. “Then dial 3,” he says.

Americans need these generated emotions to keep from falling into despair in the aftermath of “World War Terminus.” The country is covered in dust; everyone smart has emigrated to planetary colonies. But Rick cannot: He’s a bounty hunter whose job is to round up the androids who have killed their masters and made their way to Earth and freedom. He tells the difference between android and human through an empathy test, which androids fail. Over the course of a single day, Rick begins to question his choice of profession. He watches an immensely talented opera singer, who brought the world much joy, killed, while another android gives herself away by repeatedly referring to an owl as “it.” (Most of our own population would fail such a test.)

In Ubik, the question isn’t who’s android and who’s human, it’s who’s alive, who’s dead, and who’s in between. In the future world of Ubik, the dead are quickly put on ice to live out their “halflives,” in which the mind keeps going for a while. The book’s characters wonder whether they’re fully alive or just half alive. It’s an exhausting world, but Dick has the same lesson here as in the other novels: No matter what God or demons play with us, we still have the ability — and, more important, the responsibility — to make choices.

One of the characters likes to say, “So it goes” — which is also a repeated line in another book published in 1969, the late Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Like Dick, Vonnegut used the conventions of genre to focus his readers’ attention on ideas crucial to our understanding of what it is to be human. Unlike Dick, Vonnegut never had to fight for literary respectability. Yet Dick is just as funny as Vonnegut and as gifted a prose stylist as any. Even if he had never delved into mankind’s search for meaning in an increasingly alienating world, he would still belong in the Library of America for creating striking, unexpected metaphors and beautiful sentences about the human heart. His books are filled with learning; this college dropout effortlessly references Shakespeare, the Bible, and the I Ching. (Novelist Jonathan Lethem has written endnotes that could have been a bit more extensive.)

Fortunately, Dick used his gifts to speak eloquently about the dominant themes of the 20th century. His books offer hope, reminding us that, mistake-prone though we are, free will means we have at least the means of making the right decisions. As a character in Palmer Eldritch asks, “Isn’t a miserable reality better than the most interesting illusion?”

Kelly Jane Torrance is an arts and entertainment writer at the Washington Times and fiction editor of Doublethink.

Happy anniversary

"You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance."

--Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, married June 3, 1937, to Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor

Really, Tony Blair? Really?

"[Isaiah] Berlin's most influential work remains 'Two Concepts of Liberty', based on an address he gave at Oxford in 1958, when he was made Professor of Social and Political Theory. In the lecture Berlin distinguishes between old-style, traditional negative liberty, in which people are left to themselves to work out their own destinies, and the newer positive liberty, in which they are offered participation in a Grand Collective Project offering identity and self-realisation. To the casual reader, Berlin can seem merely to be engaged in an urbane, high-speed rap through ancient and modern ideas of liberty trying out various notions in order to see how they suit the age.

This is indeed how the former prime minister, Tony Blair, appears to have interpreted the text, when in 1997 he wrote to Berlin (shortly before the latter's death) suggesting that positive liberty, 'despite its depredations in the Soviet model', had much to commend it. Blair was fooled, as others have been, by the elegant Berlin prose. Where liberty was at stake, Berlin was never even-handed. He was a hard-line liberal seeking to save the tradition from those who would destroy it. It's a shame that Berlin was too ill to answer the Prime Minister's letter."

--Nick Fraser in The Independent

Chuck Palahniuk on the origins of his books

AP: Your books seem to be a commentary on what life has become in 21st century America. Is that the case?

Palahniuk: More often than not I see something that I'm doing and, in a way, I want to process and talk myself out of it. And that's what the story has to serve first because there was no guarantee that my work was ever going to sell to a publisher. So I wanted to make sure my work served me, that it was fun to do and that it dealt with a kind of personal issue. I found myself with that Ikea catalog at my work station, and I thought to myself, 'If I could just buy this sofa, if I could just buy this, then I'm going to feel grown up and I'm going to have a good life.' And I had to find some way to make fun of that and talk myself out of doing it. So that became that portion of "Fight Club."

Happy birthday

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."

--Bertrand Russell, born May 18, 1872

A novel future

I spoke with Netherland author Joseph O'Neill for the piece I linked to below on President Obama's choice of reading. The novelist was a delightful interview, and I wish I'd had room for more of his on-point remarks. I do want to post here one interesting thing he told me that wasn't really on the topic of my piece. He mentioned that he spent seven years writing Netherland, a period he calls "a long campaign," and went on to make a slightly frightening prediction (to writers, anyway) about the future of the novel:

"The writing of novels is going to become an increasingly lengthy business. There's so much rivalrous media out there. It used to be the case that a novel would bring news of the world quite easily. Even in the '70s and '80s, the Internet didn't exist and TV wasn't quite the force that it is. If you wrote a novel about XYZ, chances are people didn't know about XYZ. Now if you write about XYZ, chances are people have read a blog about it. There's no end to this veneer of familiarization that the Internet provides of the world. It's intrusive. Because the novel has become a more marginal cultural product. It almost has to be better than before to make a splash. It's scary and it's unfair. Why can't we just produce media products like everybody else?"

In print

I had five articles in Friday's Washington Times. The big piece was a look at President Obama as literary critic, including interviews with authors and experts:

President Obama recently told the New York Times Magazine that he had become "sick enough of briefing books to begin reading a novel in the evenings — 'Netherland,' by Joseph O'Neill."

The news that the president was tackling a piece of literary fiction immediately sparked an upswing in demand for the novel, whose author was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award in Washington on Saturday. Sales increased 40 percent, and Vintage Books moved up the paperback release a month, from June 2 to May 7, going back to press for a second printing even before publication.

Might the popular president find himself a literary tastemaker, too? And could the image of a well-read writer-president help further his goal of rehabilitating America's image in Europe and beyond?

Mr. O'Neill was flattered to discover the president was reading his book...

I also reviewed three movies. The first is Management, a small comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn:

Jennifer Aniston might be one of the world's hottest actresses — in every sense — but the woman who made her name on television's "Friends" has shown a fondness throughout her career for interesting roles in smaller films.

But, to be honest, her character in the indie romantic comedy "Management" isn't that interesting. Sue is your standard-issue hot corporate climber who dreams of starting her own charitable project to make a difference. Miss Aniston plays her with aplomb, of course, but the actress's job here is simply to be a slightly discontented pretty face.

It's Steve Zahn who turns what could have been a pretty predictable romcom into something surprisingly touching...

I also took a look at the Oscar-nominated documentary The Garden:

When the four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted in 1992, riots broke out in the city. The mad violence was concentrated in South Central.

Two years later, the city offered a salve to the inner-city, immigrant neighborhood. Fourteen acres of blighted city property in the middle of downtown were set aside for use as a community garden.

For a decade, low-income minorities grew food for their families in what was the country's largest such project. In 2004, though, those 350 families were given an eviction notice. In a closed-door session, the city had reached a settlement with developer Ralph Horowitz allowing him to buy back the property. The city had paid him $5 million in 1986, grabbing it under eminent domain for use as a trash incinerator, never built because of community outrage. The farmers transformed the wasteland into something useful, and their decade of hard work was about to be bulldozed.

Their fierce fight against the city and the developer is well documented in Scott Hamilton Kennedy's fascinating film "The Garden"...

And I reviewed the Mexican film Rudo y Cursi:

Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna burned up the screen in the smoldering 2002 film "Y tu mama tambien." The pair have reunited for the first time since then for "Rudo y Cursi," the directorial debut of "Mama" co-writer Carlos Cuaron.

Don't expect this Mexican movie to be a cynical rehash of the earlier one, though. "Rudo y Cursi" is too many things to be that. It's a spry soccer film, an intense look at brotherhood, an illustration of the sometimes heartbreaking disparity between passion and talent and a wicked satire of contemporary Mexican society. All of these big things are seamlessly wrapped into a compact film that's by turns terribly funny and terribly touching...

Finally, I interviewed Rudo y Cursi director Carlos Cuaron:

In a story for this column two years ago headlined "The stories of three amigos," I talked to three directors about their strangely collaborative friendship in the competitive world of filmmaking.

Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro all had critically acclaimed films come out within months of one another — "Children of Men," "Babel" and "Pan's Labyrinth." The directors, all in their 40s and hailing from Mexico, are good friends who provide very constructive feedback for one another, whether it's giving advice on scripts or cutting 10 minutes out of one another's films. The frankly gushing way they spoke about one another's work was unlike anything I had ever seen in the business.

While "The Three Amigos" seemed a fitting title for the Spanish-speaking trio, it has turned out to be wrong — there's now a fourth amigo, one who always shared that collegial friendship but has just started making feature films of his own...

I also wanted to post the reviews I wrote last week of two very good independent films that might get lost in the blockbuster shuffle. The Limits of Control stars French-Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankole as the mysterious Lone Man:

We all want explanations — for our own actions, for those of others, for the meaning of life itself. We certainly want them in our movies. But what if they're not so easy to find?

To an existentialist, Jim Jarmusch's "The Limits of Control" might seem an especially realistic film. In following the very conscious proceedings of one man on a mission, the movie illustrates how humans define themselves through their actions, and create their own meaning, partly by asking the viewer to do the same.

Characters are listed in the credits as abstractions, not people with names, emphasizing how little we know of other people, even as we spend a couple hours watching them...

Goodbye Solo is also a wonderfully unconventional movie:

"Goodbye Solo" would have turned out a very different film had it been made in Hollywood.

The film would have focused on the meeting of two abstractions instead of the reluctant friendship of two individuals. The Senegalese cab driver and the Hank Williams-loving old white man would have shouted racial epithets at each other and debated the meaning of the American dream before tearfully embracing each other at the end.

There are few cliches in this spare and affecting film, though. The young independent filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has crafted a careful and subtle movie about both the promise and despair of life that's told mainly in the faces of its two very different leads...

Thought for the day

"My husband shares certain essential qualities with my father, which, in its fatefulness, is quite depressing - as if I had no hand in the choosing. Both are artists - that is, utterly preoccupied with their own stuff. This can be trying at times, but it's also useful, if it echoes your own needs and appetites - for solitude, for work. Parity's the thing. Every artist is most alive when alone - and they don't really take holidays, no knocking off at six. I get that. But I don't recommend it for my daughters. Not that recommendation comes into it. Each of us - if we really want to badly enough - finds the person with whom we can board the ark."

--Isabel Fonseca

Quote of the day

"Any writer who wants to do his best against a deadline should stick to Coca-Cola. If he doesn't have a deadline, he can risk Seven-Up."

--John Kenneth Galbraith

Happy birthday

"One day work is hard, and another day it is easy; but if I had waited for inspiration I am afraid I should have done nothing. The miner does not sit at the top of the shaft waiting for the coal to come bubbling up to the surface. One must go deep down, and work out every vein carefully."

--Sir Arthur Sullivan, born May 13, 1842

Mightier than the sword

(Photo credit: Claire Duggan, PEN/Faulkner Foundation)

My report from the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction on Saturday night was in yesterday's Washington Times:

It must have been a sweet night for author Joseph O'Neill. Just days after he discovered that President Obama was reading his novel "Netherland," he traveled from New York to Washington to accept the 29th PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction — his first, but unlikely to be last, literary prize.

"I've never won a prize before," he says, sneaking out for a little fresh air just before Saturday night's ceremony, before correcting himself: "I've won a sports cup..."

It was great to meet the beautifully spoken Joseph O'Neill just a few days after interviewing him by telephone. I spoke to him for a piece I've written about presidential reading habits which was to have been published last week; it will now appear this Friday and I'll post a link when it's up.

I wish I'd had more room to write about the PEN/Faulkner ceremony. It is, after all, DC's biggest literary event of the year. The star power was a little muted this year, unfortunately -- it was held the same night at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, one of DC's biggest events of the year, bar none. I was happier amidst the literati than the politicos and celebrities, though. There's always something inspiring about the PEN/Faulkner ceremony. Perhaps it's sitting in a room with a lot of people who believe literature matters -- matters enough, in fact, for most of them to be paying $100+ to celebrate it. Master of ceremonies (should that have been mistress?) Marie Arana offered, for a few moments in between the gaiety, some serious food for thought. She recited a long list of places in which the act of reading has been a difficult one: Cuba, the People's Republic of China, "the artist's hell that was the Soviet Union." She mentioned the book Reading Lolita in Tehran and stopped us cold by pointing out these women gathered in their hijabs in secret to read "fiction any schoolgirl can read" here.

Even with remarks like that, it's still the readings by the winner and finalists that are the real treat. It's always a varied group, which means you get a taste of different kinds of writing, some of which you might never have thought to read on your own. Some authors are better readers than others, and one this year particularly charmed, as I mention in my write-up.

What's also interesting is hearing what the judges have to say about those writers. Writers talking about other writers -- it might seem boring to some, but I was really struck by many of their well-composed comments. Antonya Nelson, for example, said Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles was a coming-of-age story that shows we never really come of age. Randall Kenan said Susan Choi's A Person of Interest took place in "the world that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News love to chew and spew at their viewers." Lee K. Abbott quoted Tom Wolfe's famous essay urging American authors to return to realism and become the new Zolas and Balzacs. The judge nominated Lush Life author Richard Price to lead that generation of "scribblers," writers whose goal is "to know lived life in all its front and back page particulars." (Price regaled us with a story about how, when he was a judge in 1981, he fumbled while reading aloud the citation a fellow judge had written for, I believe, winner Walter Abish's How German Is It?: "There was a word there I had never seen in print before.")

Nelson noted that while winner Netherland had often been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the novel put her in mind of E.M. Forster: "Like A Passage to India, it's quietly political." That reminds me of an interesting fact. The PEN/Faulkner Award is only open to American citizens. O'Neill told me that he became a citizen of this country just in time to vote for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary. Sounds like it was a smart literary move, too, made just in time.

Afterward, as the celebratory drinks flowed, I had the disconcerting experience of sitting at a table and having a couple introduce themselves with the same names as a former Canadian prime minister and his wife. This couple might have been a more interesting pair -- he retired after running a traffic camera business, and she works at a Barnes and Noble. I commented that being responsible for those dreaded speeding and red light cameras must be akin to being an IRS agent, but he didn't seem to think so. He said something about red light cameras saving lives. I wasn't paying much attention to that -- the good-natured guy really intrigued me by saying there are actually ways to beat those cameras. But he refused to give me a single hint.

Everything you always wanted to know

Have any burning questions about the arts and entertainment world? Ask me during my live chat over at the Washington Times on Friday at noon Eastern. There's plenty to talk about -- the summer movie season (hello, Woody Allen!), Amazon's new big-screen Kindle, the summer television season (hello, Burn Notice!), the Star Trek reboot, what to see in New York (Neil LaBute's Broadway debut) and Washington (Tom Stoppard's latest from Broadway).