The other shoe drops

As expected, writer and editor Jonathan Lethem used his talk at the Cooper Union last night to announce the contents of the second Library of America volume devoted to Philip K. Dick. Along with the unassailable 1970s choices of A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Lethem has included Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney and Now Wait for Last Year.

Aside from the weak and gimmicky Now Wait for Last Year, the other choices are at least debatable. Personally, I’d have dropped one or the other in favor of a meaty selection of PKD’s short stories, but then my telephone number obviously isn’t in the Rolodex at the Library of America’s editorial office. There’s really no faulting Lethem on any of his choices, and plenty to applaud in the way he’s helped bring respectability to an American master who spent his life confined within the “Sci-Fi Guy” ghetto.

The absence of VALIS leads one Philophile to suggest that LoA may have a third volume planned for the “trilogy” of VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, but I have my doubts. Adam Gopnik’s much-debated essay in The New Yorker concluded that Dick was out of his mind while he conceived and wrote those books; I prefer to think his obsessions had finally gotten the better of him. Either way, they’re hugely overrated by the fans. When this second tome comes out, the Library of America will have placed the cream of the man’s work under its big black umbrella. Hooray for that.