Divine Invasions

Sutin's sometimes sarcastic style might surprise the reader at first, but this is a very insightful look at the life and work of Philip K. Dick - it's also the most substantial book of its kind we have yet. Sutin does a good job of inserting his comments about the works while sharing with us their genesis at the same time; the analysis aspect of `Divine Invasions' is fairly limited, but since it's not a scholarly book, it doesn't disappoint. It reads somewhat like PKD's own novels and short stories, with Dick himself as the central character. The extracts from the Exegesis show PKD at his speculative best and made me want to read more. One more note: in the last section, Sutin offers a `guide' in which he rates PKD's books on a 1-10 internal scale, also providing capsule reviews of the works he didn't write about in the main narrative; it's sure to provoke arguments, as he thought it would. Serious PKD readers should definitely read this.

This is Lawrence Sutin's best book (well, of the three that I've read). It's also the best book on Dick I've found, and it's about as engrossing as some of Dick's better novels. There's a lot of stuff in here, but I wolfed it down pretty quickly.The various troubled relationships, paranoid experiences (and attitudes), drug experimentation, and transcendental experiences are discussed here in some detail. We get lots of stories from Dick's ex-wives and such discussing his writing habits and nervous behavior.I found particularly helpful the bibliography (with plot summaries) at the end of the book. It's depressing how much of Dick's work is still out of print.A great book on a great American writer. Anyone who wants to go further might look at IN SEARCH OF VALIS, also by Sutin.

Sutin does a wonderful job of creating a literary biography. The factual details of Philip Dick's life, and how they relate to his fiction, are spliced together insightfully.If you want to understand the man behind the fiction -- and the later essays -- then you have to read Sutin's biography. I especially found the miniature bibliography useful in the back, with capsule reviews of books not extensively covered in the main text.

Sutin's comprehensive literary biography of PKD is a godsend, because it clears up so many loose ends of his life and work. The background about his lost twin, who died as a baby (he was buried with her in Colorado), and his father's abandonment of the family, does much to clarify a lifetime of driven insecurity. Dick's failure to break out of the genre category with his "quality novels" (most of them published after his death in small editions) in the late 1950s led to a revolution within science fiction itself, where he had to continue publishing. In fact Dick was a fantasist at heart, and ahead of his time in working through genre categories. Unfortunately the pay and prestige for even brilliant genre writers were so limited that his spirit was finally broken. Moreover, he made several bad decisions about relationships that gradually led him into his own strange world of cosmic paranoia. When acclaim and success finally came his way, his life was over. He died at age 53 in March 1982. Sutin adds a very helpful "Chronological survey and guide" that establishes the actual order of the books he wrote, their publication history (which has altered a bit since 1989, when the book was publshed), and summary and evaluation of each book. Strongly recommended for anyone seriously interested in this author's work.

Sutin, who obviously did his homework, begins with the loss of a twin sister when Philip K. Dick was an infant, and develops the idea that this had a profound influence on his life and his writing. He weaves literary and psychological insights together to explain Dick's entire career and the themes of his books. Sutin also proposes a plausible theory (bringing medical and psychological facts together) about the source of the "VALIS" experience, which was the major event of Dick's adult life and the impetus for some of his strangest, best, and most difficult books. Along the way, Sutin manages to put Dick's life in context of the times (especially the counterculture of the 60's) while making it clear that he was very much outside the times. It's too bad this is out of print, and I hope it's reissued someday.