In the years from about 1955 to 1960 Philip K. Dick wrote a series of novels that are framed in a style of grim, everyday realism. They are not SF. All concern small-town or suburban life in the forties or fifties; all centre on conflict between the sexes, and the most powerful (The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, Puttering About in a Small Land, and Confessions of a Crap Artist) concern bitter marital conflict. All struggle to attain metaphorical resonance and, simply, narrative excitement, though all are telling, shocking and observant in many passages. None was published at the time—Confessions of a Crap Artist, probably the best, and certainly the one that approaches Dick's SF in its offbeat humour, appeared in 1975, the rest after Dick's death. They have not received much discussion and it is not hard to see why. A story by John Cheever, a play such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a film such as The Graduate compensates the reader for its unsparing depiction of the emptiness and desolation of family life in the contemporary suburbs with some exuberance of language or elegance of form. Noir films and novels from the forties and fifties are at least vividly dark, and tightly plotted. ‘Adult’ films of the fifties, similarly interested in sexual issues, offer melodramatic confrontations and resolutions.

There are pleasures for the reader of Dick's fifties realism, but not of this liberating order. As for those who enjoy Dick's SF, remembering the amazing inventions, wholesale transformations and menacing exercises of power over reality that are on offer, they may be struck by a glum remark of Leo Runcible: ‘When you live small you think small’ (Teeth, ch. 10, 130). These are novels of frustrated repetition rather than transformation. They offer acrid observations, not startling vistas. (The question of whether these novels do incorporate at least glimpses of larger vistas will be taken up later, in discussions of Confessions and Teeth.) These novels resemble boxing matches—the characters batter away at each other in a confined space, take a breather, do it again, until we begin to fear brain damage. The fighters are flailing painfully; no one dances like a butterfly and stings like a bee in this contest.