Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1970)

I think I'd be a little surprised to hear anyone name this as a favorite Philip K. Dick novel, but it's serviceable enough, with lots of familiar Dick touches: drugs, anomie, near-future totalitarianism, and reality marked as much as anything by its elasticity and fungibility. It involves a celebrity performer, a singer and TV talk-show host who inevitably put me in mind of Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin. He is fabulously wealthy and much beloved, not to mention "a six," which apparently makes him a type of superhuman. Merv Griffin as the model of a superman is likely a stretch to all (save Griffin and the fictional Cosmo Kramer) but never mind. After suffering an attack by an ex-girlfriend, our hero Jason Taverner comes to in a world that has never heard of him. What's more, he has no personal identification documents, and that makes him illegal. Getting to the bottom of this vexing mix-up provides the narrative arc. Not surprisingly, the resolution involves parallel realities accessed via experimental new drugs. A lot of the Dick novels I've been reading and writing about likely make good starting points, I think, and this is probably another. It's weird, it's mind-bending enough, and it's delivered in a deadpan American idiom that is at once homey and dissociative. He's reliable for that. He's best on drugs and mental illness, somehow getting inside the head of strange ways of perceiving, and thinking, and then, even more remarkably, smuggling that sense into the reader's head. "Trippy" really covers it. He's less good on sex—on the one hand that's good, because he's not inclined to pro forma steamy sex scenes that have cluttered up so many things the past 50 years or so. On the other hand, he's bad on sex. There's a notably repugnant incest thread in this one, made worse by strains of BDSM stereotyping, with "leather" and "bondage" and stuff. I found it off-putting, but I was also listening to Frank Zappa albums at the time for another project, a bad combination. Dick is not good on relationships either. But he's very good on loneliness, dysthymia, alienation, and the yearning to escape. He thinks of places to escape that no one before him ever had, and sometimes it seems now that's all we can think of. Read enough of his stuff and you start to understand what a stamp he made.

In case it's not at the library.