Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Time Out of Joint
Book Review: Paranoid in the Fifties
Summary: 5 Stars
Although technically a science-fiction book, Time Out of Joint (1959) reads more like a strange hybrid of science fiction and the mainstream realist novels Dick was also writing at the time. The major part of the story takes place in a small town, rendered with much more detailed texture of description and characterization than in any of Dick's sf novels to that date. Dick throws out many tantalizing clues throughout the first part of the book that this version of the fifties is not quite the one we know. But it is an excellent imitation, aided by the fact that all the residents of the town have been hypnotized to believe they are living in the sleepy Eisenhower-era of the 1950s. The main character, Ragle Gumm, starts to break out of his hypnosis and realizes there is a conspiracy to keep him in ignorance. In one of Dick's most famous scenes, a soft-drink stand disappears and in its place is found a slip of paper that says "soft-drink stand." The book is a powerful comment on the fragile nature of reality as well as a reminder that sometimes the paranoid is simply perceiving the situation accurately.Book Review: Philip Dick a Bit Out of Joint
Summary: 3 Stars
"Time out of Joint" is definitely not one of Philip Dick's best novels. It's not awful or anything, especially the early parts of the book, but ultimately it just doesn't really hang together very well. Also, the book kind of fizzles and cops out at the end, which left me a bit disappointed and unsatisfied. Still, having said all that, there's some really good stuff in "Time Out of Joint," including the usual, fascinating PKD-esian themes: the nature of reality; personal identity; memory; sanity vs. "insanity;" paranoia (or are they REALLY out to get you?); authoritarianism; war; conformity vs. individuality. And on the positive side, Dick DOES show flashes of brilliance during the early parts of the book, especially in the bathroom lightbulb scene and of course the disappearing hot dog stand scene, but to my tastes, Dick reverts to cliches and predictable plot devices in the last part of the book. He also lets certain narrative threads and characters just sort of unravel or disappear. All this doesn't completely ruin "Time Out of Joint," but it does cause it to miss out on possible greatness and settle for just a "good" rating. Go ahead and take this one out of the library, but if you've never read Philip Dick before, I'd personally recommend that you start with "The Man in the High Castle," my personal favorite so far.Book Review: The Golden Age
Summary: 5 Stars
Time Out of Joint is a very interesting exploration of a great deal of the ideas and feelings circulating in WWII (and post-WWII) America. Naturally, it contains the usual Dick-ian everyman who struggles with understanding how reality relates to his perception of reality, but there are thematic undertones that are far *less* common in some of Dick's more outlandish science-fiction tales such as McCarthyism (which undoubtedly Dick himself was struggling with first-hand), nostolgia for the "Golden Age" of pre-WWII America, Cold War paranoia, American hypocritical morality (i.e. Japanese Interment Camps), and so forth.Clearly, Dick had been reading a great deal of the linguistic and psychoanalytic theory that became prominent in the late 60's in academic settings as traces of post-structuralist thought as well as Freudian theory pop up all over the book.
A very complex, yet easy-reading novel. Highly recommended.
Book Review: The Lunatic World of PKD (Time Out of Joint)
Summary: 4 Stars
Ragle Gumm is the all time winner of the 'Where's the Little Green Man' contest. Everyday he fills out the contest entry forms from the newspaper and mails them in before the deadline. He's famous and there's something dreadfully important about his entries being accurate and timely. Ragle lives with his sister and brother in law. Although Ragle thinks he is living in 1959, he discovers some magazines in a ruined lot that are dated 1997. He's not sure whether he is being kept prisoner in this small town, or whether he's paranoid or worse, a Lunatic.Book Review: The World Beneath the World
Summary: 4 Stars
Anyone who lived next door to Philip K. Dick in 1958 might have regarded him with a sense of mild suspicion. He hung around the house most of the day, probably, or he'd go to the library for long periods. He'd spend a lot of time reading books and making notes, and otherwise doing little or nothing that seemed like any kind of paid employment. Then for a week or ten days he'd type nonstop for hours, drop a big package at the post office and gradually sink back into apparent non-activity. You'd have to wonder what he did for food money.
At least, that's what PKD must have looked like on the outside. On the inside - that's another story. In fact, it's Time Out of Joint. (Like how I came full circle on that one? It's a cheap copy of something PKD did all the time.)
Now, before I go any further, I must apologize for rehashing that tired old assertion that any novel is to be read as a thinly-disguised autobiography of the writer who produced it. Interpretations of that kind leave no room for the imagination, ours or the author's, and we've had quite enough of that, thank you very much. PKD of all people was far too original in his thinking to rely on such hackery. Unfortunately, Time Out of Joint reads uncomfortably like thinly-disguised autobiography - it's about a man named Ragle Gumm, a figure of some suspicion, who spends his tense days at home reading books, making notes and sending mysterious packages through the mail. Sorry, kids, thinly-disguised autobiography it is. (Well, maybe a little thicker than that, but you get the idea.)
What's more, like PKD, Ragle Gumm has a sneaking suspicion that all is not well, that there's a hidden world of paranoia and violence behind the tranquility of his surroundings. And like PKD, his suspicions shortly prove to be accurate.
He lives somewhere in small-town Eisenhower America, and those packages he mails every day consist of his solutions to a newspaper contest called "Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?" The thing is a joke, consisting of a grid of 1,028 squares and a small group of utterly useless "clues", and you're supposed to guess the correct square. Lo and behold, by spending some eight hours a day examining, researching and postulating, Ragle Gumm wins the dratted thing every single time. And naturally, every time he wins, the pressure on him increases to win again the next day.
So far, despite its original publication under an SF imprint, this is about as science fictional as "Wheel of Fortune". Granted, at one point Ragle Gumm has a vision in which a soft-drink stand dissolves out of sight, to be replaced with a slip of paper labeled "soft-drink stand". Well, that could be a mere hallucination, a sign of incipient psychosis. Then he picks up the piece of paper and puts it in a box he keeps filled with other such slips of paper, and you realize that something really is rotten in the state of Denmark.
In other words, we're in PKD Land, where nothing is what it seems to be and reality changes shape while you wait. This is plain enough when the author shows you a town where buildings turn to slips of paper and no one knows who Marilyn Monroe is. The true greatness of Time Out of Joint, however, lies in the fact that PKD somehow managed to convey, even before the façade cracks open, the tension of living in a lying world. This author wasn't really a great stylist, but only a great writer could use simple language to show the rotten underbelly of conformist postwar America just by describing how a man insists on crossing the street in the middle of the block because it's a "point of honor".
Speaking of points of honor, I will say no more about what's actually bothering Ragle Gumm. Of course, Time Out of Joint has been in circulation for going on fifty years, and the true nature of Ragle Gumm's world is no big mystery anymore, but on the chance that someone out there considers reading it and doesn't know what's up, let's keep it quiet, shall we? It would be nice if new readers learned Ragle Gumm's secrets along with Ragle himself. Suffice to say that those who declare this to be PKD's breakthrough work are quite right. After five years of publishing good but predictable pulp according to Ace Books' strict science fiction template and utterly failing to sell any of his mainstream work, here is where PKD scored his first major victory in combining his deep investigations of suburban ennui with his explosive SF imagination.
The style rides rough and unpolished at times, some of the characters behave in the most cardboard fashion, there's at least one major crevasse in the plot, and I'm telling you, you won't be able to put it down. PKD knew what people's lives were like and what they dreamed about; if he wasn't always comfortable to read, he was always, always compelling.
I will conclude with a few words about this book's title. It's a quotation from Hamlet, of course - Ragle and Vic use the phrase to express their sense that things around them aren't quite right. They don't consider the entire quotation, but you should, because it provides a nifty clue as to who Ragle Gumm really is:
"The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!"
Benshlomo says, Combining reality with imagination takes a real genius, or a real psycho, or maybe both.