Don’t know if you ever read any of his non-SF stuff, but it’s worth a pop - Confessions of a Crap Artist and Mary and the Giant stand out as the most interestin

Don’t know if you ever read any of his non-SF stuff, but it’s worth a pop - Confessions of a Crap Artist and Mary and the Giant stand out as the most interesting to me. Both follow the same vein as his SF work, insofar as he takes a reasonable premise (mid-century America in this case), strips it to its symbols, and then parades them in front of you as a banal pastiche which improbably anneals into tantalising insight of the mindsets, wants and desires of the characters, who are transparent avatars of their culture. Mary, for instance, could almost be a piece of paper with “MARY” printed on it, but through that empty vessel one understands the thingness of the characters’ perceptions.