A powerful act of symbolic magic

Michael Bishop’s Philip K. Dick is dead, alas, first published as The Secret Ascension, postulates an inverse, parallel universe wherein noted science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) is well-known as a writer of mainstream literary fiction but unrecognized as a fantasist. Besides being theoretical in this way, which gesture is in itself a tribute to Dick as a master of speculative fiction, the book is also an homage to Dick’s particular writerly style—replicating aspects of his technique, like multiple third-person narratives and plots converging.

The novel opens with two such plots—in the first, a man (the late Dick in a "resurrection body") appears at psychologist Liz Bonner’s private practice complaining of amnesia and proposing its cure in characteristic writerly diction—using words like “anamnesis,” literally “the opposite of forgetfulness”, unnerving her with his unusual manner. The second narrative relates a day in the life of Bonner's husband, Cal Pickford, an employee at the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium, who discovers Dick's obituary soaked in urine while cleaning a cage at his job. This is the first of many such overlays, all eventually to converge in a conclusion described by one reader as “uncanny.”

It’s a powerful act of symbolic magic, employing the psychic and emotional residue of a recently departed figure of public history as the nuts and bolts of fictional fabric, an act of psychic cannibalism both literal and figurative, perhaps precisely the sort of obscenely intimate appropriation J.D. Salinger seeks to oppose with his current legal action against Fredrik Colting or “J.D. California,” author of Sixty Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. One difference is that Bishop’s work with Philip K. Dick is dead,alas is obviously a tribute wrought with love, while Colting’s book is apparently a sort of cynical “Whatever happened to Holden?” Another difference is that Salinger is still among the living. It remains to be seen who'll be first to kidnap Farrah Fawcett’s image in this way, let alone Michael Jackson’s, but it’s only a matter of time.
 

To read my review of Tessa B. Dick's The Owl In Daylight, click HERE