This book is totally different from any other PKD I've read. I'm not an expert on his writings, but this was comparitively not really weird enough, exciting enough, interesting enough, or sci-fi enough for me. The main character (narrator) was curiously absent and difficult to identify with. She just seemed invisible, like she could have been left out and the book would have been essentially the same. Timothy Archer was kind of an interesting character, but I had a hard time digesting all the literary references. And it wasn't just him, but the narrator. In fact, the obscure intellectual quotes and theology just pissed me off more and more as I read the book. I almost quit reading halfway through. The jacket touts this book as "An American Master's most startling novel". Startlingly unreadable, maybe. The narrator is an "overeducated" English major at Cal State - I think this book is probably best read and appreciated only by pretentious, overeducated English majors.