Jack Isidore doesn’t see the world like most people. According to his brother-in-law, Charley, he’s a crap artist, obsessed with his own bizarre theories and ideas, which he fanatically records in his many notebooks. He is so grossly unequipped for real life that his sister and brother-in-law feel compelled to rescue him from it. But while Fay and Charley Hume put on a happy face for the world, they prove to be just as sealed off from reality, in thrall to obsessions that are slightly more acceptable than Jack’s but a great deal uglier. When they take Jack into their home, he finds himself in the middle of a maelstrom of suburban angst from which he may not be able to escape.

Confessions of a Crap Artist is one of Philip K. Dick’s most accomplished novels, and the only non-science-fiction novel published in his lifetime.