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.

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Published posthumously in 1985, written in 1957, this is one of PKD's early-ish works, 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 thnk 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 emtionally. 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". ( )

Philip K. Dick is most famous for his outstanding science fiction. If you don't know why, I'll just mention Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, let you figure out the pop culture connection, and then let you continue your research into everything else he has done. What is less well known is his "regular" fiction – that is, fiction that is not "science fiction". (There has to be a name for it, but I can't think of what it is right this second. We'll just move on.)

This is a shame because Dick is a talented writer no matter what genre he tackles. Let's face it, if you can write in a way that makes the strange and unusual seem normal, then you should be able to make the normal seem normal.

What Dick does in this particular novel is put the reader right into the zeitgeist of 50s California. The novel starts with a wife driving her son to a private school outside of the Los Angeles basin. As Dick describes the wife, describes her relationship with her husband, describes the relationship with the son, describes the countryside and the city – as Dick puts all the pieces together, we are back in that time.

Now, keep in mind that this was written in the late 50s and for some writers it is very easy to assume the reader understands the times they are living in. Dick does not fall into this trap; he doesn't speak down or over explain to the reader. He uses his incredible skill to show without telling and, in the process, put us in the time and in that location.

The wife (Virginia) enrolls her son Gregg into a private school. Her husband, Roger, is not thrilled and actually drives back to un-enroll the son. On the separate trips they meet the Bonners – Liz and Chic – who also have children at the school. Gregg stays enrolled and, in the process, Roger finds himself thrown in with Liz, a slightly stereotypical 50s housewife. (I am not saying that Dick writes her as a stereotype – he fully fleshes her out. However, in a nutshell she is the airhead wife that many have come to associate with that time.) Liz and Roger become romantically entangled. Virginia and Chic become entangled in business. And, in the process we see people who are not happy with their lots in life, always grasping for greener grass. Each finds new grass, but it is hard to say what the final color is.

Again, masterful characterizations and "feel". However, (and maybe this is because Dick did too good a job of building his characters) they are not people with whom I enjoyed spending time. They are interesting – sometimes fascinating – but a touch too distasteful. As the book continued I began to see an analogy with John Updike's Rabbit. (Even Roger's final actions reminded me of something Rabbit would have done.) And the problem I saw was that, in spite of how dislikable Rabbit was, I found him more compelling – more readable – than the characters built by Dick.

Maybe it is that the book is shorter and there is less time for that full immersion into the character. Or maybe it is the cultural difference between east and west coast. Or maybe it just didn't hit me at the right time. But Virginia, Roger, Liz, and Chic just did not hold me as enthralled as Rabbit and his cast of characters.

Ultimately, this is a good book with great writing, but it is not a great book. ( )

I enjoyed this book, but reading a PKD straightforward novel is kind of like listening to Frank Zappa cover Peter Paul and Mary tunes. ( )

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. ( )