Jonathan Norton's Reviews > Operators and things: The inner life of a schizophrenic

In the 1950s an office-worker in a medium-sized business in America was observing the manipulations and deceptions performed by the cold-eyed careerists in her immediate environment. Then one day she woke up under the dominating psychic influence of various "Operators" who were going to take her in hand and reveal the true metaphysics behind social appearances: deadheaded ordinary folks are "Things" available for control by the competing gangs of overlords who have their own laws and ethics. They send her on an odyssey around the country, encountering psychiatrists and analysts and body-doctors at different times, but never getting permanently institutionalised.

This book was quite a phenomenon in its day and has had several revivals of interest. It influenced R.D.Laing apparently, and comparisons have been drawn with Philip K.Dick's contemporaneous early fiction (Burroughs would be another obvious comparison point). The theorising about a hormonal basis for schizophrenia was also mentioned at the start of Aldous Huxley's "Doors Of Perception" (1955), so this was very of-the-moment; the source text for the "Philadelphia Experiment" mythology was also in this zone. Setting aside some of the dated theorising that the author recycled, this is still a fascinating image of a semi-paranoid society, on the edge about the threat of annihilation both by the Bomb and by cultural upheaval. There is a passing reference to "the White race", which will have a different resonance to us later readers; the narrator's anxieties are not all ours. So there is another example of someone looking in to her mind and seeing it differently to her awareness. I have the latest reprint edition, and I notice that it must have been digitally scanned and thus there are a few obvious slips and textual errors.