Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

by Philip K. Dick

In a near-future dystopian America (the impossibly far-flung year of 1988!) ruled by a brutal police network, civil liberties have collapsed, prisoners go to forced labor camps, students are criminals and colleges besieged, minorities have been all but exterminated, and identification is everything. (Sounds sadly familiar, actually.) The story follows Jason Taverner, a famous and beloved TV talk show host and singer. After an attack by a disgruntled ex, he wakes up to find that no one knows who he is. He has no ID, his show never aired, he doesn't exist in the files, and not even his friends remember him. Taverner goes underground to piece together what's happened, and the novel spins out into a surreal, psychological journey involving shifting realities, drug-induced revelations, strange coincidences, and the growing suspicion that something metaphysical is at play.

This is familiar ground for PKD in a few ways: the paranoiac who happens to be correct about his paranoia, the drug use, the uneasy sense of being unmoored from reality, the psycho-babble exposition, the futuristic gadgets side by side with vinyl LPs and phone booths. The book's main hook, the terror of waking up in a universe where one doesn't exist, is intriguing. And there's a lot of tense exploration of identity and power. You can feel Dick’s fear of authoritarianism baked into every scene, especially the ones involving the brutal, manipulative cops. But he also can write with real emotional vulnerability. There are sections about grief and loss that don't really jibe with the novel's whole vibe, but are weirdly tender and you get the sense that Dick is grappling with what it means to be known, to be loved, to exist at all. As with a lot of Dick's work, it gets messy. The plot spirals and loses momentum, and there are strange narrative turns that distract from the overall story arc. It's not exactly an enduring SF classic, but it's not a self-indulgent oddity either, which some Dick stories are. It's emotionally resonant and succeeds at creating a suspenseful, tense world ruled by fear of authority. Definitely worth reading, especially if you're into cerebral, reality-questioning science fiction; just be prepared for some druggy meandering.  

four stars 

I'm Down

by Mishna Wolff

A memoir of the author's childhood up to about the age of 14. She is the white daughter of European-white parents, but her father apparently wanted to be close to black culture, so lived in a black neighborhood, had black friends, played dominoes, listened to soul music, and had black girlfriends. At school, Wolff is mocked for being white and clueless, but later on she scores highly on some aptitude tests and is moved to a private school with rich, white students, who find her mannerisms a little strange, Through it all, Wolff must deal with her father, who comes across in the memoir as a loving but hard-ass loser who can’t finish projects or hold down a job. When he marries a girl only ten years older than Mishna, the stepmother demands Mishna get a job at the age of 14, despite her maintaining a 4.0 at school and being involved in several extracurriculars.

I picked up this book because I thought it might have something interesting to say about race in America, how Wolff was too white for the black kids and too black for the white kids, but it only very briefly touches on race. Why was her father so interested in a culture that wasn’t his own? What kinds of cultural barriers were erected by her living in the neighborhood? These questions aren't answered or even addressed. Is race a huge factor in her social standing? Not really, she makes friends in both schools with no more trouble than most quiet, introspective kids. It is a funny memoir in parts, but in other parts I had to put it down briefly, the demands her father and stepmother putting on her so hostile as to edge on to emotional abuse. This isn't a book about race or culture; it's the memoir of a girl living in a poor neighborhood, who went to a rich school. It's told in an episodic manner, with the stories not building on each other or leading to any real insights. It certainly must also be at least a little fictionalized, as her lengthy conversations at the ages of 10-14 can’t be all that accurately recorded years later.