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I think the makers of The Truman Show may have copied the idea of a person's life as a staged TV series from this book. Dick had so many ingenious ideas during his career as a writer. The idea for this book might be the best one that Dick ever had. But it is not his best book. It is not as funny as A Scanner Darkly or Valis - both of which came later. And the social commentary is not as incisive or trenchant, like in his later work. But there are instances in the book which give us an idea of what is to come. This is one of the earliest of Dick's novels that I have read.

The book is about Ragle Gumm, an unemployed middle aged man who lives with his sister, her husband and their small kid. Ragle is a local celebrity in his small American town on account of the fact that he keeps winning a newspaper contest that requires extraordinary skills in mathematics. When he is not working hard at the contest, he is swilling beer and lusting for his neighbors wife. But Ragle senses that something is not right with his existence. Small clues lead him to question the very nature of his reality and what he believes to be true. Ragle could be at the centre of a sinister plot by the government to hide the truth about space travel and its benefits from the citizens.

Through Ragle Gumm, Dick is trying to say that even the most talented among us can be fooled into leading a mundane existence by the government or some higher authority. The government lays down the rules and it tries to keep us engrossed and captivated by playing on our basest instincts like the male sexual drive (in the novel, Ragle Gumm wants to marry and settle down with the beautiful but dumb Junie, his neighbors wife).

Dick uses small snippets of conversation to build character. And also to foreground the important themes of the novel.

For example look at this exchange between two supermarket employees:

"Aren't you a Democrat?" he asked. "From the South?"

"Not any more. Not since I moved up here. This is a Republican state, so I'm a Republican."

He offers us scenes from small town American life to underscore the absurdity of our mundane existence. But ultimately, Time Out of Joint is a novel that emphasizes the marvel of space travel (or migration and travel) as one of man's most primitive instinct.

According to Dick:

"It had nothing to do with minerals, resources, scientific measurement. Nor even exploration and profit. Those were excuses. The actual reason lay out-side their conscious minds. If he were required to, he could not formulate the need, even as he experienced it fully. No once could. An instinct, the most primitive drive, as well as the most noble and complex. It was both at once."

An entertaining and intriguing novel from the great PKD.