Puttering About in a Small Land

by Philip K. Dick

Written in the late 1950s but unpublished until after his death, this is one of Dick's greatest realistic novels

When Roger and Virginia Lindhal enroll their son Gregg in Mrs Alt's Los Padres Valley School in the mountains of Southern California, their marriage is already in deep trouble. Then the Lindhals meet Chic and Liz Bonner, whose two sons also board at Mrs Alt's school.

The meeting is a catalyst for a complicated series of emotions and traumas, set against the backdrop of suburban Los Angeles in the early 1950s. As Roger, Virginia, Chic and Liz orbit each other in ever-decaying circles, their lives threaten to run out of control.

This is a realistic novel filled with details of everyday life and skilfully told from three points of view. It is powerful, eloquent, and gripping.

Winner of both the HUGO and JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARDs for BEST NOVEL, Philip K. Dick is widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day. The object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Science Fiction Fantasy, United States

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Philip Kindred Dick was a prolific American science fiction author whose work has had a lasting impact on literature, cinema, and popular culture. Known for his imaginative narratives and profound philosophical themes, Dick explored the nature of reality, the boundaries of human identity, and the impact of technology and authoritarianism on society. His stories often blurred the line between the real and the artificial, challenging readers to question their perceptions and beliefs.
Raised in California, Dick began writing professionally in the early 1950s, publishing short stories in various science fiction magazines. He quickly developed a distinctive voice within the genre, marked by a fusion of science fiction concepts with deep existential and psychological inquiry. Over his career, he authored 44 novels and more than 100 short stories, many of which have become classics in the field.
Recurring themes in Dick's work include alternate realities, simulations, corporate and government control, mental illness, and the nature of consciousness. His protagonists are frequently everyday individuals—often paranoid, uncertain, or troubled—caught in surreal and often dangerous circumstances that force them to question their environment and themselves. Works such as Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly reflect his fascination with perception and altered states of consciousness, often drawing from his own experiences with mental health struggles and drug use.
One of Dick’s most influential novels is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s iconic film Blade Runner. The novel deals with the distinction between humans and artificial beings and asks profound questions about empathy, identity, and what it means to be alive. Other adaptations of his work include Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle, each reflecting key elements of his storytelling—uncertain realities, oppressive systems, and the search for truth. These adaptations have introduced his complex ideas to audiences well beyond the traditional readership of science fiction.
In the 1970s, Dick underwent a series of visionary and mystical experiences that had a significant influence on his later writings. He described receiving profound knowledge from an external, possibly divine, source and documented these events extensively in what became known as The Exegesis, a massive and often fragmented journal. These experiences inspired his later novels, most notably the VALIS trilogy, which mixes autobiography, theology, and metaphysics in a narrative that defies conventional structure and genre boundaries.
Throughout his life, Dick faced financial instability, health issues, and periods of personal turmoil, yet he remained a dedicated and relentless writer. Despite limited commercial success during his lifetime, his reputation grew steadily, and he came to be regarded as one of the most original voices in speculative fiction. His work has been celebrated for its ability to fuse philosophical depth with gripping storytelling and has influenced not only science fiction writers but also philosophers, filmmakers, and futurists.
Dick’s legacy continues to thrive in both literary and cinematic spheres. The themes he explored remain urgently relevant in the modern world, particularly as technology increasingly intersects with human identity and governance. The Philip K. Dick Award, named in his honor, is presented annually to distinguished works of science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. His writings have also inspired television series, academic studies, and countless homages across media.
Through his vivid imagination and unflinching inquiry into the nature of existence, Philip K. Dick redefined what science fiction could achieve. His work continues to challenge and inspire, offering timeless insights into the human condition a

Reviews

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 3 out of 5]

Puttering About is minor PKD. One of his sidelined realist novels. A quiet, marital struggle in a normal American suburb. It oozes nostalgia for a lost time and place, like an old sitcom, where 'traffic jam' refers to fifteen cars on the expressway and people still do things like get their television repaired, instead of just buying another one.

It deals with regular sorts of people in regular sorts of jobs. In a way, they have been puttering about most of their lives. I know from experience working in retail, even a generation or two removed from Dick's time, you do feel like you are just puttering about in a small land much of the time. I ran a store for a year or so, and like the television salesman in this book, I just felt like I was the ruler of this Lilliputian island, trying to come up with busy work, waiting for customers to show up, letting my imagination run wild, trying to find some sense in it all. The character's sad desperation feels very familiar, and it is the modus operandi of the seemingly impulsive actions contained within the novel. The excitement in life does not come from work, it comes from the trouble and the people outside of work, we are led to believe. Work is a quiet place, Dick seems to say, where almost nothing happens, where paper is shuffled around, products dusted off, customers given the sales pitch.

I believe Dick himself, at some point, worked at a record store, (detailed in Mary and the Giant) and probably other retail places. He was not a wealthy writer or even a full-time writer right off the bat. He never has that detached air of someone commenting on a society they were barely a part of. He was clearly mixed in with these people he writes about. The wild science fiction adventures he indulged in, and the mysticism later on, are reactions to the realism he faced. They are his way of processing the powerlessness he felt in the American way of life, perhaps, and to stake his claim on greatness. Therefore, his realist novels should not be undervalued. Luckily, they are a blast to read, but probably don't have the same re-readability as his genre works.

I revere this author's great novels, and I still enjoy his minor novels and very impressive short stories. What he does well in his realist novels is get in his characters' heads. He taps into an addictive stream of thought, which serves as a delicious vehicle of storytelling. No matter which character is front and center, you get to know them intimately. This intimacy runs through the bulk of his writing, and despite this book's uneven structure, sustains the tension throughout it.

The main flaw of the novel, I think, is the focus on Greg, the couple's child in the beginning. Dick fools you into thinking he is going to tell the story from multiple perspectives, and it even mentions that fact on the product description, but really, for most of the book, the focus is on the two main characters, and occasionally, the third woman in the triangle. You can expect there to be an adulterous relationship, can also see it coming, but that is a common theme throughout the author's work.

I believe that Dick's work grows finer with age. He encapsulates his time so well that when I tire of the gloss and sheen of contemporary science fiction, with the glib characters set aboil on a froth of the accumulated s-f gestalt, flailing in space stations and time leaps and intergalactic civilizations, I often wish to go back to the simpler time, the simpler themes, and the powerful characters Dick does so well. The same goes for realist novels. What realist novel DOESN'T have an adulterous relationship in it? But instead of making use of literary whirligigs, Dick confronts you plainly, but brilliantly, with his characters' hearts and minds.

[Hyzenthlay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The worst part of having a favourite author who died before you started reading him is that eventually you will run out of new reading material. The best part of that favourite author being Philip K Dick is that he was prolific as fuck AND he has so many books that are only recently coming back into print and/or being published posthumously for the first time that even though I've been reading him for 20+ years, I still haven't run out of new-to-me shit to read.

Puttering About in a Small Land is one of those mythical PKD volumes I searched used book stores and thrift shops for for years. It was first published in the mid-80s, following Dick's death, then went out of print for almost three decades cos there was never much call for his literary fiction. It's not sexy enough to be referred to in hushed reverential tones like a DADoES or mind-fucky enough to be a scholarly treatise on humanity and reality like the VALIS trilogy.

It's a quiet book, dealing with adultery and retail. It's undeniably an early Dick book, exploring what exactly it means to be human; to feel eternal, knowing all this pain is an illusion. The prose and style will be familiar to anyone who's read more than a handful of his books or short stories, but it's not one of his Big Damn Idea books.

I feel I'm not explaining myself very well.

If you're a genre fan thinking to dabble in Dick, don't start here. [Waves hand] This is not the book you're looking for. You go read something else (if you don't want to start with the usual suspects, I applaud you and would recommend The Penultimate Truth, Dr Bloodmoney or The Cosmic Puppets), cos you will likely find this book's slightly plodding pace infuriating.

If you're a litfic reader, looking to broaden your reading horizons, you *could* give this one a go. Maybe only if you're already into mid-20th Century Americana, though. This might not be the best starting point. You'd be better served picking up Confessions of a Crap Artist or Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (which, yes, is genre fiction, but ONLY JUST).

Fellow Dickheads? Obviously you need to read this. After Milton Lumky (who knew typewriter sales would be so compelling?). You might hate it, but your need for completion will compel you.

TL;DR This book isn't for you. Or you. Or you. But it might be for YOU.

[paper0r0ss0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nella California dell'immediato dopoguerra due coppie piccolo-boghesi di diversa estrazione e assortimento caratteriale, si incontrano per via della scuola frequentata dai rispettivi figli. E' in pieno svolgimento la fase di ristrutturazione dall'economia di guerra. Tutte le certezze, i progetti e i sogni fatti nei giorni della mobilitazione bellica sono in pericolo, se non del tutto svaniti. Ci si ritrova di punto in bianco a dover fare i conti con i propri limiti e con quelli dei propri partner. Nulla di piu' facile che scegliere l'adulterio come fuga dalle insoddisfazioni materiali e morali. Avviene cosi' anche per i personaggi di questo bel libro di Dick, lucido e crudele quanto basta. Il crollo del "sogno americano" ancor prima che inizi. L'ineluttabilita' dei limiti delle persone alle prese con le costrizioni sociali e morali della consuetudine borghese. Una tenue vena di agghiacciante e allucinato delirio attraversa tutto il libro nonostante non sia un romanzo sci-fi.

[Lewis Szymanski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read a PKD book in over 20 years. After reading this I regret the absence and plan to make up for it.

This is general fiction written in the 50s but published posthumously in 85. There are no fantastical elements. No androids or aliens, no telepaths or precogs, no simulated realities of a technological or pharmacological nature. This is not a novel about big crazy ideas, it's a novel about characters. This is simultaneously the most real and weirdest PKD novel I've ever read.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published posthumously in 1985, written in 1957, this is one of PKD's early-ish novels, and one of his "mainstream" books, rather than a science-fiction work.

For those familiar with PKD, there is much that will be familiar. His main protagonist, Roger, is a working man, feeling brow-beaten by a society he feels does not recognise his potential, dissatisfied with his marriage and with life in general. Roger owns a television shop and feels that he's pretty successful, while despising his customers and paying little attention to his business. In keeping with many of PKD's science fiction works, there's an episode in which Roger feels the surface appearance of the world peeling away and he gets a terrifying vision of an alternate dark reality, too horrifying to think about and rapidly pushed back down into his subconscience.

His wife, Virginia, struggles to keep Roger focussed on providing for his family, both financially and emotionally. Unacknowledged by Roger, though hovering at the edge of his awareness, it is she who has been the driving force in their relationship and Roger would have abandoned the business, Virginia, and their son, Gregg, long ago if he had not been scared to face the consequences of his actions.

It's no surprise, then, that Roger seeks escape in an affair with Liz, a woman who he barely knows and doesn't really like. Neither is it a surprise that he is pathetically unsuccessful in keeping the affair hidden from his wife. Once that barrier is broken, though, what is there to keep him tied to a life he no longer wants? Nothing, and so, at the end of the novel, just as he earlier abandoned his first wife and daughter, he abandons Virginia, Gregg and Liz.

There are times when I almost came to have sympathy for Roger; it never quite happened and I was never close to actually liking him. He's not a malicious or abusive man, just a self-centred, egotistical and morally weak person. He likes to think he is cleverer than everybody else, whilst suffering with feelings of inferiority. He knows his life should be more fulfilling; he feels he deserves that; it's not his fault that he doesn't quite measure up, it's everybody and everything else. Roger has the narcissist's habit of maintaining a lie in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, thinking that he is cunning and holding the upper hand, whilst really presenting as childishly obstinate and self-deluding. Not that (as Donald Trump has found) this is an unsuccessful strategy, as it's impossible for Virginia to argue with him or have a meaningful discussion about anything with Roger while he employs this tactic. It does mean, however, that Virginia is pushed to out-manoeuvre Roger in order to catch him 'in the act', such that he is unable to deny reality and is forced to face the consequences of his actions for a brief period, prior to withdrawing into his egocentricism.

Virginia is certainly a more likeable person and I have great sympathy for her. While she seems to have made a poor choice in her partner, her reasons for doing so are fairly clear. Whilst Andrew M. Butler in his short review of the novel in The Pocket Essential Philip K. Dick considers that Virginia "doesn't seem to care about him", I think it is clear that she does love Roger, despite her knowledge of his flaws and weaknesses, and her sometimes belittling comments towards him. Virginia is staunch in her defence of Roger against her mother's criticisms of him, and while that has much to do with the dynamics of their relationship, it stands as one of the testiments of Virginia's love for her husband. After the affair is uncontestibly exposed, though, things take a downward turn in respect of Virginia's regard of Roger. He seems to become less of a partner, less of a man, in her eyes, and more an object to be used in the furtherance of her own ambitions. An unattractive trait and one that diminishes her. It feels like a realisation of Nietzsche's dictum, "Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one".

I've read reviews that criticise Puttering About in a Small Land for dealing with mundane, unintersting lives rather than presenting melodrama or the fashionable angst of remarkable people, but as most of us live Thoreau's lives of "quiet desperation", PKD has, I think, given a portrait of life that more realistically reflects the experience of "the mass of men".

[Ryandake · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is the second of Philip K. Dick's non-sf fiction that i've read, and i'm telling you, there's something rather addictive about them.

this book is about two couples in LA in the late 40s/early 50s, the postwar era. they meet, have adventures, get into trouble.

the plot of this book is not the draw. it's the fine characterizations Dick works, getting us so deeply into the characters' heads that we find ourselves puttering about in the smallest land of all: the space inside the skull.

and damn! he's good at it. he's even amazingly good at getting into women's heads. (a lot of writers have a hard time writing the opposite sex.) we get to learn about each character's world view, their deceptions petty and otherwise, their self-deceptions... and how each paints the world to fit.

granted, these heads do not come complete with contemporary moral values, ethics, and so on; the book was published in '85 after Dick's death, and i've no idea when he actually wrote it. but there is a lot about it that has that cigarette-haze, blue-lit whiff of the interregnum between the end of the war and the explosions of the 60s--back when love wasn't free yet, but one could feel a ripeness beginning to split at the seams.

i read The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike a while ago, and the two books share a lot of characteristics: a tight, tight focus on just a few characters; a time that feels somehow encased in glass; a plot in which by contemporary standards, not much happens, but which nevertheless keeps you compulsively turning pages.

i don't know why Dick is not better known for his literary fiction. he was certainly as capable a craftsman as many others of his day. in truth i like his non-sf better than his sf, which often seems cold and distant to me, emotionless. give it a try!

[Brett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is yet another of PKD's posthumously published realist fiction, very similar in themes and approach as his others such as Mary and the Giant, Voices from the Street, or the Broken Bubble. This is a far cry from the science-fiction that he is now associated with, and written back in the days before he had begun to make a name for himself as a genre writer.

This book is for my money probably the best of the these types of PDK that I have encountered, though it still suffers from the kind of sameness that runs through all these books. We have characters that have low-intensity, retail-oriented jobs, staid family lives, and that entertain or engage in extramarital affairs and suffer the consequences or not. This one gets off on a strange note with a focus on the protagonist couple's son and what school he will attend. A lot of energy gets spent on this subplot in the first section of the novel and then its dropped once the son is conveniently shipped off.

The characters are generally a little more filled out than in the other realist novels I mention above, but the story moves slowly and the book feels overlong. You're going to read more about the TV repair business that you'd likely care to, and learn more about how to utilize retail frontage. All these novels are really only for PDK superfans or those with completist tendencies such as myself.

[Marissa Uden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's my review cross-posted from SFFAudio. Puttering About Review. I'll update with our podcast discussion on it when the episode drops.
>>
Puttering About in a Small Land (written 1957 but first published in 1985) feels very different from Philip K Dick’s usual stuff. It’s a dark and funny slow-burn set in 1950s Southern California, but there are no simulacra, no time slips, and no telepaths, and the only artificial reality is the one built out of society’s expectations of suburban married life.

It also seems unusually sensitive for PKD – not in a corny or sentimental way but just finely tuned into human relationships. He captures the subtle and imperfect communications of a dysfunctional marriage where two people are pretending to work together but are really pushing and pulling below the surface, wanting different things and resenting each other for it.

“I’ll be back pretty soon,” he said. From his eyes shone the leisurely, confident look; it was the sly quality that always annoyed her.
“I thought maybe we could talk,” she said.
He stood at the door, his hands in his pockets, his head tilted on one side. And he waited, showing his endurance, not arguing with her, simply standing. Like an animal, she thought. An inert, unspeaking, determined thing, remembering that it can get what it wants if it just waits.
“I’ll see you,” he said, opening the door to the hall.
“All right,” she said.

The story is told in three alternating points of view: Roger, his wife Virginia, and the “other woman” Liz. All three are trapped, one way or another, in self-made realities they don’t enjoy.
Some readers complain that PKD writes unflattering female characters, and as usual these ones aren’t much to admire: Virginia is gossipy and judgmental, her mother is a controlling nag (who often corners Roger and has some of the funniest scenes in the book), and Liz Bonner is so naïve and childlike she verges on the idiotic.

“She’s sort of a—” Mrs Alt searched for the word. “I don’t want to say lunatic. That isn’t it. She’s sort of an idiot with a touch of mysticism.”...

But even so, Virginia has her strengths, and Liz Bonner is lovely in a quirky way. Her flaws and naïve unpredictability are exactly what free her from society’s expectations, and are what attract Roger. Despite the deceit and infidelity, their love story is somehow still beautiful.

And to be fair, PKD also writes pretty unflattering men. For example, Roger not only cheats on his wife, he also abandoned his previous wife and daughter and seems to be a compulsive liar. He’s a bristly, bad-tempered, and indifferent to his wife’s gestures of love and compromise. All he really cares about his TV retail-and-repair business, which is where the book title comes from: he’s a little king “puttering about in a small land.”

The waning of a marriage and infidelity appear in a lot of PKD’s stories, but in this one they really drive this plot. Normally I wouldn’t try to detect an author’s own life in his fiction, but since PKD has openly admitted he weaves autobiographical details into all his stories, it seems safe to see something of him in Roger.

His essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” might give some more clues to his approach to fiction set in the real world. Just because the characters’ universe is based in reality doesn’t mean PKD won’t try to disintegrate it.

“I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. … Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live.”

I listened to Puttering About in a Small Land on audio and read the print version too. The audiobook was read by Amy McFadden, Kate Rudd, and Luke Daniels, one for each of the main characters. All three were great, although using three narrators didn’t work so well for me since the story is in third-person. Hearing the same characters read in three slightly different ways gave the audiobook a patchwork feel and was a bit jarring and distracting sometimes.

I’d recommend Puttering About in a Small Land for PKD fans but not so much as an entry to his works. For anyone who knows his style, it’s very cool to see a more subtle side of him and to see how beautifully he can write about human relationships in the artificial universe we call reality. Definitely worth the read.

[Jack Stovold · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Philip K. Dick Project
Entry #13 - Puttering About In A Small Land (written late ‘56, early ‘57, published posthumously Oct 1985)

Puttering, the fourth straight novel I’ve read so far, sees Dick writing much more efficiently than he has. The sort of scattershot plotting and underdeveloped subplots seen in Voices From the Street, Mary and the Giant, and The Broken Bubble are largely absent, despite Puttering being by my reckoning the longest of the four. This book goes full speed ahead, and I found it to be every bit as much a page turner as his sci-fi novels.
While Puttering doesn’t reach the kind of muted and sad yearning found in some of the other straight novels, there’s a lot of new things Dick tries here, and the results are invariably interesting. The flashback structure in the first half of the book is well executed and is a neat look at Southern California during the war, as well as shedding some needed light on the characters and their motivations. The writing itself is sharper as well, and Dick changes it up with more poetic prose, particularly in the intriguing few scenes written from Liz’s point of view, and in Roger’s youthful scenes of frustration. Always welcome are just some hints of Dick’s weirdness, especially in the surreal and vaguely disturbing imagery from Roger’s boyhood on the farm in Arkansas.
Liz is another dark-haired bizarro Dick girl, although not in the usual manner. Some of the book’s most darkly comic moments come at Liz’s expense, as everyone thinks she’s a dumb ditz, and she is mostly, although Dick smartly hints that she may have a far more complex inner life than anyone suspects. All the characters in this seem fuller than in earlier novels. Their motivations are clearer, although not opaque, and they have the usual baffling rapidity to them. (Case in point: Chic’s extreme sudden interest in dropping everything and become Roger’s partner in retail electronics). The retail electronics world, familiar from Voices, figures prominently as well. There’s something very mildly pleasant amongst all of Dick’s mundane scenes of retail life, and he happens to capture an interesting era in the transition from radio to television.
What come through to me most in this novel, is that people don’t usually change. It’s a kind of sad realization, that for Roger and Virginia, they are doomed to repeat the mistakes they have made over and over again, even as they realize they’re making them. Dick’s characters are human and flawed, but don’t really find any redemption. It’s sadly realistic in this way, because they are just average folks, always fumbling, thinking they’re about to move on to something else. But they don’t really. Life just keeps going. For all their ambitions and hopes, they must realize that they are not fundamentally different, or better, than anyone else. Everyone has the hopes and fears, but we are not all great. We’re mostly just average, and our dramas play out quietly in the background of everyday life.
I’m not sure if this is better than Dick’s other straight novels, but it’s definitely better written. It’s tight, faster and more compelling, with the fat trimmed off. It was a good read.

Stray thoughts: #Ms. Alt is sure a strange character.

#Sign of the times: Liz doesn’t know what a clitoris is called.

#This book was set three years before it was written, for some reason.

#Also realistic: Roger’s casual racism, which comes up a few times but never becomes much of a plot point.

My edition: Tor Trade Paperback, 2009

Up next: “Time Out of Joint”!
June 26, 2012

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a look at this book in a used bookstore and before I knew it, I had finished half of it. I finished the rest of it the following night.



It's a simple read, but in no way is this book simplistic. There's so much I have to say about this book, I could fill another book, or maybe two. If you're looking for what is traditionally thought to be the classic Philip K. Dick genre and type, then this is not the book for you. This book is not an escape from reality, instead, it is a hard crash into reality's dead center. As a sociological study of the time and place, it is unfailingly accurate, and it fits perfectly with the existentialist aspect of Dick's philosophical makeup, even though it is not a side of him that his publishers cared to publish or publicize while he was alive.



Personally, I love this book. It is incredibly clear and well written, and honest as an insightful portrait of the time and place, and the people who populate its pages. The history contained in this book along with the sociology of the time and place is an essential, but often over-looked component in how we got to the love generation of the '60s, (which is now so often misunderstood and misreported) and from there, to where we are today. It illustrates not only the pivotal period of post-war 20th century America, but also details the constructs of society which fueled and enabled the selfishness of it's people, a people ill-prepared to maturely handle such rapid change and expansion without selfishly grabbing at it for all it was worth and in the process, learning to love things and use people, as opposed to loving people and using things.



While there is no mistake that selfishness and materialism existed long before mid-20th century America, it was at this time, and in this way, that America opened the floodgates of free time and material opportunity to an entire society, ostensibly for their betterment, but without the benefit of prior education, the time to adjust, or the evolved, inclusive, and tolerant moral backdrop needed to use these benefits for anything other than the selfish purposes of each individual's bored desires, eventually leading to an entire society which was completely baffled when its next generation, their children, rebelled in the 60's with anti-materialism and pro-love as their mantra.



If I were currently teaching the sociological history of the United States, this book would be among those at the top of the reading list. It is an important book.

[David Agranoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars if you are a serious Dickhead, if not probably a 3-star slice of life of 1950s California. That said this is my favorite of the realist novels I have read so far. We already recorded the Dickheads podcast episode link when it is posted.

While in no way science fiction the fact that it was published decades after it was written during Phil's second and longest marriage to Kleo feels like a period piece. In the novel, a young boy named Gregg is being dropped off at a boarding school in remote Ojai California, similar to the experience of a young PKD. The opening of the novel appears to be addressing the author's Mommy issues, but it is much more than that. PKD uses his SF world-building skills to set the stage of an early TV shop and suburban life of the era. Funny at times, disturbing here and there. Worth reading for completionists for sure.

[Magda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non il Dick che conosciamo. Qui la fantascenza non compare in nessuna pagina, perché questo è stato un tentativo dello scrittore di arrivare ad un pubblico più ampio e non quello di nicchia che aveva catturato fino a quel momento.
È una splendida storia americana, di quelle che hanno come scenario gli USA del secondo dopoguerra e tanta speranza e sogni per il futuro. In questo contesto due coppie giovani si incontrano casualmente perché i figli frequentano la stessa scuola, ma subito capiamo che le due coppie sono male assortite e che c'è una specie di attrazione che le farà scoppiare. È un libro che fa una precisa analisi dei personaggi e di ognuno di loro è impossibile non riconoscere l'americano della fine degli anni 40.
Davvero un bel romanzo.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puttering About In A Small Land is one of Dick's early non SF books. Like all of Dick's work you can love it or leave it. I personally am a fan of most of his writing. The early stories like this one are often mood dramas. Not a lot of characters but the focus is on two couples and how a chance circumstance effects there lives with some positive but mostly negative consequences. My favorite character is Virginia who is forgiving (kind of ) but for selfish reasons. The ending reminded me of a Tom Waits song "Franks Wild Years".

[Wade Duvall · Rating 4 out of 5]

As you may or may not know, Philip K Dick, famous for his contribution to New Wave science fiction, also wrote several realistic slice-of-life novels all set in California. If you were to go into this book expecting New Wave Philip K Dick, I think you would mostly disappointed. I can't help but wonder if that's why this book gets lower reviews that some of Dicks better known works.

In his science fiction, Dick is famous for playing with, and questioning, reality. So in a way, Dick writing realism/slice-of-life seems like a complete 180... at first. Gone is the paranoid tone of his science fiction, replaced with a realistic descriptions of the minutia of life. Remaining are his highly flawed characters and the strange affection he seems to have with them.

It's hard to say if fans of traditional Dick would appreciate this book. The pulpy style is gone, but the sparse dialog and focus on inner dialog remain. I had no problem getting through the 300 or so pages, but many may find the slice-of-life aspect boring. I think I will hold off generally recommending this particular one until I've read more. That said, I think there is great promise here.

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really would have liked to give this 4 stars, but as it was I waivering on 2 stars.

PKD was a truly terrific writer, but his choice of "plot" for his mainstream writing stifled him. His writing sucks you in and draws you in but the characters are too real and the diintegration of their lives is too close to home to be entertaining.

The historic record of urban development in California after WWII up to the mid 1950's is very interesting, and is the saving grace of the book. It is really interesting to have this suburban counter part to hard boiled noir of Chandler.

PKD did not have to take his plots to stars or sideways into another dimension to have success, - he could have just taken his gritty plots out of the quagmire of domestic life (leave them in as side plot or catalyst), and then taken his well formed chaaracters (and the reader!) on a journey.

[serprex]

7 "Okay, he said - Missing quote
8 were going - was going
23 If - if
24 part - past
25 bad kerning, space before "He put ashore", kerning was terrible throughout, letters like 'Av' so far apart, it was brutal, page 28 had crazy spacing between quote & W with '"What's'
53 the house. up - comma
61 What - Missing quote
97 Anacin tables - tablets
142 "It's so - drop quote
145 slooked -looked
147 another period for a comma
152 learning - leaning
168 shoulder? she - Missing quote
186 gong - going
187 Chis - Chic
196 to to - to go
223 "Yes, he - Missing quote
225 "If Chic had - This quote got dropped into the middle of some existing dialogue
238 Come by? she - Missing quote
252 I won't gone in - go on in?
263 they put in - they put it in
267 bus, "Virginia - this open quote should be a close quote
281 But, he thought - this paragraph began without indentation

Roger's injury of a "slipped disc" lined up with the previous Dick novel I read, The Zap Gun, where one of the fellow cogs had some back pain whose description was transient, at times being "a slipped disc"

Chapter 17's prose is well written. Really paints a confusing stream of consciousness that relates how Liz can be so out of it

On characters coming off as immature: Virginia getting frustrated at the lack of emotional support from her eight year old son was a good way to start off the novel

Parallel dream worlds between wanting to go forward with a bunch of sketches of a store & wanting to go forward with a different spouse

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip's non science fiction books are never as good as his scifi ones. I just wish they were more daring. Like he's happy to write about drug use and adventurous people in the scifi but when it comes to normal life everyone is so mundane. This one was more interesting than the others I read though. Largely because the POV characters were women, which was a good change. One was thought of as being dumb, but when he gave her streams of thoughts there was so much going on, and so many different things she was thinking, but she only verbalised a fifth of it. The affair at the heart of the story seemed mostly implausible. Like do people really go to bed that quickly and are that bad at keeping it secret? But it was an interesting look at the war and the post war period and how that effected work and migration. There was sexism, racism and homophobia, particularly in the main male character. Things oddly missing from pulp at this time, but I suppose reflected the views of the "normal" people more.

[Sean O'Leary]

This is the 35th book by Phillip K Dick I've read and my fourth non-scifi. Prior to reading this I read Humpty Dumpty in Oakland and In Milton Lumky Territory and both were flawed but had their moments. That being said, it's easily one of his worst books he's written from what I've read so far. I'm shocked by some of the praise people have given it here, it's not conceptually interesting, the story is about two people who cheat on their spouses and amounts nothing more than that, and the supposed drama is nothing to write home about either. The novel goes back and forth between two narratives; Roger and Virginia before they were married and after, in present time. The former narrative amounts to nothing and leads to awkward confusing segways between chapters and has no major affect on the latter story.

Both sets of characters are honestly people I cared little for. From the beginning Roger and Virginia's marriage seems to be loveless so as a result when things do finally begin to fall apart even more there's no real reason to be upset, in fact after reading the whole thing I got the Impression that its good that it dissipated as their marriage was pointless. The opposite couple, Liz and Chic aren't developed that much as the characters actually rarely share scenes or interact with one another except for cliche minor bickering and sweet talk. All of this adds up to a drama that doesn't seem that dramatic or at least as dramatic as it was intended to be when two spouses wind up cheating on the others.

To top it off not a single character is likeable. Roger is bored with his married life and seeks escape from it; this would be fine except for the fact he's already shown to have been in a prior marriage so he hasn't learned anything from his past mistakes. As a result its impossible to be sympathetic towards him. His wife Virginia is generic and jealous though she is nothing compared to Liz, Chic's wife. Liz is by far the most sexist character to ever grace PKDs novels. She's super clingy, portrayed as an idiot (though this is from Virginia's perspective so there's a possibility that its just because she's jealous, this doesn't help though), and literally needs to bear other men's children. Liz is dependent on other people around her for guidance and direction, an unfortunate alarm for a bad female stereotype.

As a side note there are kids in this story belonging to bother couples but they're even more generic than the adults and only seem to be there to emphasize the drama as they might be the only ones affected by the couples moving apart (and even then they aren't.) There's a subplot about Rogers and Virginia's kid Gerry going to a special school but in the end this is really only an excuse for the two couples to meet up.

Going back to the blatant sexism in the novel I should say I expected some form of it seeing as a lot of PKD novels u fortunately have characters following these trends. Out of everything I've read by him so far though this is the worst and I can't excuse it. I could excuse it before in some of his other novels especially when it added to the plot, like killer wives or female androids, but in the end I can't defend this despite the fact that PKD is my favorite author. I should mention also that I'm not really much of a feminist (for the record I'm a male) and still all of this bothers me. Not only is Liz so dependent but the other female characters aren't good either. Roger's mother in law is naggy and hates him, for the wrong reasons, and this just adds another stereotype. I didn't want to spoil it much so skip to the next paragraph but the end result of the novel is pretty sexist as well; Virginia catches Roger cheating on her with Liz and rather than doing much about it she tries to ensnare him so that he won't leave her and seems to beat herself constantly throughout the novel as if she's the blame for what's going on.

All of the stereotypes and sexism remove any meaning to the psychology (internally I mean, not meta) that people seem to praise it for.

All of this combined does lead to one of the few reasons why one would bother reading PAIASM, either to complete PKD's bibliography or to psychoanalyze dick, though at some point both go hand in hand. I feel unfortunate for those doing the former for the aforementioned but the latter reason is the only redeeming quality about the book. It makes you wonder what woman or what events in PKDs life made him this pissed off or disturbed him to a point where he had to write such a novel. Again I'm no stranger to PKDs sexism but it takes the forefront of the novel not just a subplot or plot device. This book may also be semi autobiographical; Roger has a first wife and kid who he leaves from boredom. Now this might be a reference to his first wife who is pretty unknown or could just be another bland concoction. Maybe another upside to this novel is that it's a fast read but that's because it's mostly dull yet fast flowing dialogue.

Some of the things in the novel make me believe the book was unfinished. The awkward past narrative that phases in and out is my reason for thinking this and the fact that the book was never published during PKDs lifetime to begin with. I feel that the novel shows that there's a reason why this never got published, either he didn't want it published since he himself disliked it or publishers didn't want to take a risk with it before they realized PKD was profitable.

I can't recommend this really to anyone except PKD completionists and analyzes. If you don't belong to those two groups don't read it, though I don't know why you would want to anyway, read something else by him, they're all better to begin with; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Eye in the Sky, Valis, Martian Time Slip, the Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike and so on...

[no.stache.nietzsche · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fairly simple but interesting PKD novel of the realist variety. Nothing crazy here but the fiction flows well and the characters all have their well placed counter points. The protagonist is.. quite unlikable, but in that specifically PKD antihero sort of way, where the character is tragicomic and bumbling, and yet still sympathetic in a sly sort of way.

This probably would have been four stars for the book itself, but we'll give it five specifically for the production value of the audiobook version! Really enjoyed the dual male/female narration, it really added to the vibe of the marital tension around which the plot revolves.

[Shannon Bohnen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh.

[Vickipedia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I picked up Puttering About in a Small Land, I had never read a Philip K. Dick novel but I'm familiar with his sci-fi works thanks to Hollywood. Imagine my surprise as I was perusing The Strand's collection of books and came across this non-sci-fi gem. The Strand, by the way, is a fantastic bookstore in Manhattan—check it out if you ever get the chance.

Puttering is set in the 1950s during a dreamy, developing landscape of suburbia Los Angeles. Two families are involved but Dick chooses to focus on Roger and Virginia Lindahl, and Liz Bonner (who is married to Chic Bonner, a supporting character in this story). The novel is written in the points of view of Liz, Roger and Virginia. The Lindahls are parents to a young boy named Gregg and the Bonners have two sons, Jerry and Walter. All three boys attend the private Los Padres Valley School up in the hills of Ojai during the week and come home on weekends.

Throughout the first arc of the novel, we learn that Virginia is Roger's second wife. He was previously married to a woman named Teddy and they had a little girl together. After his divorce, Roger marries Virginia against her mother's misgivings about a man who was too immature to look after his wife and child. Together, Roger and Virginia hightail it from Washington, DC to California. This takes place during the war and the two of them are able to find jobs at factories out in California. The Lindahls eventually save enough money to consider buying a house but a series of events complicates things and forces them to spend a bit of their earnings, and at the same time Roger gets the idea to open a store for television repairs. Virginia, only wanting Roger to be happy, decides to enlist the help of her mother and borrows enough funds to help Roger open up his shop. While doing this, she sacrifices her dream of dancing professionally.

The story then fast-forwards back to "present day" if you will, and at this point the Lindahls have been introduced to the Bonners. Virginia's impression of Liz isn't very complimentary, with Virginia going so far as describing Liz as "dumb" to her husband. Liz seems to have a child-like personality, is easily excitable, but is highly accommodating because she wants very much to be liked. This excitability, as well as her physical appearance, appeals to Roger. As the story progresses, Roger and Liz begin a passionate love affair to which Liz finds out about.

We are given the opportunity to explore the complexities of these characters who long for something more than what polite society can offer them. The institution and bonds of marriage are tested and destroyed, there is an ominous cloud of loss that hangs over the Lindahls that quickly becomes a storm after the war, we question the idea and responsibility of having a nuclear family—is it truly part of the American dream, or just an inconvenience?, and we witness the aching of sexual desire that serves as the elephant in the room, making its way toward the crowded kitchen table in the Lindahl household.

This is a novel I could picture my American Studies professor assigning to me for required reading and I would consume it to no end—that's how much I truly enjoyed this novel. But as someone who lives off of stories that explore human growth, isolation—both moral and physical, and has a love for period pieces, this is a novel that hit every mark on my "all the things I love" checklist.

On a personal side note, I want to mention that when I first started reading Puttering I was making a trip into West LA and my destination required me to exit into the hills of La Cienega. As I was making my way through the area, I felt as if I was transported back in time especially at the moment when I drove past Pann's, a local diner on La Cienega and La Tijera Blvd. I was amazed, wondering to myself, 'Did Puttering really take me back in time? Or am I having a random David Lynch moment?' Leaving the city to head back home toward Orange County, I felt broken. A sense of loss came to pass as I begrudgingly accepted that I had to leave a city that was still locked in an era that I could only dream about in books such as Puttering.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book situates comfortably among other mid-50s observations of middle class, white middle-aged folks. In my head, I classify with “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” and “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation,” although “Puttering” in more toward straight drama than either of those contemporaries. PKD’s style, well known from “Ubik” and “Three Stigmata” comes across in two aspects: carefully observed interior lives and a single scene in which Liz Bonner trips out inside her own head about the delights of sexual pleasure.

The book addresses themes relevant to both its dates: composed 1957, published 1985. For 1957, the anxieties around post-war stagnation, technological change, and racial diversity pervade. All four main characters are products of the Depression and the Home Front, and they try in their ways to create fulfilling homes for themselves or otherwise meet their needs. For 1985, a new set of worries were at play, and the book anticipates women’s lib and the crisis in masculinity that would result by the early 1980s. Roger Lindahl has much in common with the aimless men of Reagan-era sexual thrillers, except he encounters someone mostly harmless.

So why five stars? If PKD’s name weren’t on the cover, I wouldn’t have bought the book. If he weren’t the giant of SF that he is, we would judge this book against contemporaries and find that it communicates something significant about the causes and effects of marital infidelity. There’s no malice in Roger and Liz. They’re innocents acting stupidly. Virginia finds them out immediately and uses the situation not for revenge, but to renegotiate the power dynamic of her marriage and life for the better. She’s frail but correct at the book’s opening, and confident by its conclusion. She makes the right decisions. Roger, meanwhile, reverts to himself prior to meeting Virginia and at book’s end steals and runs. Liz Bonner hoped to become a magazine image: sexy, clear, and unchanging. All this comes through like a well-tuned TV picture. Worth a read.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first foray into the writing of Phillip K. Dick. Based on what he is generally known for, this is an odd duck of a starting point. Unlike "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep", "Puttering About In A Small Land" is nothing remotely akin to science fiction. Rather, this is a story about a man who appears to feel trapped by the confines of suburban family life in post-WW2 America.

The characters' names escape me as I'm writing this from memory, but the story centers around a man who leaves initially leaves his wife and child for another woman. The newly married couple leaves for California to start anew and take advantage of the high paying war industry jobs available. After the war, they have a child and the main story centers around enrolling their son in a boarding school to the North where the main character meets another couple from the neighborhood.

As the main story progresses, the main character essentially takes a liking to the neighbor's wife. As they both have children attending the same private boarding school, they find reason to travel to the school together. As one might expect, the journey to the school evolves more into the journey about mutual interest in one another.

What made this story so fascinating to me was the behavior of each of the main characters as the sordid details continued to unfold. In a modern story of this type, there always seems to be a pronounced reaction of revenge and anger in the face of unfaithful behavior. Being set in the 1950's, there is a continual sense of awkwardness and dullness of emotion. On the surface, it sounds like a recipe for a misfire. Instead, I had the perspective of watching through a glass tank as the beings trapped inside were discovering these new emotions and feelings in real time.

I can see why this book might not be for everyone, but I highly recommend it for someone who might enjoy a seemingly standard story told in such a different way.

[Geoff Sebesta · Rating 5 out of 5]

It might not be PKD's best, but it's still a great book. Depth, perception, and a reassuring lack of perfection. He gave himself full reign to explore the inner lives of his characters, and there are moments of great beauty. He also delights in showing how different people interact with different people.

I wish all realistic novels were this real. This is not an elaborate fantasy world, it is about a southern California television store owner in the early 1950s as he loves and then abandons three women, probably dooming his poor children to do the same, and in the process sells some televisions to people who probably don't deserve them. He also has deep thoughts about sex and death but they do not stop him from making terrible life choices.

Here is why it is not his best:

1. The main character has a sort of inner restlessness that I've seen in many books of that era, but for modern readers it translates into "This scary guy will do anything at any time." For a fictional character in the year 1955 he does not do much more than the average child-beating and abandoning of families but it's still something to see.
2. The ending of the book resolves the entire conflict in a particularly uncomfortable way when you realize that this book was almost certainly about PKD, whoever he was married to at the time, and whoever he was cheating with. One has the terrible feeling that he showed this book to his wife as the clincher for some particularly sordid argument about open relationships. I don't remember my PKD timeline as well as I used to but I suspect that this book was written during one of the meth-and-marriage binges.


I really liked the little things, like how difficult the drive from Santa Barbara to Ojai is, or is not, depending on who is driving and why they are driving.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I very much enjoyed this, and I would rank it as second only to The Transmigration of Timothy Archer among PKD's non-science fiction novels. In fact, it reminded me of Timothy Archer at times, despite having been written some 25 years earlier.

Unlike most of PKD's oeuvre, this is not a novel about Big Crazy Ideas, it's a novel about characters. And here he shows that he really can write great characters and deft prose. In comparison to so much of his work, which has that frantic, rushed, slapdash feel, Puttering feels careful and thoughtful. Virginia Lindahl and Liz Bonner are two fully fleshed out characters without the judgmental baggage that Dick piled on so many of his female characters. They are not necessarily likable, but they have flaws and strengths of their own. You know, like real people. Roger is more the typical shlubby PKD male protagonist, but even here, the author attempts to fill in more of the character's backstory, giving him a traumatic childhood and a life of bad breaks.

The care and authorial maturity that this book shows makes me a little sad, to be honest. Perhaps PKD's bad choices made him a good author. But here is a great novel written before he made most of those bad choices. If only Dick hadn't gotten addicted to prescription amphetamines, if only he'd gotten better psychiatric help when he went off the rails in the 60's, if only he'd been paid better during his lifetime. If only... he might have had the literary career he wanted. I love the crazy, bizarre, addled sci-fi PKD wrote. But if he'd kept it together a little better, maybe we could have had Big Crazy Ideas and Good Characters. With good, carefully written plots. Maybe he'd still be alive and working today.

I guess that's less a review of this book than a rumination on a talent that burned itself out too soon.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another early PKD realist work. The "small land" of the title is the TV&radio store that Roger Lindahl rules as his own domain. But the scope of this novel isn't small at all: we journey across the whole USA, from depression Arkansas to Washington DC in wartime to the aircraft plants of California and in the closing pages we're headed out to Chicago. The story is mostly within in the years 1952-4 but with flashbacks to earlier episodes. The social-observational detail is greatest, as Dick tries to capture the huge economic transformations and migrations that occurred between 1930 and 1950, and the corresponding cultural shifts. Black Americans won't stand for whitey pushing them around on the streets any more, whilst women are getting more assertive sexually and also in terms of power and keeping ownership of what they worked toward. There is a sense of class awareness, snobbery and suburban attitudes here as well, that we haven't seen in other early PKD works. There is a well-paced plot about infidelity and deception running here. In many ways Roger Lindahl is the typical "men's rights" hero, trapped 50 years before his time and with no idea how the world is changing around him (although he was materially gaining a lot from it).

Reading this in the awareness of the later SF: there is the perspective-shifting style that gets carried over in to the 60s novels. It's also notable that Roger suffers a sense of metaphysical instability, having a horrified vision of the dreadfulness of existence at one point (a passage that stands unique in Dick's writing, as far as I know); there is also an episode where he seems on the verge of breaking down in to hallucinations about the shop's intercom system. We're not so very far away from "Time Out Of Joint" in this world.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A co-worker recommended that I read this decidedly non-science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. I am so glad that I did. Puttering About in a Small Land is set during and just after WWII. It tells the story of an average working class couple and their son, as they struggle to find connections with other people and meaningful experiences in an overwhelmingly banal world. Just like he does in his science fiction, Dick has the characters question the legitimacy of their reality and fall into and out of flashbacks and hallucinatory fantasies that threaten to replace the less immersive present.

"What did anything mean? he wondered. And how did a person tell? We can never be certain. Not until our dying day. And maybe not even then. All of us, he thought, are down here fumbling around, guessing and calculating. Doing the best we can."

"...maybe I have got to the point when I see something in everything, because I want to see something. The next thing, he thought, is voices. I'll start hearing voices. What can I count on? What can I believe?"

"You invent it, he thought to himself. And then you maintain it until it's true."

"The feathers, from the heap, fly in clouds and fix themselves onto the turkey. The spray forms on the water, a figure rises feet-first from the water and ascends at great speed; the water collects and descends to cover the spot. Fragments of the burst balloon collect into the balloon again. The ground stirs and beneath it things move about. Through a crack, things are seen to be moving far below. And then the old withered senile things get up out of the ground; they sit up. They stand, they step out, they begin to wave their arms and talk. And gradually they return to the town and take up where they left off."

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of Dick's so-called "straight" novels. When I still lived deep in southern Virginia and worked in a steamy dishroom, I used to plumb the depths of the nearby university library for interesting books to read. In the midst of an obsessive haze, I read a series of Dick's straight novels one right after another: this one, In Milton Lumky Territory, and Confessions of a Crap Artist. I loved them all. Something at the time appealed to me about Dick's depictions of oddball characters struggling through life in 1950s California. There is something very real about these stories: family drama, relationship trouble, the weirdness of everyday people living barely concealed under a manufactured varnish of "normality." Dick's bitter satire of 1950s life in America holds just as much truth today as it did then. So many of us project outward what we perceive as "normal" and "acceptable" behavior, when on the inside we are anything but normal. And for what? To conform to a society sick with hypocrisy and manipulation? To get people to love us for what we know deep inside we aren't, but what we think we should be? Dick shows us in these novels that people are not round pegs that fit neatly into the corroded holes of society; they are real and society by nature is false, which leaves us to wonder why we are doing what we are doing in our lives.

[Marcos Francisco Muñoz · Rating 4 out of 5]

El Philip K. Dick que escribe ficción convencional es un primo hermano de Kafka y Carver que además de tener una perspectiva poco esperanzadora del mundo, construye personajes con un determinismo casi tan fatal como su propensión a pasar de las más inalterable inacción a la más alta iniciativa.
"Puttering about in small land", o como se la conoce en español "Ir tirando" nos cuenta la historia de una infidelidad, y... eso es básicamente todo. Pero es la manera en la que el autor se introduce en la mente de los personajes y su visión particular de la realidad la que hace que este libro sea más que una simple historia de algo que la eternización de un final.

Los fans de Dick encontrarán la manera en la que su estilo ha empezado y evolucionado, el resto encontrará una lectura más que disfrutable. Si bien, se nota que el autor disfruta sobremanera la descripción de paisajes y caminos.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Philip K. Dick, but Puttering About in a Small Land, a mainstream fiction novel written in the 50's but published after his death, bored me. It's the story of a married couple in 1950's Los Angeles, dealing with their small lives and the intersection with another couple whose children go to the same school as their own. While some may consider it a fascinating character study, I found the characters to be flat and uninteresting. Not one of his better works; recommended only for completionists.