Philip K. Dick is best known as the author of science fiction classics such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which became the movie “Blade Runner.”)  But he also wrote a number of mainstream novels that went unpublished until his science fiction made him famous.  One of those novels is Puttering about in a Small Land; it’s not a great novel, but it is diverting—about Roger Lindahl, who feels constrained by his cold wife and colder mother-in-law, has an affair with a woman who represents all the best in women (freedom, connection to life), is caught, constrained even more, and ends the story by lighting out for Chicago.

Puttering was written in 1957 (but not published until 1985) and set in Los Angeles, mostly, with glances at Washington, DC.  But, Dick’s biographer, Lawrence Sutin, suggests that the novel was really about Berkeley in the 1950s, and this seems true.  And so the book might be useful for getting sense of the area—not only because Dick was a local (he was), but because he frequented the Bohemian fringes.  I don’t know that he was a Fortean, per se, but he certainly ran with some of the same crowd.

One theme that runs throughout the book is the increasing importance of technology and consumerism to everyday life.  In the aftermath of the War, Americans had to re-adjust and re-build a society that was oriented not around manufacturing so much as selling services.  Roger epitomizes this by opening a radio—later, radio and television—shop, which evolves from a place the offers repairs (a small land where he can putter bout) into a an appliance store that runs on sales—a store that no longer had a place for Roger.

Interestingly, hanging over much of the novel is not the joyous effusion that is usually associated with the end of War, but a sense of displacement and depression.  That probably reflects Dick’s own vision—a record store played an important role in his life and shows up in much of his fiction, for instance—and is certainly necessary to the story—this is not a comedy—but also gives a glimpse into the sense of dislocation that was there at the time, but is often not remembered.  For example, Dick makes a point of mentioning the EC comics, then popular among children, and seems to suggest that consumerism was corrupting youth.  He does cut against this somewhat, though, suggesting that the horror and stories—though mass produced—might create a world where magic remained, and the mundanities of a consuming life was kept at bay.

Some vignettes:

82-3: “It seemed to her that the long hours of work at the aircraft plant [read: docks] made both of them excessively tired.  They became quarrelsome, like the people in the bars.  Both of them became thin—they had arrived thin enough as it was—and somber.  Most of their free time was spent lined up at the supermarket, buying groceries, or at the launderette waiting for their clothes.  In the evenings they listened to the radio or walked down to the corner for a beer. ….

The war came to an end by stages; the aircraft plants began to discharge groups of employees and cut down the number of shifts, the overtime, the seven-day week. ….

Near their wartime housing village a colony of stores had come into existence, clustered around the supermarket.  First, after the launderette, appeared a shoe repair shop, then a beauty parlor, a bakery, two bar-and-grills, a real estate office.”

84-5: “They had finished the war in a sprint, an ordeal lasting night and day, without humor and certainly without idealism.  Now it had come to an end; they lay on the couch or washed a few things, or sat around discussing what to do with their money, which opportunity to take advantage of.  They had earned their money.  The servicemen had begin to return; they had little or no money and many of them wanted to go to school on the G.I. Bill or they wanted to get their old jobs back—saved for them by law—or they spent that time with their wives and children, glad to be able to do that and nothing else.  For the warplant workers something more was required, something tangible.  They had got used to having something in their hands, some real object. …..

How high property prices had gone in the last year.  A house that had sold for five thousand dollars now sold for ten.  New tracts, subdivisions they were called, had started to advertise; each had a picturesque name.”

100-1: Roger “had a vision of crooks, swindles of every kind; he saw up into the office buildings and the crooked activity going on, the wheels, the machinery.  Loan offices, banks, doctors and dentists, quack healers preying on old women, Pachucs smashing store windows, defective equipment, food with filth and impurities in it, shoes made of cardboard, hats that melted in the rain, clothes that shrank and ripped, cars with broken motor blocks, toilet seats running with disease[,] germs, dogs carrying mange and rabies throughout the city, restaurants serving rotted food, real estate under water, phony stock in nonexistent mining companies, magazines with obscene pictures, animals slaughtered in cold blood, milk contaminated with dead flies, bugs and vermin and excretion, rubbish and garbage, a rain of filth on the streets, on the buildings and houses and stores.  The electric machines of the chiropractors crackled, the old ladies screamed, the patent medicine bottles boiled and exploded . . . he saw the war itself as a stupendous snow-job, men killed for fat bankers to float loans, ships built that went right to the bottom, bonds that could not be redeemed, Communism taking over, Red Cross blood that had syphilis germs in it.  Negro and white troops living together, nurses that were whores, generals who screwed their orderlies, profits and blackmarket butter, training camps in which recruits died by the thousands of bubonic plague, illness and suffering and money mixed together, sugar and rubber, meat and blood, ration stamps, V-D posters, short-arm inspections, M-1 rifles, USO entertainers with corks up their asses, motherfuckers and fairies and niggers raping white girls . . . he saw the sky flash and drip; private parts shot across the heavens, words croaked in his ears telling him about his mother’s monthlies; he saw the whole world writhe with hair, a monstrous hairy ball that burst and drenched him with blood . . .”