Oh, but that's what I meant with "even if you take [the book's] wild premises into account". It would be less weird if the world only started to turn bizarre once we think the characters are in half-life, but retrospectively the book was bizarre from the beginning.
Like take the exchange with the front door that you mentioned, where the protagonist basically had a human argument with it to be let out (and with his fridge). It indeed seems humorous at first, but once you realize that the book isn't a Douglas Adams'esque comedy, it seems downright bonkers!
The Douglas Adams comparison isn't half wrong, though I like to think of Ubik (as with several of PKD's other novels) as being spiritually closer to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Like Vonnegut, PKD's stories are often an incongruous combination of tragedy and deadpan comedy, though his style is of course quite different.
Ubik is meant to be a colourful and out there. Take the descriptions of characters' outfits, for example. One is wearing "a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts", and that's a female character. Ubik was beloved by French critics who compared him to Alfred Jarry, the surrealist. The argument with the door is meant to be ridiculous, but also predicts hostile technology. Today, I just had to argue with a chat bot in order to cancel my NY Times subscription (they also allow you to do it over the phone; but you can't just cancel), which is the kind of "banal dystopia" that PKD loved to conjure up.
Adams was also influenced by Vonnegut. In The Sirens of Titan, the entire plot — involving time travel and an attack on Earth by Mars — is orchestrated by an extraterrestial being simply because he needs a spare part for his spaceship. You find that kind of cosmic irony in Adams a lot.
"Like take the exchange with the front door that you mentioned, where the protagonist basically had a human argument with it to be let out (and with his fridge). It indeed seems humorous at first, but once you realize that the book isn't a Douglas Adams'esque comedy, it seems downright bonkers!"
To enjoy soft scifi and fantasy, you have to be able to be able to suspend disbelief.
Your complaint about the protagonist arguing with his door reminds me of people who read Tolkien and then complain that elves and balrogs don't exist. No, they don't, and you have to be able to get past that to enjoy the books.
Also, it's uncanny how many of Dick's "bonkers" ideas have wound up being close to where we are now or soon will be.
Even with something as outrageous as arguing with a door, we're pretty close to arguing with our phones. Voice recognition and voice synthesis has already allowed us to talk to our phones, and while phones aren't arguing back yet (afaik), it's not inconceivable that they will if corporate dominance proceeds apace. With the development of the Internet of Things, more and more appliances are likely to have that capability. I'm not sure about doors, but fridges are already part of the IOT. So Dick's world, even in this respect, may not be that far off.
Much harder for me to swallow are things like Ubik itself (whatever it is) and the various entities that seem to rule that world. But their improbability does not detract from my enjoyment of the book in the least, because I am able to suspend disbelief.
Also, as I said in another reply in this thread, I think PKD's books are much more comprehensible and relatable if you've had some bad trips on psychedelics. It's quite common for people in such states to experience inanimate objects as menacing and/or alive, for the world to seem inhabited by powerful spirits, to experience one's death, afterlife, and rebirth, etc..
So to someone experienced with psychedelics, reading PKD might not necessarily elicit a reaction of just "that's weird," but "I know what that's like. I've been there."
The confusion and unreality are the point. It's not supposed to be a linear, coherent narrative.
Whether by drug-induced accident or design, PKD was modelling how the 50s corporate world feels. People are subject to powerful forces far beyond their control, and they can be rewarded or punished for reasons that seem to have no relationship to their actions.
It's a kind of Capitalist Dreamtime, a 50s suburban corporate reworking of Kafka. With more drugs and mysticism and miraculous but also threatening technology.
Like take the exchange with the front door that you mentioned, where the protagonist basically had a human argument with it to be let out (and with his fridge). It indeed seems humorous at first, but once you realize that the book isn't a Douglas Adams'esque comedy, it seems downright bonkers!