Confessions of a Crap Artist
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Confessions of a Crap Artist is a 1975 novel by Philip K. Dick, originally written in 1959. The novel chronicles a bitter and complex marital conflict in 1950s suburban California from the perspective of the wife's brother, an obsessive compulsive amateur scientist. The novel contains only small amounts of the complex mystical and science fiction concepts that define much of Dick’s work. Rolling Stone Magazine called it a “funny, horrible accurate look at life in California in the 1950s.”
Plot
Template:Spoilers The novel’s protagonist - the “Crap Artist” of the title - is Jack Isidore, a socially awkward tire factory worker who has been obsessed with amateur scientific inquiry since his teenaged years. He catalogues old science magazines, collects worthless objects, and believes disproved theories, such as the notion that the Earth is hollow and that sunlight has weight.
Unfit to live independently, Jack eventually moves in with his sister’s family in a luxurious farm house in suburban California. Jack’s sister, Fay Hume, is a difficult and subtly controlling woman who makes miserable everyone close to her, especially her misogynist husband Charlie.
On the farm, Jack happily does housework and cares for livestock. He also joins a small apocalyptic religious group, but most of his time is dedicated to a meticulous “scientific journal” of life at farm, including his sister’s marital difficulties and her extramarital affair with a young grad student while Charlie is in a hospital recovering from a heart attack. After Jack matter-of-factly reports this to Charlie, he plots to kill Faye.
Analysis
Jack feels compelled towards ideas and studies that those around him consider worthless. Although Dick never states directly that Jack is mentally ill, his behavior closely mirrors obsessive compulsive disorder and several characters suggest he seek psychiatric help.
But despite his possible disorder, Jack is the most productive character in the novel. He runs both the farm and the household when Charlie is in the hospital without sacrificing his scientific inquiries. At one point in the book, he is offered the opportunity to enter into the same comfortable, suburban lifestyle as his sister. Although circumstances prevent him from doing so, Jack’s meticulous nature allows him to go to impressive lengths to secure a job and confront difficult and complex financial and legal situations.
Fay and Charlie, on the other hand, are wholly destructive characters. Throughout the novel, it is revealed or at least implied, that both have concocted complex plans to emotionally destroy the other due to long-standing bitterness. They refuse a divorce both because of its taboo and because both fear losing their luxurious home to the other (Neither shows extensive concern for their two children).
At the novel’s end, Jack concludes that his obsessions are healthier than those of his sister and brother-in-law. However, the novel does not argue explicitly that Jack’s illness is acceptable or not really an illness. In the end, he does seek psychiatric help.
Comparison to Dick’s Other Work
Most of Philip K. Dick’s fiction falls under the category of science fiction and is even strange by the standards of that genre. Characters often discover that they or people around them are dead, robots or supernatural beings, or have been living in some other state of unreality.
Comparatively, Confessions of a Crap Artist is literally mundane: ordinary and of this world. Aside from the new age religious group that plays a small part in the novel, there is not much discussion of science fiction concepts (The theme of the new age religious group is also found in Dick's novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). Most of the novel concerns the quotidian conflicts between Fay and Charlie and Jack's efforts to keep-up his "scientific studies" despite the misgivings of others.
The novel also reflects themes of fantasy and hidden conspiracies, which are common to Dick's work. With his misplaced notions of science and belief in absurd theories, Jack is living in a state of unreality although a mild one when compared to other Dick protagonists. The conflict between Charlie and Fay also reveals a state of unreality in that, although they live under the façade of typical suburban life, each has conspired extensively against the other.
Confessions of a Crap Artist, like much of Dick’s work, features a protagonist that appears to have a pervasive developmental disorder. There are many similarities between the character of Jack Isidore and that of Bill Lundborg in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Jack was a tire factory worker and Bill was an auto mechanic, and both characters demonstrate symptoms of obsessive compulsive behavior as well as Asperger's syndrome. Jack also shares the surname of John R. Isidore from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," a Chicken Head whose brain is deteriorated and nearly useless.
Film adaptation
In 1992, French director Jérôme Boivin released Confessions d'un Barjo (Confessions of a Nutcase), based on the novel. The film follows the novel fairly closely, although Jack (played by Hippolyte Girardot) is given the nickname “Barjo” (loosely translated as nutcase) and is referred to by that name throughout the film. Also, the story is shifted to contemporary France.
Trivia
- Jack Isidore is named after Isidore of Seville, who wrote what he felt to be an 'exhaustive' encyclopedia on all the facts of the universe, but which was only a hundred pages long. - Aside from a short science fiction story that Jack reads to himself in the book, and the UFO cult he becomes involved in, there are no SF or Fantasy aspects to this book at all. - Philip K. Dick longed to be known as a 'Serious' writer, and churned out "Straight" (Non-SF) novels throughout the fifties, in addition to his Science Fiction novels and short stories. This is the only "Straight" novel he wrote to have been published during his lifetime.
