The Philip K. Dick Collection

Some long novels, Martin Amis once noted, are really short novels that happen to go on for a long time (indeed, he thinks "most long novels are this kind of long novel, where writers routinely devastate acres of woodland for their spy thrillers, space operas, family sagas and so on"). On the other hand some long novels that are long "because they have to be, earning their amplitude by the complexity of the demands they make on writer and reader alike." He doesn't talk about a third type: the short novel that is paradoxically a long novel. I don't mean a condensed book, or a fragment that hints at greatness; I mean that rare item, a book that folds magnitude into hidden dimensions within its narrow one-eighty-pages. Philip Dick wrote those sorts of novels...

Re-reading these four novels was a stirring experience. It is a reminder of the fact that for Dick, though not for lesser writers, the point of art is not to represent reality, nor to improve it, but in some salutary sense to break it; to work towards some sort of explosive point of spilling-out, or generic transcendence. And the recommendation: the Library of America "Four Novels of the 1960s" is a simply splendid little volume, one of the best ways of accessing four of Dick's best novels. These black covers have swallowed four major novels, but the spine is slender and the meal only expands in the reader's mind.