Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: This book has a great set-up - a man who slowly starts to realize that his "reality" is just a sham. There is a long (compared to the length of the book) build up, where piece by piece, he starts accumulating information that leads him to finally break out of his world. It is at this point where you figure the story can really take off. Instead, it ends, pretty much in short order. It's sort of like opening a huge beautifully wrapped present and then finding there's a gift certificate inside. Not so bad, but, it brings the experience down. Worth a read.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: This book has a great set-up - a man who slowly starts to realize that his "reality" is just a sham. There is a long (compared to the length of the book) build up, where piece by piece, he starts accumulating information that leads him to finally break out of his world. It is at this point where you figure the story can really take off. Instead, it ends, pretty much in short order. It's sort of like opening a huge beautifully wrapped present and then finding there's a gift certificate inside. Not so bad, but, it brings the experience down. Worth a read.
Rating: 
Summary: elegant paranoia seasoned with social critique
Review: This fascinating novel presents a vision of 1950's America that is at once disturbing and eerily nostalgic. A small town slowly disintegrates before Ragle Gumm's eyes at the same time that his own sense of self is slowly stripped from him. The end of the book, which explains it all, is much less satisfying than the hallucinatory beginning which force the reader the face both the basic instability of identity and some of the dark undercurrents (such as sexual repression and the increased commodification of daily life) below the idealized image of small-town 50's America
Rating: 
Summary: Time out, period.
Review: This is Dick's most overrated single novel. PDK wrote a lot of stuff for a grand on the barrelhead to pay the rent (or alimony) and TOoJ is one of them. (Note that some humorist at Amazon has paired this one with "The Simulacra"--be forewarned.)TOoJ impresses the intelligentsia due to the fact that they think it's about the Cold War. Well, it is and it isn't. Granted that anything written in the immediate post-Sputnik epoch is going to be drenched in the quivering fear of the period. But the basic premise here is drawn from WW II, the "Special Talents" section of the OSS, which recruited everything from safecrackers to psychics to aid espionage missions. As for Ragle Gumm's existential predicament, this was a universal for Dick, not tied to any particular historical moment, as any examination of his novels of the next fifteen years clearly reveals. A critic would say that this is a transitional novel between Dick's dystopian novels of the 50s and the false-reality stuff of the ensuing decade. All too true. One of the fun aspects of reading Dick is trying to guess what outlandish, wild-eyed explanation he'll come up with for his reality shifts. Here, there's no explanation whatsoever. Weird things happen (e.g., the disappearing hot-dog stand) and we're just supposed to roll with it. Dick was not quite ready to deal with the concept at this point. He got there, though. Apart from that: horrendous writing, even by Dick's standards--at one point, Gumm comes across a photo of Marilyn Monroe (nonexistent in his 50s paradise) and immediately starts spouting like a psychology postgrad. Right--that's the first thing I'd think too. (Amusingly enough, this passage is quoted without fail in academic critiques of the novel.) Clumsy development unrelieved by Dick's wilder leaps of imagination, an extremely sketchy and cliched future history, an anticlimactic ending (The Big Surprise on the final page is something we were told about five pages earlier). This is Dick's version of a 50s potboiler. You can do better. Dick produced good ones even this early, "The World Jones Made" and "Eye in the Sky" in particular. (This last is his earliest full-length assay into reality shifts, and one that puts TOoJ in the shade.) For the Truly Weird PDK that everyone swears by, see anything from the mid-60s to 70s. (You'd be well advised to leave "Three Stigmata" for last.) No question that PDK was the American Borges. Of course, Borges didn't leave a trail of TOoJ's in his canon. But then, he had a day job.
Rating: 
Summary: nothing's quite as it seems...
Review: This is not a PKD classic by any means - but it's a strong novel, well worth reading. Before I get into the plot, I'd like to point out how this book embodies the best aspects of PKD's writing. In the opening sequence, he sketches out the characters of the main players - Rigle Gumm, his sister Margo and brother in law Vic and their neighbours, the Blacks, with amazing vividity and economy.A few sentances is all he needs to make them real. Similarly, this book captures his ear for crisp, convincing dialogue. The economy of his writing again comes out in the fact that, even though he barely sketches in most of his settings, they are quite real in the reader's mental eye.
The plot centers around Ragle Gumm, WW2 vet, who lives with his sister's family, makes a lot of money solving newspaper puzzles and flirts with his neighbours wife. But there are subtle discrepancies. He sometimes sees objects vanishing. A radio his nephew makes enables him to listen to mysterious conversations,including one about him. He finds an old magazine which mentions a famous actress called Marilyn Monroe - but he's never heard of her. He finds an entire telephone directory full of numbers that don't even seem to exist. Perhaps he's just paranoid,cracking up? The truth is far stranger.
PKD masterfully explores the process by which the reality behind Gumm's oddly neat and tidy world is discovered -the conflict in Gumm's mind between the unfolding realisation, and the fear that perhaps he is just going mad.
The revelation, when it happens is fairly unexpected and satisfying.I won't go into the details, but it's about space - where we SHOULD be going, but apparently many people disagree.
So, this is a well-written, rewarding book. Not an absolute classic, but not one that's just for the PKD fans either.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting!
Review: This is one of Dick's early novels and one of his easiest reads. His handling of the cracks that gradually appear in his "real" world is simply beautiful and is great literature. This is a book that I have disposed of and then later bought again and reread several times. I recently bought the Japanese language edition to practice my Japanese with.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is one of PKD's finest. The idea that the first two-thirds of the book are more "mature" than the last third is outrageous. The fact that this is SF should not make people give excuses for liking it. PKD was an SF writer, and while the beginning of this book does not read like science fiction, it certainly does not mean that the last third is childish or juvenile. SF can be just as mature as normal fiction (and at its best, it far surpasses the hights that non-science fiction can rise to). This is an excellent work, and one of the 4 or 5 best PKD ever wrote.
Rating:
Summary: The Strangest of the Strange
Review: This is the first book that I read by Dick. Time Out of Joint has a quick plot, unusual plot twists, and a resonance throughout that hints at a far deeper meaning than what is being told. This is another work of true literature by a master writer.
Rating:
Summary: Time Out of Joint
Review: This novel to be a turning point in PDK's journey as a novelist. By choosing this road, Dick put himself into position to write some of the classics that come later. The beginning of TIME OUT OF JOINT is mature PDK. I am sure practical considerations and pressures cause the ending to be of lower quality than most of the book, but it is the first two thirds of the book that make it worth the trouble to get and read this pivotal work. Great American novelists of recent times? Have to say Steinbeck, Dick and Amy Tan.
Rating:
Summary: The Golden Age
Review: Time Out of Joint is a very interesting exploration of a great deal of the ideas and feelings circulating in WWII (and post-WWII) America. Naturally, it contains the usual Dick-ian everyman who struggles with understanding how reality relates to his perception of reality, but there are thematic undertones that are far *less* common in some of Dick's more outlandish science-fiction tales such as McCarthyism (which undoubtedly Dick himself was struggling with first-hand), nostolgia for the "Golden Age" of pre-WWII America, Cold War paranoia, American hypocritical morality (i.e. Japanese Interment Camps), and so forth. Clearly, Dick had been reading a great deal of the linguistic and psychoanalytic theory that became prominent in the late 60's in academic settings as traces of post-structuralist thought as well as Freudian theory pop up all over the book. A very complex, yet easy-reading novel. Highly recommended.
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