It can be difficult as a reviewer to be faced with a book that has earned adulation, or at least glowing advance press, seemingly across the board, that doesn't seem to have deserved any of the accolades. One hears of Dick as a "major literary figure," an ":important American writer," a "pulp-fiction Kafka," and the like. When faced with a novel like Voices from the Street, one has to wonder what these people have been smoking.

The truth of the matter is that Dick's reputation rests probably as much on the screen adaptations of his books as for the books themselves. In top form, Dick is chilling, a harbinger of the fundamental paranoia in societies that too much resemble the one we are living in. His best novels -- The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS -- are science fiction at a very high level. Dick was able to instill a hallucinatory quality into stripped down, straightforward narratives that has never really been equalled. He also wrote "mainstream" novels, which Jonathan Lethem has dubbed "proletarian realism." He was a terribly uneven writer, and interestingly enough, the manuscripts for most of the mainstream works are lost or were destroyed by Dick in his lifetime. Voices survived and now sees its first publication, which is perhaps not the best thing for Dick's reputation.

Stuart Hadley is, in a word, a loser. It's not that he fouls up whatever he does, but that he has so much trouble bringing himself to do anything to begin with. He is, according to his wife, a frustrated artist without the discipline that being an artist requires. He's twenty-five, attractive, has a steady job and a lovely wife, and at the beginning of the story they are expecting their first child. Hadley realizes that it's necessary that the child be a boy -- "it had to be an entity he understood. There were already too many things beyond his comprehension; his marriage had to remain a finite core around which he could collect himself."

And that, perhaps, is the definitive statement on Stuart Hadley: he has a wife who adores him, a boss who cuts him a lot of slack, and he can't get his act together because he has no idea who he is and it never occurs to him to find out. He's given to religious fanaticism, alcohol, the occasional bout of extra-marital sex, and we're never quite sure why. What is sure is his descent into chaos.

After that, he does find a sort of redemption, at the expense of everything he was or might have been. Oddly enough, the final section of the book, coming after the violent and destructive climax, is the only section in which Hadley becomes the least bit of a sympathetic character. (I am not the only one to wonder why anyone else in the book put up with him at all.) It's a happy ending built on no discernible foundations.

Voices from the Street, at about 300 pages, is easily 100 pages too long, and those hundred pages happen before the book should have begun. It's barely readable, and one is so fed up with Hadley so soon that actually finishing the book becomes a matter of addiction or dogged determination. This one is one for die-hard fans; the rest of us would do better to concentrate on his really good stuff.

The official Philip K. Dick Web site seems to have been subsumed in Thephildickian.com.