Mary and the Giant

Just finished re-reading Mary and the Giant by Philip K Dick. It's an astonishing book, and probably the best of his non-science fiction novels from the 1950s. It's certainly the only one to have a properly developed sympathetic female character, although young and often compared to a child, who is shown struggling to escape the restrictions of small town life. She tries to do it by replacing her violent and abusive father with older lovers, doomed to failure of course as she discovers, but an attempt all the same.

I'd given the novel less attention than some of the others for this project, simply because it is set in one town and therefore I remembered it as less to do with mobility. It is though, all to do with social mobility, and contains the most detailed discussion of race relations of the time, and a more progressive view of gender relations. The geography of the book is also very clearly imagined.

The town is not a default, or an assumed norm, but set in opposition to the suburbs. The black owner of the car wash where Schilling, who comes to town to set up a record store, first stops, is an example of a non-alienated worker who used to go on a bus to work in an airplane factory but now owns his own business in a small town, which he asserts is 'no suburb; this is a complete town.' It is one that has a 'colored section', but that is 'good enough.'

Whe Mary Anne is planning her escape from the town at the end of the novel one possibility that emerges is to move to 'one of the new suburbs, like Stonestown ... They say its right out of the future ... Some insurance company built it, the whole town.' (p. 201) If moving to a 'swanky new apartment' is one way of avoiding her history then another is through the automobility and independence provided by owning her car. Schilling tries to persuade her. 'There's a lot of satisfaction in owning your own car. You're not dependent on anybody; you can get up and go whenever you want. Late at night ... when the streets are deserted. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I get up and go driving.' (p. 198).

Schilling's attempts to help her come to nothing. He was simply a stepping stone to something else. A sympathetic character, but one locked into particular gender relationships, he has become used by her, the young small town woman he was going to help, and she must now move on. She finally gets him to understand by kicking him on the shin.

The ending, like In Milton Lumky Territory, seems tagged on in an attempt to make the novel more 'commercial'. While it can be explained away as a kind of two world fantasy, whereparallel worlds exist, it is deeply unsatisfying.