Rating: 
Summary: ONE OF DICK'S BEST
Review: A tire-regroover named Jack Isidore is an eccentric fellow. He believes that sunlight has weight, cows have four stomachs, the earth is hollow, and by the way, the world is going to end on April 23rd. But the weirdest part of the story is this: his "normal" sister and brother-in-law and some friends of theirs are even STRANGER than he is. In this book Philip K. Dick explores what it means to be normal. Are we any different from the people in the mental institutions? Unlike some of PKD's books, this one is very consistent and keeps your attention the whole way through. I was very pleased with it. Sure, it's more fiction than science fiction, but it proves how versatile an author PKD really is. This is definitely one of his best books, and I've read about half of his novels.
Rating:
Summary: Dick should have been an important mainstream writer.
Review: Confessions of a Crap Artist reveals specific emotional information about the author's life in much the same way that Phil Roth's novels reveal his emotional life. Dick was pigeonholed by the New York publishing industry to the detriment of American letters. All of his non-science fiction novels reveal a fine stylist, dedicated to finding the truth of his life and time, similar in tone to much of Ann Tyler's work. This book stretches the reader's emotional empathy and allows us to see into all it's characters in ways that both critique and praised them as human beings. Mainly though Dick shows the great sympathy for these people that he always hoped God would show to him. If you care about post-war American literature, Phil Dick is the great "lost" talent of our time, and you should strive to read all the "main stream" novels that have appeared since his death
Rating: 
Summary: A Different Kind of Dick
Review: Darkly funny, slightly sad, brutally honest, and philosophically deep, Confessions of a Crap Artist merits the distinction of being among Philip K. Dick's best novels, despite its prima facie dissimilarity to PKD's main body of work. Ostensibly a chronicle of the disintegration of a middle class family (a rather banal and hackneyed gimmick in contemporary American fiction), Confessions is at heart an inquiry into the nature of reality. PKD fans will immediately recognize this as the motivating theme of the author's career.The protagonist is the mildly schizophrenic Jack Isidore (recognize that name from anywhere?), whose obsessions with pulp mags, pseudoscience and new age detritus render him an ineffective, if harmless excrescence on mainstream society, and enlighten the novel's title. After being arrested for shoplifting a can of chocolate covered ants, Jack is "rescued" by his sister Fay and her husband Charley Hume and brought to live with them in their ostentatious Marin County home, where Jack earns his keep by scrubbing the floors, feeding the livestock and babysitting the Humes' two daughters. Liberated from the household and parental obligations that had theretofore been the weak glue of their relationship, the Humes' marriage promptly falls apart. Fay's overweening selfishness and Charley's pathetic ineffectiveness as a husband come to the fore, resulting in infidelity, public scandal, and death. Meanwhile, Jack falls in with a local UFO cult peopled by Marin County housewives. (PKD devotees will recognize the cult's leader, Claudia Hambro, as an incarnation of the perennial dark-haired girl). Jack's hallucinations provide escapist counterpoint to the novel's bucolic 1950's setting, and parallel the more meaningful contrast PKD is trying to convey: that of superficial bourgeois respectability straining to conceal dysfunction, conceit and vulgarity. Thus, Confessions is not merely a family chronicle; it is social satire, an indictment of a distinctly American flavor of hypocrisy. Placed in the broader context of PKD's oeuvre, however, satire takes a backseat to the author's overriding philosophical query: What is reality, and what is the relationship between perception and reality? Jack, whose quirky hallucinations give the novel a fantastic element, nevertheless perceives the Hume family dynamic with great clarity. And when his cult-inspired eschatology fails to materialize, he makes the ultimate confession (that he is a nut), but insists that "the blame [is] spread around fairly." That is to say, he insists that the reader recognize his nominally sane sister, her husband, and her lover Nathan Anteil as equally nutty. The problem of perception is further illustrated by the novel's shifting narrative style. While it is nominally Jack's confession that we're reading, the point of view actually alternates among the four leading dramatis personae. Interestingly, the first person voice is used for both Jack and Fay, while Charley's and Nathan's perspectives are presented in the third person. This suggests the possibility that PKD intended Jack and Fay to be literary alter-egos. It's a shame that Confessions is marketed as a science fiction novel, because it could and should serve as a bridge connecting readers of general fiction to an author whose talent was too big for his genre.
Rating:
Summary: One of PKD's Best
Review: I bought and read this book several years ago. I hesitated to read this novel because it was touted as "a mainstream novel" but as a PKD fan I should have known better. Philip K. Dick is never mainstream. Jack's story is fascinating in a watching a car wreck kind of way. The ending is so true to Jack's character that I have never forgotten it. In fact, just writing this review makes me want to read the book again.
Rating:
Summary: Life as a retread.
Review: I tell you, this book made me sadder than I've been in so very long. It's about so many things that push my buttons that if I were a crap artist like Jack Isidore, I'd believe Mr. Dick was writing to me personally. It's hard to pick out what's the top layer of the book and what's subtext and so forth. There are definate themes, though. Jack is a crank. A real nutcase. He sees as real whatever sounds the neatest to him. Aliens and so forth. And the book is an exploration of him coming to terms with how he collects 'crap' ideas in his head. And how he realizes that the people who are 'normal' collect their own crap, but it's all emotial and motivational crap and therefor not rigorously testable like his pseudo-science crap beliefs. It's also about a supremely selfish woman coming to terms with herself, a honest man baffled by his own reactions to the world and his wife, an intellectual knowingly watching his slide into hell and the ruination of his marriage, the duplicity of affairs and more importaintly, the self delusion often involved in precipitating affairs. The vindictiveness in people. The need to destroy out of spite, out of anger, and out of frustration as if destruction somehow brings understanding. And how sometimes it does. It's about a house. A marvelous house that eats everything in it. It's about modern society. It's about wanting everything you don't need and needing what you don't want. It's beautiful, sad, inspiring, and woeful. It's about a sweet woman turned bitter. About hope snuffed out and resignation kindled in its place as a pale replacement. It's about the dominoes of life, how kicks travel from one person to another. You kick me, I kick him, he kicks her, she kicks some stranger. It's about telling lies on tires, telling lies on lives, telling lies on ourselves. It's about the blowout in the tire that reveals the truth, the blowout in each and every one of us. I kept thinking "Oh, no... oh no... " as I read this book. The ending is as unavoidable as it is predictible, and you fight against the whole way, and you're relieved when it happens, and saddened at each chance to pick another path lost. I think this may be one of Dick's best books, up there with Adroids and his other well known books.
Rating: 
Summary: interesting but ultimately disappointing
Review: I'd heard only good things about this book, so being a pkd fan, I expected an intriguing read. For the first 80 pages or so, it was, but after that it drifts into less pleasant territory. The dialogue at points is clunky and unnatural, and sometimes the character's motives are not believable (for example, Charley wanting to kill his wife; Jack's amusing but unjustified creating a "story" for Charley). Despite the fact that some of this is drawn from the author's life (faye is based on one of his real-life wives), it feels like he doesn't really know these characters. They serve the plot rather than vice versa. Also pkd's strengths -- his humor and elaborate imagination -- are tied up. Knopf requested a rewrite for this novel circa 1960 and sadly the author never revised it, despite not finding a publisher for it until 1975. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to pick up "three stigmata" or "dr bloodmoney" for my pkd fix.
Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: I'd heard only good things about this book, so being a pkd fan, I expected an intriguing read. Not so. The dialogue at points is clunky and unnatural, and sometimes the character's motives are not believable (for example, Charley wanting to kill his wife; Jack's amusing but unjustified creating a "story" for Charley). Despite the fact that some of this is drawn from the author's life (faye is based on one of his real-life wives), it feels like he doesn't really know these characters. They serve the plot rather than vice versa. Also pkd's strengths -- his humor and elaborate imagination -- are tied up. Knopf requested a rewrite for this novel circa 1960 and sadly the author never revised it, despite not finding a publisher for it until 1975. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to pick up "three stigmata" or "dr bloodmoney" for my pkd fix.
Rating:
Summary: Crap into Gold
Review: In the 1950s, Philip K. Dick made an effort to establish himself as a mainstream, "realistic" novelist. "Crap Artist" dates from this period, and is one of PKD's finest novels of any sort. Of course, even in realistic fiction, Dick couldn't help being innovative. "Crap Artist" is outstanding for the weirdness of its material, and also for its virtuosic use of multiple perspectives. The initial narration is by Jack Isidore, the socially retarded faeco-aesthete of the title; then it switches to another first-person POV (Jack's sister) and then again, to a third-person narrative; then back to Jack; and so on. It's jarring but effective, and fun once you get used to it. It's interesting that "Crap Artist" allows science-fictional concerns in through the back door, via Jack's half-baked, rather pathetic obsessions. I can't help but wonder if PKD was using this character as a means of self-criticism. More subtly, nutty Jack comes across as more sane than the other characters since he finds meaning and contentment in his interests. Also, like his in-laws, Jack is engaged in the pursuit of things of dubious value; but at least his pursuits are harmless. "Crap Artist" is less outwardly amazing than PKD's later masterpieces of specu-fiction, such as "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," "Ubik" and "Valis," but it's certainly worthy to stand beside them in terms of quality. It's a realistic novel in the truest sense because it shows that nothing is so abnormal as "normality."
Rating:
Summary: One of Dick's best character studies.
Review: Jack Isadore is a social cripple, barely able to function on a day to day basis. He is the nicest and most likeable character in this story. The rest of the people in this novel are not exactly people you would like to know, but you probably already do. A powerful expose of just how hollow and craven the most "normal" of people can be, and all told in a very entertaining way. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to see just how well rounded Dick was as a writer.
Rating:
Summary: the alien EVERYDAY
Review: lift off! the everyday veneer and see whats real and not, like sputtering about in a big head in a small land dicks brilliance shines through more opaque than usual. his most easiest obvious the paranoid as normal premise REVEALED clear as a shiny brook in the wilds.
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