The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1986) - Plot & Excerpts
This book is arguably the best of Philip K. Dick's mainstream literary works. In my opinion, the other that is closest in quality is "Voices from the Street". Both novels present stories that flow satisfyingly from their initial concept without their plots becoming forced, a significant problem in PKD's other mainstream literary works. I place both "The Man Whose Teeth..." and "Voices from the Street" above "Confessions of a Crap Artist", the only one of PKD's mainstream literary works to be published in his lifetime (also not including the VALIS trilogy). "Confessions" has a quirkiness that made it attractive to publishers at a time when they wouldn't touch the rest of his mainstream literary works. Though being distinguished by publication during the author's lifetime, I do not find the story to be as good as "...Teeth..." or "Voices..." nor do I find "Confessions" to be as well written as its previously unpublished siblings.Like with all of PKD's mainstream works, "The Man Whose Teeth..." is the story of a creative man in his twenties who is not content with his job and has a disastrous love life. In this iteration of the PKD tale the hero is a commercial artist whose wife manipulates him into quiting his job so that she can go to work at the firm he leaves. While unemployed, the hero gets into a battle of wills with the local realtor. He uses his skills as a commercial artist to pull a prank that humiliates the realtor in front of the community.A flaw that is difficult to take in this book, occurring in all or most of the mainstream books, is a dramatic presentation of domestic violence between a man and a woman. Another flaw is that Racial slurs of the time are bandied about in such a way that it is difficult to know how critical the author is of racism or if he is racist himself. An oddity is reoccurring discussions of the 'natural place' of men and women belonging within the workplace or the home respectively. The ideas might have been thought provoking or timely if they had been published when the books where written, but leave the contemporary reader interested in the book more as a historical document by which to see the development of Philip K. Dick as a writer than as a novel to be read upon its own merits. Finally, the conflicts are a bit underwhelming and petty in significance to the society they describe.All of these observations are from a reviewer who really likes the book and encourages Philip K. Dick aficionados to give it a try if he or she is looking for the best of PKD's mainstream literary works. This book is extremely well written. The story leaves the reader more satisfied with the quality of the story and its presentation than with any of its mainstream siblings. The mainstream novels boil down to a warning against attempting to fill the void in one's life with consumerism or career ambitions. Reading these books has led me to observe that the science fiction novels are about the same thing. The difference is in what PKD described as consumerism and ambition in the science fiction novels. PKD's genius was to make his tepid warning against consumerism fascinating by presenting consumerism as the method for monolithic corporations to use technologies that start as consumer products (androids, drugs, implanted memory, responsibility for military and police protection)to take over society and to run rough-shod over individuality and freedom.The mainstream novels are interesting in their own way. Disastrous love relationships look the same in both the mainstream and science fiction iterations. The mainstream books probably would have been better if a publisher had taken an interest in them and given PKD appropriate advice for their improvement. If that had happened he might be remembered as a working-class John Updike. As it is he was able to find his genius in science fiction, where he is one of he giants. It is the scale of the presentation of the same themes that made the mainstream novels underwhelming while the science fiction presentations are startling in their size and originality and make millions of us Philip K. Dick fans.
Philip K. Dick’s mainstream novels, all but one of which remained unpublished until after his death in 1982, are normally regarded as the poor cousins of his science fiction works. To an extent this attitude is justified, but some of his mainstream novels are better than he is normally given credit for. At the time they were written, in the 50s and the early 60s, these novels were seen as too strange and too bleak to be publishable (and too poorly titled: The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike; really, Phil?) But I for one find a lot to like in some of these novels, especially the later ones. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland is a fine work, even if it is very despairing, and so is The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (henceforth Teeth).This must be the second time I’ve read Teeth and the first was a decade ago, so I didn’t remember a lot about it except that it was really depressing. Well, it’s still depressing but not poorly written despite PKD’s sometimes clunky sentence structure. What I noticed this time around was that the book is primarily about the treacherous landscape of gender politics long after WWII but long before second wave feminism. It’s a book about the anxieties of masculinity and the manifold ways that men try to subjugate women: through keeping them jobless in the home; through defining success almost exclusively in career terms; through violence and, if worst comes to worst, through rape. There are some harrowing scenes, but PKD handles this dark material far more adroitly than he had done in the earlier Voices from the Street. In short, I think Teeth is due for some rehabilitation as a serious work not entirely dissimilar to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.PKD almost always used a shifting third person point of view in his novels, and Teeth is no exception. Written when the young (31) PKD had had some minor publishing success in the ghetto of science fiction but none at all in the wider marketplace, the novel mirrors many aspects of PKD’s life at the time in Marin County, California, alongside third wife Anne (who would write of these years in her excellent memoir Search for Philip K. Dick 1928-1982). Here our main characters are two married (but, crucially, childless) couples by the names of Leo and Janet Runcible and Walt and Sherry Dombrosio. According to Anne, these characters are based on real people who lived in Marin County at the time of the novel’s composition. Anne and Phil’s scholarly disagreement over whether Neanderthals were meat-eaters or vegetarians (Phil contended, wrongly, that they were vegetarians) even managed to worm its way into Teeth.PKD had this way, even in his supposedly straight-laced mainstream novels, of marrying seemingly unrelated elements into a bizarre but cohesive whole. Only PKD could produce a novel that is on one hand about the angst experienced in childless families, and on the other about a hare-brained scheme to fabricate a Neanderthal finding on US soil as a way of getting back at a hated neighbour, and have it make some kind of sense. Teeth weaves together disparate plot strands into a strange but oddly beautiful fabric, including: what it was like for a man to happily work for an advertising company until his wife gets it into her head that she wants a job there too; what it was like to be a Jew, and a relatively successful businessman, in mildly anti-Semitic America; semi-scholarly debate about the origins of the species; the problems of the water supply in Marin County and what fate might have befallen the area’s earliest White inhabitants. And it makes sense. Teeth is not a nice novel by any means, and it paints a gloomy picture of human relations on a number of levels, but it’s a fine novel all the same.
What do You think about The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1986)?
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, Philip K Dick, 304 pg.This book is from PKD's selection of non-science-fiction stories. If I remember correctly, he wrote most of these stories early on in his career; they weren't very popular and remained unpublished until fairly recently. These books tell the stories of small towns in the mid-twentieth century. The people all know each other and nothing exciting really happens, but PKD is able to tell these stories with a high level of detail that allows these ordinary characters to shine. I am impressed that I end up genuinely interested in uninteresting people and things in each one of these books. The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike is a pretty good book, but certainly isn't anything special.
—David
"The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike" is a realist novel. "Originally completed in 1960, this book was initially rejected by potential publishers, and posthumously published by a small press in 1984, two years after PKD's death." (-Wikipedia)The setting is in the late 1950's -- and the attitudes and prejudices are evident throughout the story in the characters.There is a lot of inner struggle going on within the internal dialogue of the characters. So, the reader gets different perspectives of each of the characters. At first, you wonder where all this is leading. But, eventually, it all comes together.The story has its moments ... had my interest, and even some laughs. But, overall, not one of PKD's better works. I'd give this book a 2 1/2 stars, but I haven't the option here with Goodreads.
—C.A. Chicoine
Not a science fiction book.The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike is a story of marital strife in rural Marin County, CA, in the sixties. It follows two dysfunctional married couples involved in a petty feud as they each ruin their relationships and lives with eachother's help. Each couple has a domineering partner and a submissive one: Leo Runcible is a harsh blowhard who buffets his shrinking wife, Janet; and Sherry Dombrosio is an aggressive woman who insists on "wearing the pants" that her husband Walt feels rightly belong to him. What's interesting is that Dick's characterizations make it hard not to empathize with the abusive partner in their struggles with a weak-willed spouse. Janet Runcible is a drunk with weak nerves, a borderline incompetent; Walt Dombrosio is insecure, socially inept and ingratiating in his relationships. I found myself fascinated by the two parallel, slow-motion trainwrecks of marriages as they disintegrated into spite.The material is a bit dated -- I think I was supposed to empathize with Walt more when he spoke of his shame at having a wife who has to work. In a sense, though, that historical aspect of shifted cultural norms added a layer to the novel it wouldn't have had if told from a modern perspective. I really enjoyed reading this, although I can see why it went unpublished for so long.
—Zach
