{moszoomthumb imgid=1036 itemid=74 style_m=2}Philip K. Dick meets Phoebus K. Dank in ‘The Cardboard Universe’

As science fiction author Philip K. Dick once said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A feeling of unreality was Dick’s stock in trade, and his novels and stories—including “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “VALIS” and “The Man in the High Castle”—are full of trips into parallel realities, mind-bending hallucinations and mysterious transmissions from ultra-dimensional entities. As if Dick’s fictional worlds weren’t complex enough, his personal life was also mentally taxing. Plagued by mental illness and addictions to various drugs, Dick had no choice but to ask some serious questions about the true nature of reality.

Dick’s novels provided the answers to those questions, answers that were steeped in paranoia and unease. When laughs are had in a Dick novel, they’re more like a rueful chuckle forced out under the weight of an indifferent, confusing universe.

Luckily, there’s another Dick out there who is all about the laughs. Actually, make that another Dank, as in Phoebus Kinsman Dank, the hack sci-fi writer who serves as the focal point of Christopher Miller’s latest novel, “The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank.” Presented as a comprehensive encyclopedia of Dank’s life and work (57 books and hundreds of short stories), “The Cardboard Universe” details the fictional author’s rivalries, failed marriages, neglected novels and his persistent mania that he’s nothing more than a character in a science fiction novel written by Philip K. Dick, who, it turns out, was a character in one of Dank’s books.

The only problem, though, is that in this cardboard universe, Dank is dead and the encyclopedic duties are handled by Bill Boswell, Dank’s number one fan, sycophantic house mate and a professor of “Dank studies” at the local college. Assisting Bosworth in the copious summaries, annotations and digressions about Dank’s ouevre is Owen Hirt, Dank’s long-time friend and, as Boswell alleges, the fiend who clubbed Dank to death with a book.

The conflict between Boswell and Hirt plays out in each of the encyclopedia’s entries and the accompanying footnotes, with Boswell’s fawning tone (he calls Dank “probably the only real genius of our time”) at direct odds with Hirt’s angry contempt (his opinion of Dank: “a fat, badly-dressed and mild-mannered nobody”). Boswell is a failed novelist whose only published works are books about Dank, while Hirt is a poet with only one slim volume of verse to his credit, and between the two warring wordsmiths stands Dank himself. Overweight, under-intelligent and possessed by ridiculous delusions, Dank is the only successful author among the three men and, by all accounts, the least deserving of fame.

After all, it’s Dank who penned such tales as “Double Jeopardy” (in which a man sues his Siamese twin for various abuses to their shared body), “The Future Tense of ‘Ouch’” (set in a world where pain takes an hour to arrive after an injury) and “La Vie en Rose” (the story of an ophthalmic surgeon who rebels in a pollution-filled dystopia where all citizens must wear rose-colored contact lenses).

There are plenty of devastating laughs in “The Cardboard Universe,” most at Dank’s expense. Even as Miller pokes (respectful) fun at the real-life Dick’s stylistic tics, he deftly emulates them, introducing a sly murder mystery into the proceedings and infusing Hirt and Boswell’s conflict with some very Dickian feelings of unreality. Dick himself shows up a couple times as a character in one of Dank’s novels, the unfortunately titled “Big Dick.” Miller expertly blends the broad comedy of Dank’s life with the tragic, somewhat pathetic lives of Boswell and Hirt, and the result is never jarring. As the two work their way through Dank’s catalog of misbegotten stories, Hirt and Boswell start to blend and shift in surprising ways. Glimmers of envy and contempt appear in Boswell’s otherwise glowing entries, and Hirt’s tone gradually softens when discussing his old friend. From there, the two only get stranger and less reliable until “The Cardboard Universe” folds neatly in on itself.

It’s a Dickian feat of science-meta-fiction that works remarkably well. But unlike Dick, Miller isn’t looking for absolute answers about what’s real and what isn’t. He’s more concerned about personal realities, the elaborate lies and narratives people construct about those they love and hate, admire and envy. As Boswell and Hirt both reveal, reality doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. But neither do all the conflicting emotions we have about those closest to us. The barriers between those competing emotions are as flimsy as cardboard, and when we fall through them, the results are just as tragically funny and funnily tragic as a Phoebus K. Dank novel.