Then one day Jason Taverner is erased from existence. His records do not appear anywhere in the government's exhaustive databases. As such, he is vulnerable for arrest and assignment to a forced labor camp. His agent has never heard of him, and neither has his sometime mistress and costar and fellow "six", Heather Hart. He stumbles through a couple of difficult days, mostly marked by encounters with differently needy women: Kathy Nelson, who forges papers for him; Ruth Rae, another former mistress who doesn't remember him but is happy to take him in again; Mary Anne Dominic, a talented potter who helps him out of another fix; and perhaps most importantly Alys Buckman, the drug-addict sister of Police General Felix Buckman, with whom she carries on an incestuous relationship. Taverner is constantly under purview of the police, especially Buckman (the title "policeman")... confusingly arrested and released repeatedly, even as his identity is eventually restored.

As I said, the plot doesn't really make much sense. And the setting is absurd if one attempts to see it as a plausible 1988: certainly it makes no sense today, but it was also impossible from the point of view of 1974. One almost wonders if the original notion for the novel was conceived in the 50s. (Especially given that Taverner is much more an early 50s pop star than a 70s or 80s pop star.) But I actually think that Dick had no interest whatsoever in displaying a plausible future. He just wanted a vehicle for his wild speculations. Which turn out to be rather interesting: Taverner's situation, his loss of identity is given a philosophically intriguing explanation. And the main characters -- Taverner and Buckman -- are well depicted though neither is very sympathetic.

The novel is well worth reading, for reasons that are hard to explain. For all that it's an implausible mess, it is weirdly intriguing. Dick's ideas are always absorbing. That said, the ideas here are not as thought-provoking as in his best novels, the characters not as interesting, the plot not terribly strong. And of course Dick was never anything special as a stylist. In all ways, I must rank this novel as Dick at less than his best. But still somehow he held my interest.