A couple of weeks ago, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that this fall they would be publishing a consolidated, edited, two-volume edition of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis, the 8,000-page manuscript in which Dick attempted to come to terms with, understand, and interpret the possibly drug-fueled spiritual visions he experienced during the 1970s.

Given the unevenness of Dick’s published work, a reader can be forgiven for wondering whether Exegesis is likely to repay the investment of time it would seem to demand, and in an interview with the New York Times, Jonathan Lethem, the book’s editor, didn’t exactly dispel those worries. Lethem “hesitated to describe the original, unedited Exegesis as a work.” He told the Times,

It’s not even a single manuscript, in a sense. It’s an amassing or a compilation of late-night all-night sessions of him taking on the universe, mano a mano, with the tools of the English language and his own paranoiac investigations. . . . [H]e was turning his brain inside out, on the page, over a period of years of his life. . . It’s absolutely stultifying, it’s brilliant, it’s repetitive, it’s contradictory. It just might contain the secret of the universe.

This sounds a bit more like a sow’s ear than a silk purse, though I can’t help but admire Lethem’s game attempt to put the best face on the situation.

All of which calls to mind Christopher Miller’s hilarious take-off on Dick, writing, and literary worship, The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank (2009). Any Dick fan with a sense of humor would enjoy Miller’s wildly inventive and wickedly funny faux reader’s guide, which is teeming with ideas for terrible stories (“Bacterial Rights,” “If Looks Could Kill”) and novels (The Pray-o-Matic; Personal Worst, “a sit-on-the-couch-in-your-underwear-eating-cold-Pop-Tars-straight-from-the-box sort of book”).

But the book of Dank’s that came to mind when I learned that Exegesis was to see the light of day is Listening to Decaf, which the reader’s guide describes as the product of an attempt by Dank to kick his twelve-to-fourteen-cup-a-day coffee habit. Listening to Decaf is

a book of aphorisms, a hefty collection of thoughts of which their author was especially proud. He once told me that Listening to Decaf was “the wisest and most serenely insightful thing” he’d ever written.

And then the guide shares some samples from the book, which give a sense of the weakness of both prose and thought that plagued Dank’s work:

Everybody wants to accomplish something big. What are they trying to prove? That’s what I want to know. Do they think they’ll live forever if they build great monuments? Look at Ozymandias. It’s high time people started trying to accomplish something small. What’s better–a boulder or a pearl?

And so, we’re told, it goes for 800 pages. “It was as if,” writes the guide’s author, without caffeine Dank

lacked the energy to smother in the cradle the more sickly of his brainchildren. You’d think that once he resumed his coffee habit, Dank would have noticed that he’d rated his decaffeinated thoughts a bit too highly, but not even the greatest writers are always able to recognize the relative merits of their own books. Dank never gave up the conviction that in Listening to Decaf he’d fathomed more abysses of profundity than most mortals ever manage to fathom with just one life’s air supply.

Exegesis will surely at least be more interesting than Listening to Decaf; as to whether it will be any more tolerable at such length, I have my doubts.