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Confessions Of A Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick
01/07/2006 . Source: Sue Davies 
pub: Gollancz. 246 page enlarged paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-575-07464-7. Buy Confessions Of A Crap Artist in the USA - or Buy Confessions Of A Crap Artist in the UK  check out websites: www.orionbooks.co.uk
The only one of Dick's mainstream novels to be published in his lifetime, this is the story of Jack Isidore and his sister, Fay. The narrative follows Jack, a social misfit. His sister is sufficiently convinced that he is unable to fend for himself and she and her husband, the well-to-do Charley Hume, take him in.
Jack enjoys the life-style and helps round the house, baby-sits the kids and makes himself at home. But all is not right at the Hume house. There is a simmering tension between Fay and Charley. When Charley ends up in hospital after a heart attack, Fay takes up with a recently married man with a view to replace Charley. Jack's own life is guided more and more by his disconcerting idea that the world is about to end. A man of ideas, he lacks practicality. We might call him mentally ill. Jack directly relates things that happen to him to the order of the universe. He has some very odd moments and is apt to take opinions as the literal truth. Jack's is a very strange world indeed and Science Fiction could not make it any stranger.
It is easy to see themes that Dick continued to address in his other novels both SF and straight. The idea of how reality is perceived by an individual and the general alienation of people from each other. You don't need aliens flying in to make this any weirder.
The final section of the novel is acutely disturbing as Jack infests the realities of both his sister and her husband or is it the reverse? All three of them do terrible things and the sense of violence and despair is very potent.
Dialogue, characters and scenarios are extremely well-drawn, the visuals and vocals are powerful and this is certainly on a par with Camus' 'The Stranger' as a novel that explores the human psyche and does not find the contents very edifying.
Changing from the perspective of Jack, Fay and an omniscient but internal narrator for Fay's husband Charley leaves us with a sense of being unable to take sides. Seen from all angles, everything that happens will happen, had to happen. It doesn't make it right and the result is a disturbing vision of a post-WWII U.S. that left me feeling unsettled. Time to check your glasses. What's your reality and is it mine?
Sue Davies
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