In Milton Lumky Territory (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
So it might surprise folks that In Milton Lumky Territory, a very posthumously published piece of Philip K. Dick's literary fiction, is in many ways the strangest and most uncanny of his works I've ever read. Then again it might not; it's still Philip K. Dick, after all.What makes it uncanny is the veneer of surreality -- if not unreality -- that the years have lain over its basic story of three characters whose neuroses get in the way of communicating, who are so worried about how they're coming across that they're not coming through. But it's not the characters or their strained, pained interactions (which are as beautifully and compellingly rendered as anything in highbrow White Male Narcissist literature) that make reading this novel so weird.Its their world. Banal, ordinary, mundane, but also, through the action of time and economic upheaval, harder to believe could have ever been real than any Martian colony or post-apocalyptic California or urban techno-dystopia or tank full of humanoids engineered for another planet that Dick concocted.In Milton Lumky Territory depicts an insignificant backwater in mid-century America, but its an America with a functioning manufacturing economy, in which it's quite possible for ordinary schmoes like PKD's typical barely competent boob-heroes to make a living, own a house, start or acquire a business, travel great distances by car just on the off-chance of maybe finding a warehouse full of newly-imported, as yet unknown and unmarketed Japanese typewriters* that can be bought cheap and sold in their downtown stores in places like Boise, Idaho not just for a profit but for enough to live on comfortably.Fascinatingly and probably unintentionally also, In Milton Lumky Territory depicts the seeds of this economy's doom. One of the main characters, Bruce, starts off the novel working as a buyer for one of those newfangled discount houses, the ancestors to today's big box stores, before meeting Susan and letting himself be suckered into her dream of making something of her little two-bit typing and mimeographing business. There's also the aforementioned Japanese import typewriters Bruce is hankering to find and sell, the first wave of globalization and the downfall of an economy in which American businesses build durable and useful goods to be sold, used and repaired and used again in America.It feels almost like PKD is taunting us, we who live in what can be argued is one version or another of his post-apocalyptic techno-dystopias he later created when he gave up on being a highbrow literary novelist and turned to science fiction and pulp to make his living. If only we'd been satisfied with what we had back then, maybe we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. We could have lived in this novel, but instead, we had to break things and ruin things, let in globalization and inflation and deregulation and union-busting and general plutocracy.But all this is just rich modern subtext to the experience of reading In Milton Lumky Territory. There is also the actual story, a soap opera plot in which Bruce and Susan meet (again**) and sort of back into deciding they're in love and should marry their fortunes together and encounter the title character, Milton Lumky, who is a traveling typewriter and typing supplies salesman (that there could be such a profession!), only to alienate him and then belatedly find they need him, for he perhaps holds the secret to finding the golden opportunity of Bruce's theoretical warehouse full of languishing game-changing Japanese machines. The characters' interactions bristle with tension, with misunderstanding, with neuroses, with the drama of miscommunication and buried intentions and revelations that seem more than a little creepy.Which is to say that so many of the things we read PKD for are here, one does not miss the spaceships or the aliens or the revelation that the president is a robot.I know this world existed once. My parents have vivid memories of it and I trust their accounts. Its relics can still be found all around us (myself, I have three wonderful old manual typewriters, one from 1926, that all still work beautifully because they've been lovingly cared for and used well and kindly over the years by people who respected them and expected them to last). Those empty storefronts in your city's downtown used to be occupied by businesses like Susan's; those factory buildings weren't always chic yuppie loft condos.It's a lost world, and it's our own decisions, not a comet from space or a machine uprising or a nuclear misunderstanding that lost it for us. And that makes this the most poignant PKD of all.*Dude. Typewriter fetishists take note. This story is about people who buy and sell and repair typewriters and paper and ribbons and carbons, and they talk about them a lot. It's pretty much heaven.**Their original meeting lends all this a soap opera sudsiness that is good for too many guffaws to spoil here.
I read this with the idea that it was a late, late work, done after much of his famous science fiction writing, that it was somehow like Shakespeare's Tempest, the work of an author at the end of his life, a late meditation on all that had gone before. Ha! Only after did I learn that it belonged to his pre-SF work, done in the 50s.As I read, I kept wondering, mistakenly why Dick would locate his novel in the 50s, unless it was to capture something of that time he'd felt he'd lost. This sort of intertextual conjecturing was silly, it turns out, but fascinating as a thought experiment. What aided my misapprehension about this book's date of composition was just how well it was written, certainly much better than his earliest SF, when the characters were paper thin, and it was only his clever conceits that lent stories and whole novels any merit. IMLT, on the other hand, was rife with all sorts of psychological edginess, some overt and some very subtle.This novel's simple outline and dynamic reeks of an ordinary reality, of events that actually transpired, probably in much the way Dick describes them. Whether true or not, that's the effect his storytelling has in this novel, the tale of a young man who unwittingly falls in love with the woman who was his 5th grade teacher a decade before, in the process deciding to leave his job as a traveling whole goods buyer for a warehouse outlet in Colorado. Bruce settles down in his Idaho hometown with Susan, and he immediately works with her to make profitable her typewriter store. An older traveling salesman, Milton Lumky, a friend of Susan through her business, tells Bruce about a warehouse of typewriters, and the two end up doing a lot of driving to find and bring them back, Lumky in the meanwhile suffering a bout of some disabling disease. Bruce is compromised, but at Lumky's urging he continues on to retrieve the typewriters. Further, when he finds out after buying the typewriters that they have Spanish keyboards, he is ready to compromise himself with his former employer, and seeks to unload them. Susan intervenes and informs on him. Though the warehouse is willing to take them at cost, Bruce decides to refit each and every one of the 200 typewriters by hand, but Susan fires him. Bruce moves out. Lumky dies, and his widow claims Bruce owes him money. Bruce then has a daydream about his time as a 5th grader and how Susan had appeared as his teacher. The dream is poignant and frightening, and it begins to merge into the reality of Bruce and Susan happily married, relocated to Colorado, running a thriving business, living a happy domestic life. And it never comes clear where the dream ends and where the novel's events resume, if indeed they do. Is Bruce still still daydreaming at novel's end, or is he reconciled with Susan and his contented bourgeois life? Rife in all of this is a deep-down concreteness. All the events and characters are just solid and plain enough to be real: the long trips to and from Boise to Denver, and the road trip out and back to the west coast; the conflicts of conscience and with each other; and the odd presence of Milton Lumky. Emotions and actions are abrupt and sometimes peculiar and unexpected, mercurial and unresolved. Lumky remains forever ambiguous: alternately a benign guiding spirit or a capricious agent of mayhem, but also just an older man whom Bruce and Susan came to know.It's all a very strange brew, entertaining and puzzling.
What do You think about In Milton Lumky Territory (2005)?
One of PKD's early non-SF novels, this didn't get published until 1985. His introductory comment about it being "a very funny book" is misleading - I didn't find anything particularly amusing in it, though I suppose there is a wry satisfaction to be had in the story of a slick young salesman having to learn the limits of ambition, amongst other things.The world is the mid 50s US, away from the big exciting cutting-edge places. The characters, as usual in PKD realist novels, are all chafing at the conventions of the 50s but don't (yet) have any countercultural outlet to go to, at least not one that an aspiring young novelist could mention and hope to get a mainstream publisher interested. We see a lot of provincial America slowly changing under the exciting post-War innovations of interstate highways, mass ownership of cars, and the rise of new chainstores offering every kind of home gadget to the masses. There is a background sense that old roles have become unsettled and that maybe anyone really could be anyone they want to be, and this could even break down and confuse old certainties (in another novel, "The Man Whose Teeth...", PKD explicitly has a character get ostracised for trying to socialise across the racial divide). Milton Lumky himself is a sick middle-aged man who gets a rant against Bruce Stevens for being "heartless", yet the latter is the most milquetoast nihilist imaginable: just a young chap desperate to get on in business, clearly eager-to-please and conform. He's gone and got married to his old schoolteacher, God help him. Not too much is made of there being anything really bad about that, or how it would play differently if it were an older *male* teacher with a former girl pupil. Altogether this is a pleasant read, and although the writing isn't quite so well-crafted, I think I prefer it to Saul Bellow's "Seize The Day", which has thematic similarities.
—Jonathan Norton
Philip K Dick is one of my favourite authors but I find his non-science fiction work really hit or miss. I think my biggest complaint with it is that it is so middle class, middle America. In his science fiction, there is so much more social commentary about issues such as race, gender, drugs, government. It's all very anti-establishment and critical. So I'm not sure why the non-science fiction books are so normal.I did really like the broken bubble, but this one wasn't nearly as good. It was about a young man of 24 who was one of the most middle aged and dull characters. He got married on a whim, tried to make a business, failed dramatically but still somehow managed to succeed. Young businessmen who have or have not got what it takes was really not what I wanted to be reading about. Definitely one I'm glad I borrowed from the library.
—Mel
Non succede niente…Da tempo è in atto da parte di certa critica un tantino snob il tentativo di riabilitare la produzione “mainstream” (cioè non fantascientifica) di Philip Dick, che sarebbe stata ingiustamente oscurata a causa della fama dell’autore come maestro della narrativa di genere.A mio parere invece noi posteri dovremmo fare un monumento alla memoria degli editori che negli anni 50 rifiutavano sistematicamente i lavori con cui PKD tentava di nobilitarsi nell’alveo della letteratura americana, inducendolo così a dedicarsi al genere che gli dava da vivere e che, fra parentesi, gli ha conferito fama mondiale e imperitura.Questo “In terra ostile” ad esempio sembra quasi (non fosse per la dimensione…) un bozzetto incompiuto sul quale ci aspettiamo che Dick innesti una delle sue geniali allucinazioni o deviazioni dalla realtà di cui solo lui possiede la ricetta segreta per trasformarli in segnali sotterranei di disagio ed inquietudine destinati a sovvertire la realtà o quanto meno la sua percezione. Un giovane mediocre protagonista che nell’arco del racconto, attraverso vicende e incontri che potrebbero fare lievitare la narrazione in un’altra dimensione, rimane giovane mediocre per tutte le quasi 300 pagine che si portano a termine con fatica, apprendendo le tecniche di marketing e di valutazione dell’articolo “macchina da scrivere elettrica”, sorretti solo dalla vana speranza che “succeda qualcosa”… ma non succede niente
—Ubik 2.0
