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A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Police informant in a dystopic future America begins to fracture his consciousness as he takes increasing quantities of drugs to maintain his cover.

Hm. This is a confused, rather disarticulated book, so I have no problem talking about it in the same manner:

• Like a lot of dystopic futures, this one feels incredibly dated. Dystopias are projected anxieties, and this particular projection of America rapidly losing the drug war is so specific to Dick's personal trauma, and to a specific moment in American culture, that it's hard to understand now. If nothing else, it's bizarre to read a novel about illegal drug usage which is not also, fundamentally, about race, which is something this book is almost entirely oblivious to. But Dick wasn't having those conversations because their cultural moment had not yet arrived.
• Speaking of dated, it's also difficult to really appreciate a book which so thoroughly rejects the notion of addiction as illness. Dick specifically set out to write about what drugs did to his generation the way other scifi authors write about a meteor striking earth. Like an extinction event, some unstoppable natural force that just . . . happened to all of them. And yet they all chose it, or so he says in the afterword. And yet again, he's clearly conflicted; almost no one in the novel gets the drug origin story – the first hit, all that – except for a very few people. And with only one exception I can think of, they were all forced into addiction – raped and forcibly injected, etc. etc. It's all self-contradictory and conflicted and vaguely embarrassing in the way novels about personal trauma can be. Like, throw your dirty laundry out on the lawn, that's cool. That's good art, sometimes. But at least look at it as clear-eyed as you can first.
• This actually is a good book, from a craft perspective. For obvious reasons, Dick could really put his finger on the pathetic/hilarious/dreamy thing. Except he did it too well, because this book is roughly 60% conversations among stoned people, and you guys, for real. Stoned people are annoying. So fucking annoying. So he really got that part, and it made a lot of this a miserable slog.
• I don't know. When you come right down to it, I just didn't like this. I thought it was shallow and indecisive, with that particular helpless sort of nihilism that I neither respect nor enjoy. Revelations about the nature of identity? Sure, I guess, if you've never, you know, read about that before, ever. Also, it is really hard for me not to laugh at a book when the author informs me that "There is no moral in this novel: it is not bourgeois." I mean, lol.




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