Voices from the Street

By Philip K. Dick

Book Overview

Stuart Hadley is a young radio electronics salesman in early 1950s Oakland, California. He has what many would consider the ideal life; a nice house, a pretty wife, a decent job with prospects for advancement, but he still feels unfulfilled; something is missing from his life. Hadley is an angry young man - an artist, a dreamer, a screw-up. He tries to fill his void first with drinking, and sex, and then with religious fanaticism, but nothing seems to be working, and it is driving him crazy.He reacts to the love of his wife and the kindness of his employer with anxiety and fear. One of the earliest books that Dick ever wrote, and the only novel that has never been published,? Voices from the Street is the story of Hadley's descent into depression and madness, and out the other side. Most known in his lifetime as a science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick is growing in reputation as an American writer whose powerful vision is an ironic reflection of the present. This novel completes the publication of his canon.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765316927
• ISBN13: 9780765316929
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 301 Pages
• Weight: 1.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A superb portrait of mental illness...

Based on some of the other reviews, I think a lot of people will miss the whole point of this novel. I think the underlying cause of Stuart Hadley's discontent with his world is that he is mentally ill, more than likely clinically depressed. I have the same condition and I identified with Hadley's character a lot. Everyone in Hadley's life is trying to stuff him into a box from his wife at home, his sister and brother-in-law, to his boss at a television store. Hadley doesn't know what he wants out of life and everyone around him tries to make that decision for him - which, if you know anyone with severe depression, is the worst thing one could do for a depressed person. It only pisses them off more. His mental illness amplifies everything he does and how he thinks. He goes to extremes in thoughts and deeds, trying to find something that satisfies him. Some reviewers say that the character whined too much. Hadley does whine a lot but in my opinion, that is another indication of his emotional ailments. Hadley is a lot like the alcoholic who tries to switch from liquor to beer to wine to try and find a way to face life and the ups and downs that go with it. He throws himself into a religious cult, an affair, and eventually, a plan to completely reinvent himself. His descent into madness is violent and destructive. Call me crazy (hah, I would), but I think a lot of people have acted like Hadley at least once in their lives but would be too self-conscious to admit it and that is why they find Hadley so distasteful. The one thing in the novel that I would criticize most is that Philip K Dick cannot write realistic women characters. But that is true for a lot of his novels. All of Dick's female characters seem to be these neurotic, half-witted twits. This book is NOT science fiction although it can be found with all of Dick's other sci fi novels in your big box bookstores. There is nothing science fiction about it. If you're expecting Dick's characteristic science fiction, you won't find it here. Reviewers have said that a bad thing about this novel is that it's depressing. Yeah, it is but then again it's about a very sick man. Whoever would expect this novel to be light-hearted and fun should skip reading it and go back to watching TMZ.

Brilliant, disturbing -this man was a great writer.

I've been reading P.K. Dick since 1975. I read his 'Confessions of A Crap Artist' in the late 1970s and loved it, but thought it was more or less a kind of one-off mainstream novel. And now we have 'Voices From the Street', 'Humpty Dumpty In Oakland', and 'In Milton Lumky Territory', the last two of which I haven't yet read. One might hope this particular posthumous Dickien mainstream vault was bottomless because the stuff is so good, however the introduction to 'Voices' seems to indicate that this novel is it, the last one. Too bad. This is a brilliant book. Not perfect by any means, but withering and harrowing in its honest and uncompromising points of view, devastating in its portrayal of America, that supposed materialistic paradise, in the early 1950s. The writing is wonderful. The characters are fascinating, if anything but sympathetic, and it is impossible to predict exactly what is going to happen, although there is a definite aura of doom about the book from page one. The time and setting of the novel are evocative and even nostalgic in a perverse kind of way; you might think of it as a kind of subversive mid-20th Century West Coast time capsule. Just about everyone in the book is lost or floundering. The ones who haven't sold out and are clinging on grimly to cheap materialistic values take desperate lunges for that something missing in their lives, but they for the most part end up unhappier than the duller, more plodding majority. The most basic, simple human relationships don't seem to work. There is fear, hostility and outright hatred between races, and between those with differing political and religious beliefs. Violence seethes just below the surface. The whole society is sick. Maybe the whole world is sick. After reading the first chapter, I felt the author was making a pretty good case for there being something wrong with life itself. One of the most pathetic characters in the book, Horace Wakefield, a middle-aged recluse who works in a flower shop and belongs to a Jehovah Witness-type cult that reveres a charismatic black man with an end-of-the-world message, actually comes across in the end as one of the most grounded people in the book, 'Wakefield winced. Fingers trembling, he straightened his tie, smoothed down his coat; he pulled himself upright and faced Hadley. "You can't," he said hoarsely. "You're living in a crazy world Stuart. It isn't possible to cut out a neat little pattern; this is a world of war and lunatics, and you're in it whether you like it or not." Leaning towards Hadley, he grated: "In a crazy world, it's the nuts who know what's going on".' And yet the gloom is relieved by scintillating angles of dark humour that flash by when least expected. With Dick the unexpected is always expected and that saves a gritty, uncompromising work like this from being oppressive. This book compares well with Richard Yates' 'Revolutionary Road', which was written at about the same tim

The last PKD book?

I first started reading Philip K. Dick in 1983, back when he was just beginning to get some real recognition. Since then, I have owned and read practically everything he's written and enjoyed most of it. Some of this was posthumously published, typically works from his early writing days that had never been printed: books like Mary and the Giant or The Broken Bubble, which are not science fiction. Voices from the Street is another such novel, and according to the book jacket, is the last unpublished novel of Dick's. The protagonist in Voices is Stuart Hadley, a television salesman in 1952 Oakland. It is in some ways, a troubled time on the world stage, with the Korean War raging on and the threat of nuclear war hovering over everyone. These events are just part of the problems plaguing Hadley, who is alternately bored and frightened by his life. Superficially, things should be good: he has a loving wife, a child soon to arrive and a decent - if rather low-paying - job that may offer better opportunities. Seeking to fill a void in his life, Hadley attends a religious service held by a small, apocalyptic sect led by a charismatic preacher. This in turn will eventually connect him with a woman who simultaneously attracts and repels him. But answers to the depression that hangs over him will not be easily obtained, and things gradually fall apart. Hadley is a typical Dick hero, a middle-class, rather ordinary man whose life begins to get more and more out of control. He is occasionally rather unlikable, due to his petty bigotries and sullen attitude. In other words, he is a three-dimensional character, as are the other people in this tale. So why did Voices from the Street remain unpublished? I'm sure part of the reason is that it doesn't belong to a genre and may have been harder to sell. Also, it may not have been good enough to merit publishing; the only reason it is in print now is because of who wrote it. It is essentially a book for Philip K. Dick completists only; while not bad (I would rate it a low four stars), it only has bits of what made Dick so great. However, if you are a Dick fan, this is a good look at his early writing.

Captivating

The characters are almost uniformly annoying; there were many points in the book where I wanted to throttle one of them. It's a depressing story with a depressing ending. Nonetheless, this was a captivating book, quite well written. Watching these nuanced characters try to make a buck, try to figure out the world, try to figure themselves out, was fascinating. I would recommend it to Philip K. Dick fans and to others. I don't think I'd put this book among Dick's absolute best, but it is quite good. (In case someone reading this thinks PKD only wrote science fiction: that's not the case. He wrote a number of books that are not even remotely science fiction, and this is one of them.) Early in the book there are various anti-Semitic and racist comments that I found jarring. I initially dismissed them as products of the time. They turned out to be precursors to important plot points. Lots of issues are explored, agonized over. Few if any are resolved. The book stimulated a lot of confusing thought for me, part of what I really liked about it.

Quietly chilling, perhaps his best "writing"

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, though I have to say it has disturbing moments (some may not "enjoy" being disturbed in reading, I have to say that I do). I found myself both identifying with and repelled from Stuart Hadley, the centerpiece character in the novel. This created moments of reading the novel that were surprising and moving. Though the overall tone of the novel is dark, and much of Dick's characteristic humor is not as overtly drawn as in other novels, the subject matter will interest fans of his work, especially fans of his posthumously published "mainstream" novels. (Mainstream? Hardly. That was the problem for publishers!) My guess is that this was written in the Point Reyes Station period, around "The Man in the High Castle" and "The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike" (maybe this should be titled "The Man who Was So Afraid to Risk" or some similar title!) The writing I feel is a superb example of what Dick was capable of creating with patience and passion. Descriptive passages evoke sudden moods, action sequences race or crawl appropriately with swift shifts that jar and disturb. I am not sure if there was much editorial revision or intervention at play in this manuscript, I suspect perhaps not, and it may well be better for it. It seems to take just the right path and pace to unfold. Recommended for Philip K. Dick fans. I view it (right at this moment) as one of his best. (Scandalous?)