The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
First edition, 1984
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike was written in 1960 and published posthumously by Mark V. Ziesing in 1984. Set in a thinly fictionalized West Marin County, it follows the escalating feud between Walter Dombrosio, a San Francisco commuter with liberal pretensions, and Leo Runcible, a Jewish real estate agent whose social ambitions make him the most fully drawn character in Dick's mainstream fiction. A discovery of apparent Neanderthal remains on Dombrosio's property draws a geologist, the local press, and eventually everyone's worst assumptions about race and displacement into the open. One of the stronger entries in Dick's posthumously published mainstream novels.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in cloth covered boards with red lettering on spine. Willimantic, CT: Mark V. Ziesing, 1984. Wintz & Hyde MS8.1. ISBN: 096129700x. #11032.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in cloth covered boards with red lettering on spine. Willimantic, CT: Mark V. Ziesing, 1984. Wintz & Hyde MS8.1. ISBN: 096129700x. #11032.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike was written in 1960 and published posthumously by Mark V. Ziesing in 1984. It is set in a thinly fictionalized version of Point Reyes Station in West Marin County, the rural coastal community where Dick lived in the late 1950s, and it reads like a novel assembled from close, sometimes uncomfortable observation of his neighbors.
The two central figures are Walter Dombrosio, a liberal-minded advertising man who commutes to San Francisco and nurses a reflexive contempt for the small-town world around him, and Leo Runcible, a Jewish real estate agent whose aggressive social climbing and hunger for respectability make him both the novel's most vivid character and its most troubling one. The two men become locked in a feud that begins with a dispute over a property sale and escalates through a series of petty betrayals, each man dragging his wife into his grievances in ways that damage their marriages as thoroughly as they damage each other.
Into this already tense social landscape is the discovery of the Neanderthal skeletal remains, apparently genuine, unearthed on Dombrosio's property during construction work. The find, which would be scientifically unprecedented in the New World, attracts a geologist named Wharton and eventually the press, and Runcible seizes on it as an opportunity to restore his standing in the community. What follows is less a scientific subplot than a social one. The skull becomes a mirror for each character's assumptions about race, superiority, and what it means to be pushed aside by history. A conversation between Runcible and Wharton about Neanderthals living alongside Cro-Magnons, enslaved or simply displaced, carries more weight than anything said directly about the novel's human conflicts.
Dick's mainstream novels are uneven, and several of them feel like exercises or warm-up material. This one does not. The antagonism between Dombrosio and Runcible is drawn with genuine complexity: both men are right about each other, and both are wrong about themselves. Runcible in particular is one of the more fully realized characters in Dick's fiction, a man whose energy and ambition are inseparable from his insecurity, and whose worst behavior is never quite reducible to simple villainy.
The two central figures are Walter Dombrosio, a liberal-minded advertising man who commutes to San Francisco and nurses a reflexive contempt for the small-town world around him, and Leo Runcible, a Jewish real estate agent whose aggressive social climbing and hunger for respectability make him both the novel's most vivid character and its most troubling one. The two men become locked in a feud that begins with a dispute over a property sale and escalates through a series of petty betrayals, each man dragging his wife into his grievances in ways that damage their marriages as thoroughly as they damage each other.
Into this already tense social landscape is the discovery of the Neanderthal skeletal remains, apparently genuine, unearthed on Dombrosio's property during construction work. The find, which would be scientifically unprecedented in the New World, attracts a geologist named Wharton and eventually the press, and Runcible seizes on it as an opportunity to restore his standing in the community. What follows is less a scientific subplot than a social one. The skull becomes a mirror for each character's assumptions about race, superiority, and what it means to be pushed aside by history. A conversation between Runcible and Wharton about Neanderthals living alongside Cro-Magnons, enslaved or simply displaced, carries more weight than anything said directly about the novel's human conflicts.
Dick's mainstream novels are uneven, and several of them feel like exercises or warm-up material. This one does not. The antagonism between Dombrosio and Runcible is drawn with genuine complexity: both men are right about each other, and both are wrong about themselves. Runcible in particular is one of the more fully realized characters in Dick's fiction, a man whose energy and ambition are inseparable from his insecurity, and whose worst behavior is never quite reducible to simple villainy.
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