* Given the central role that Dick’s dead twin Jane Charlotte Dick played in the novels of the 1960s and early 1970s, it is significant that she surfaces here through a miswriting, a slip of the pen that inscribes “sister” instead of “savior.” Dick interprets this as the “ultimate abolition” of his karma, a final erasure of his guilt over her death. (“Somehow I got all the milk,” he said of her inadvertent death as an infant through malnutrition.) Given his intense identification with Christ during this period, the slip also aligns her with Christ and consequently with Dick’s feeling that Christ is in him and, in a certain sense, is him. Hence the slip also signifies the “ultimate restoration of what was lost.”—NKH
* Ultimately the value of the Exegesis lies not in its ideas but rather in the glimpse it provides into a creativity at once visionary and fractured, at once coming apart and striving heroically, in the only way a novelist can strive for such a thing, to keep himself together as a life nears its end in shambles, haunted by a dead twin sister whose own life was a month long, and defined by bouts of psychosis, a diorama of drugs, five marriages, suicide attempts, and financial destitution, real or imagined stalking by the FBI and IRS, literary rejection at its most stupid (which is to say destructive), and a Linda Ronstadt obsession. One takes the Exegesis seriously because one takes Dick seriously, not the other way around—because it’s his fiction that constitutes as significant a body of work as that of any writer in this country in the last sixty years, and because it’s his fiction that persuades us that Dick may be someone we remember who has yet to exist, writing books published around the time of the printing press, which was invented before the wheel and after voice-mail.—SE