Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Magnum Books, Methuen Paperbacks. (1979), Paperback, 172 pages
Description
Jack Isidore is a crap artist -- a collector of crackpot ideas (among other things, he believes that the earth is hollow and that sunlight has weight) and worthless objects, a man so grossly unequipped for real life that his sister and brother-in-law feel compelled to rescue him from it. But seen through Jack's murderously innocent gaze, Charlie and Juddy Hume prove to be just as sealed off from reality, in thrall to obsessions that are slightly more acceptable than Jack's, but a great deal uglier.
User reviews
LibraryThing member donaldmorgan
Dick is a terrible writer. I've read 3 or 4 of his books, all of which seemed more or less half-baked, and finally decided to give this one a chance , hoping that maybe, just maybe, there would be something good about it. I threw it down 3/4 of the way through, bored out of my mind. The language is
Show More
flat and awkward, the characters are more like shadows of characters. It's a real clunker. If you enjoy the music of sentences, keep Dick out of your bookshelves. Show Less
LibraryThing member melydia
Jack Isidore is a "crap artist" who collects crackpot theories and lives his life as though a scientific observer instead of an active player. Fay and Charley (Jack's sister and brother-in-law) decide he is not capable of supporting himself in normal society, so take him in to live with them in
Show More
their giant house in the country. Fay and Charley have problems of their own. While no single character in genuinely sympathetic, Jack's naive observations of dramatic events entertained me in a way similar to Star Trek's Data and his confusion when humans react differently than he expects.It's an initially confusing book, and takes a little while to get into its groove. It swaps point of view nearly every chapter, alternating between first-person Jack, first-person Fay, third-person Charley, or third-person Nat Anteil (their neighbor). (The fact that the back of the book incorrectly refers to Charley and Fay as Charlie and Judy didn't help matters either.) Once you pick up on this it's fairly easy to distinguish narrators and becomes an interesting study in different people's opinions on the same events, and the effect these differences have on the outcome. You can see the tragedy coming a mile away but still can't believe it when it actually happens, which is a feeling I hadn't encountered in a book for a long time. The ending was somewhat abrupt but generally satisfying. Show Less
LibraryThing member jezzaboogie
Genre jump; shifting first person, confusion, need notice early; frank, stark, honest, "Ouch, I think those things" a la DFW.
LibraryThing member CliffBurns
Phil always pined for mainstream acceptance and CRAP ARTIST is one of his more successful attempts at veering away from the tropes (and traps) of SF. An entertaining and well-executed novel...
LibraryThing member nmele
I had not read this Dick novel previously, and found myself experiencing cognitive dissonance since much of it takes place in rural Marin county, a real place, and much of that action is surreal without being science fictional: no Mars, no radioactive dust, no androids, and yet somehow this is of a
Show More
piece with novels like "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "Martian Time Slip". As I read and reread Dick, I am becoming persuaded that he is one of the most significant American novelists of the last century. Show Less
LibraryThing member librarianbryan
[review 1]
pig hearts
[review 2]
I must admit I am a little perplexed. I’ve never been one for novels in which bourgeois jerks act like jerks and we’re supposed to snicker / cry. It’s an entire sub-genre of American literature I have intentionally censured on ideological grounds. So how this
What I can’t get out of my head is notion that Jack Isidore is PKD. In the words of Charlie Hume, “haven't you ever faced the fact that you're a warped, stunted, asshole type?” Fresh off the Exegesis, I feel like Dick is confessing all that was just made up. Interesting though that Confessions was written in 1959. The events which supposedly inspired the Exegesis occurred in winter/spring 1974. Considering all the Time is Going Backwards shit in Exegesis, the pair, arguable Dick’s most mundane and far out works respectively, represent some kind of thesis and antithesis.
Perhaps what we are supposed to get from this book, and this is exactly what I took from the Exegesis, is that PKD was kind, gentle but complex (read: all mixed up) person.
His oeuvre, like any, has its own internal logic. How can it not? That oeuvre is both beautiful and strange. If it is beautiful, how can it not be true?
footnote:
The presentation of this edition is a travesty. Terribly designed cover with no relation to the text and typos on the back. Terrible.
pig hearts
[review 2]
I must admit I am a little perplexed. I’ve never been one for novels in which bourgeois jerks act like jerks and we’re supposed to snicker / cry. It’s an entire sub-genre of American literature I have intentionally censured on ideological grounds. So how this
Show More
particular book stacks up with the rest of that is a little up in the air for me. I would take Lethem’s word that it stacks up lickity split but really I can’t believe it considering what makes Dick horrible, aka bad writing, is on display in dollops here. Dick’s low brow epistemological pipe bombs don’t quite work in a world wherein the telepathy is patently false. Diffuse the bomb, diffuse the beauty.What I can’t get out of my head is notion that Jack Isidore is PKD. In the words of Charlie Hume, “haven't you ever faced the fact that you're a warped, stunted, asshole type?” Fresh off the Exegesis, I feel like Dick is confessing all that was just made up. Interesting though that Confessions was written in 1959. The events which supposedly inspired the Exegesis occurred in winter/spring 1974. Considering all the Time is Going Backwards shit in Exegesis, the pair, arguable Dick’s most mundane and far out works respectively, represent some kind of thesis and antithesis.
Perhaps what we are supposed to get from this book, and this is exactly what I took from the Exegesis, is that PKD was kind, gentle but complex (read: all mixed up) person.
His oeuvre, like any, has its own internal logic. How can it not? That oeuvre is both beautiful and strange. If it is beautiful, how can it not be true?
footnote:
The presentation of this edition is a travesty. Terribly designed cover with no relation to the text and typos on the back. Terrible.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jessicariddoch
This book is not what I expected form this author. From someone who wrote Do androids dream of electric sheep we have a book about a couple living in the countryside outside of (american city in california that I cannot remember the name of it as it was not that important to the story. It is a
Lucky for me I do like non science fiction and this is a well written book. The people are falling appart and this is causing the world as they like to think it fall appart too. The brother who at the beggining of the book comes to stay with them details this, It is rather weird as he reports the important facts to his brother-in-law, as to what they are.
Despite the prediction of one of the periferal characters the world does not end.
I would now reccomend this author to non scence fiction readers. it is good
Show More
story of a couple who are breaking up, and the brother of the wife who has a strange compulsion with strange facts. I would guess today he would be diagnosed with aspergiers or something.Lucky for me I do like non science fiction and this is a well written book. The people are falling appart and this is causing the world as they like to think it fall appart too. The brother who at the beggining of the book comes to stay with them details this, It is rather weird as he reports the important facts to his brother-in-law, as to what they are.
Despite the prediction of one of the periferal characters the world does not end.
I would now reccomend this author to non scence fiction readers. it is good
Show Less
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
A surrealistic novel of family conflict, set in California's Marin County, in the 1950's. It has a Steinbeck quality, and many of Dick's science fiction memes are demonstrated by the narrator, who watches the destruction of his sister's nuclear family. It is not so much fun as "Androids".
Apparently
Apparently
Show More
written by 1959. Show Less
LibraryThing member greeniezona
I forgot when I packed this for my trip that this is Dick's one non-sf novel. While it drags a bit in places, it ends up being a cutting send-up of the upper-middle-class in Northern California in the 50s. Everyone in this book is terrible -- but mostly in interesting ways. I spent most of the book
I probably wouldn't have read this had it been by anyone else, but it was fascinating to see Dick's non-genre work.
Show More
swinging wildly between rooting for Jack's probably sociopathic sister Fay and rooting for her comeuppance. In some ways Jack seems the most sane of the bunch, until he falls in with an end-of-the-world group and things feel for a bit like they're on more familiar Dick territory.I probably wouldn't have read this had it been by anyone else, but it was fascinating to see Dick's non-genre work.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Braden_Timss
Could have been edited down a lot. Dick repeats himself, takes a long time narrating irrelevant things, and I don't believe all of it is deliberate. It makes for a really boring book. And what's more is that it is just so misanthropic, without any interesting edge to it. But I don't know. Maybe
It's also worth saying that this book is uncharacteristically misogynistic for a PKD book. In his other books it's clear that PKD is like pathetically in love with women, but the mechanism of this book relies so much on this nasty view of men and women. It's just a bad picture I think no matter how you look at it.
Show More
this says something really insightful about middle-class families in the American 1950s, as the back of the book says? Lives boring and comfortable like those bred contempt and self-sabotaging behavior, I guess. Fair enough. But the book is just a depressing and boring drag, even if it might have some true observations. And that's only if it does. It's also worth saying that this book is uncharacteristically misogynistic for a PKD book. In his other books it's clear that PKD is like pathetically in love with women, but the mechanism of this book relies so much on this nasty view of men and women. It's just a bad picture I think no matter how you look at it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member zetetic23
The first non sci fi PKD book I have read and I enjoyed it. Very easy to read, a few characters that he regularly uses in his novels. Excellent comparison of a 'not normal' person with some so called 'normal' people. I really enjoyed the chapters that were told from the perspective of the brother,
Show More
very detailed and often OCD view of the world. I much liked how he described people driving on the roads that they were familiar with. Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1975
Physical description
172 p.; 17.8 cm
ISBN
0417042906 / 9780417042909
Local notes
Omslag: Claydon, Hook and Mann
Omslaget viser en iturevet plakat hvor en pige i en voldsomt stor bh sidder oven på en stor citron eller appelsin. Plakatens tekst er "Confessions of a". Resten er rykket af og en grafittimaler har tilføjet Crap Artist.
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Omslaget viser en iturevet plakat hvor en pige i en voldsomt stor bh sidder oven på en stor citron eller appelsin. Plakatens tekst er "Confessions of a". Resten er rykket af og en grafittimaler har tilføjet Crap Artist.
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Similar in this library
Pages
172
DDC/MDS
| 813.54 |