And the story is disturbing, hilarious, and utterly believable because the reader, too, can’t help recognizing the truth when he sees it, however crazy it is. Charley attacks his wife because she makes him buy Tampax; it’s ridiculous, but who among us can fail to see the sanity underneath Charley’s madness? Who can fail to identify with Fay in her moments of self-realization, such as the following soliloquy? It’s funny, of course; but it’s too accurate not to also be painful:

Almost at once I felt, acutely, that I was a hysterical nut. They shouldn’t trust you with the phone, I said to myself. Getting up from the bed I paced around the bedroom. Now it’ll get all over town, I realized. Fay Hume calls up some people in Point Reyes and raves like a drunk. That’s what they’ll say: I was drunk. Sheriff Chisholm will be by to take me away. Maybe I ought to phone him myself and eliminate the middleman.

The reality of Philip Dick’s characters stems quite simply from the fact that they are real to him; he hears them talking, in his mind, and records their conversations and thoughts—his dialogue, in almost all of his novels, is excellent. He is especially good at capturing the interactions between people; the authenticity of his work lies not so much in what people say as in how they respond to each other. In a conversation in 1974, Dick told me, “Well, the idea of a single protagonist, I never could understand that too well… What I’ve felt is that problems are multipersonal, they involve us all, there’s no such thing as a private problem… .It’s only a form of ignorance, when I wake up in the morning, and I fall over the chair and break my nose, and I’m broke, and my wife’s left me—It’s my ignorance that makes me think I’m an entire universe and that these miseries are my own and they’re not affecting the rest of the world. If I could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody getting up and, in some analogous way, falling over a chair and breaking something.”