VALIS is an intensely rational portrait of a kind of madness, of doubling, doppelgangers, and split personalities, of reality, coincidence, and paranoia, of messages, everyday life, and divine intervention. That makes the novel sound a bit better than it actually is. The narrative is an odd mix of petty, personal problems--a friend's suicide, another dying of cancer, the (well, one half of) the protagonist's marital problems--and living gnostic revelation and knowledge. I mean, was God even possible in 1974? Seems unlikely to me.

In terms of form, the novel is all conversational. This is disarming when the hand of God/VALIS steps in to disrupt Orange County 1974 with the blue light of revelation. But perhaps that's how such things happen to the enlightened. Never having been shown the rending of the veil, I cannot say. The reasonable and personal tone is, however, perfect for speaking so intimately about the split personality of the narrator, who is BOTH Phillip K. Dick and his other half Horselover Fat (a translation of Philip from the Greek and Dick from German). I admired the technique of the narrator telling us that he both is and is not Fat, that they are depicted by turns as the same person and not the same person, depending upon the mental health of the author/narrator. It gives you a real sense of a mind divided between our so-called "Observable reality" and the truth of our limited perceptions and how some arrive at points of departure from what the rest of us more or less agree to call "The truth." The disarming technique of describing what anyone on the outside would call irrationality in a rational, educated, and personal manner brought home the dire stakes of mental illness. Knowing that you are mad does not effect the madness. This is so hard to take when one is on the outside of the reasoning of the illness itself and teaches us much about our mental concept of reality and how deeply flawed our senses and brian are in registering the world around us yet how secure we feel in these limited perceptions, impressions, and our interpretations of them.

It should be noted, for the literati, that such an interior narrative technique is all tell and no show, and would certainly induce vomiting in Iowa Writers' Workshop zombies, and that I enjoyed the technique very much. Writing is too important to sully with rules. I mean to say, I know I've only given this three stars, but it's a million times better than anything Cormac McCarthy or Paul Auster has ever written. I enjoyed it up to a point. It got a bit tedious towards the end as there's not much in the way of event--a sparkle off of a necklace, a super-wise two year old's conversation--but I did get caught up in that rational voice telling me so many things that cannot be, that I believe cannot be, that I realized we don't really know much of anything, but arrive at reality almost wholly through our imagination. This would be, I guess, why I prefer novels to the texts of those in denial of this, the so-called non-fiction books.