Philip K. Dick: Freaks, Meet Geeks.

Philip K. Dick leaves me feeling untethered—his intention, I think—but I can generally counteract this disorientation in the usual way: by putting things in boxes. I am a human being. My computer is a machine. The Ramones are punk. Blondie is New Wave. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist. E. M. Forster was gayer than a picnic basket. And so on.

Unfortunately, Dick is unlike most freaks: he actually resists boxing in. There's a lot that argues for putting Dick next to Hunter S. Thompson on the shelf of uncategorizables: they were roughly contemporaneous; both wrote science fiction (ibogaine?); both entertained, then discarded, the delusion that hippiedom and mind-expansion would save us all. Thompson thought politics was better than sex; Dick felt the same way about theology. Most interestingly, both had late-in-life marriages to relationships with much younger fans; psychologize that as you will.

While I'm comparing him to other writers, I'll set him alongside William Hazlitt, with whom he shared a physiological sensitivity to language. Take this story from David Bromwich's Hazlitt: Mind of a Critic:

On his way to the Neate-Hickman fight, Hazlitt—as he reminds us obliquely—had been brooding on Sarah Walker's rejection of him; until the "tall English yeoman" he found at an inn, "making a prodigious noise about rents and taxes, and the price of corn now and formerly," dismissed someone who wanted to call off a bet, saying, "Confound it, man, don't be insipid!"—at which, from the blackness of self-sorrows Hazlitt was roused. "Thinks I, that is a good phrase."

Compare it to Dick's habit of getting sentences stuck in his head:

"Doctor, the FBI is putting something in my food to make me paranoid!"

. . . Another time, someone told him about the death of a mutual friend. The person who came with the bad news didn't say, "Gloria killed herself," but instead, "Gloria killed herself today." As though it had been bound to happen, the only question being when.

. . . One of the "squares" who lived next door asked if someone could come over and kill a giant insect that had gotten into her kitchen. When the insect was dead, she said, "If I had known that it was harmless, I would have killed it myself!" Members of Dick's circle repeated this to themselves for weeks.

. . . A schizoid speed freak would never say, "I need to take amphetamines in order to hold a conversation with someone," but rather would say, as Dick remembered once thinking to himself, "I am receiving signals from nearby organisms, but I cannot produce my own signals unless my batteries are recharged."

Thinks I, those are good phrases. It's a small quirk, but one I've found that many writers share. (Aaron Sorkin talks about getting lines stuck in his head, too, in his case ones from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which he saw at an impressionable age.)

In any case, I enjoyed Carrère's biography and will recommend it, in exchange for recommendations of which Dick to read now. I don't know the man's canon as well as I (now) know his life, so, if you've got a favorite, throw it out in comments.