Ken Kesey - Sometimes a Great Notion
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Sometimes a Great Notion: summary, description and annotation
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The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century. This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. Out of the Stamper familys rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.
Ken Kesey: author's other books
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Ken Kesey
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Kristen Lopez
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Table of Contents
From the original reviews of Sometimes a Great Notion
As in Cuckoos Nest, Kesey brings to life people you will never forget... Getting into this book is getting into a fascinating, crazy world of a fascinating, crazy family which has a throbbing reality and a desperate dedication to living... and then there is that great gift for comedy, for purely sensational writing. When Kesey describes the Canada honkers flying over the woods you can almost see them; when he describes the smells of the grass and the tastes of the strawberries you feel and you smell and you taste.Ralph J. Gleason, San Francisco Chronicle
Sometimes a Great Notion, a big book in every way, captures the tenor of post-Korea America as nothing I can remember reading... Beyond the PTA and the beer commercials, beyond the huge effluvium of the times, exist people who live by the ancient passions, and Mr. Kesey in the fullness of his material discovers them for us.
Conrad Knickerbocker, The New York Times Book Review
A tremendous achievement... Set against the damp and brutal background of an Oregon logging community, the book by turns gasps, pants, whoops, and shrieks... you cannot help but admire Keseys vigor, his profligate command of the language. And you have to stand back in awe of the mans ability to create character.
Don Robertson, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
In his first novel Kesey demonstrated that he was a forceful, inventive, and ambitious writer. All of these qualities are exhibited, in even higher degree, in Sometimes a Great Notion... Here he has told a fascinating story in a fascinating way... Many novelists have experimented with the rapid shifting point of view, and some have tried to blend past and present, but I can think of no one who has made such continuous use of these two methods as Kesey. And he has made them serve his purpose: that is, he has succeeded in suggesting the complexity of life and the absence of any absolute truth.Granville Hicks, Saturday Review
Full of vitality and color... There is no doubt that Kesey is a bold writer working out his own mode of expression... Anyone interested in the trends of the American novel should want to read it.
Edmund Fuller, Chicago Tribune
The reader should put on a muffler and a slicker before he reads: its that wet and cold up in Oregon and Kesey is that realistic... He is both poet and peasant, as rich and voracious as the river and woods.
Irving Scott, Los Angeles Times
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION
KEN KESEY was born in 1935 and grew up in Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon and later studied at Stanford with Wallace Stegner, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Scowcroft, and Frank OConnor. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, his first novel, was published in 1962. His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, followed in 1964. His other books include Keseys Garage Sale, Demon Box, Caverns (with O. U. Levon), The Further Inquiry, Sailor Song, and Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs). His two childrens books are Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear and The Sea Lion. Ken Kesey passed away on November 10, 2001.
CHARLES BOWDEN lives near the Mexican border. His most recent books are Inferno and A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior. He was born into a country that had a great notion, and he misses it.
To my mother and father
Who told me songs were for the birds,
Then taught me all the tunes I know
And a good deal of the words.
Who told me songs were for the birds,
Then taught me all the tunes I know
And a good deal of the words.
Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in the town;
Sometimes I get a great notion
To jump into the river... an drown.
Sometimes I live in the town;
Sometimes I get a great notion
To jump into the river... an drown.
From the song Good Night, Irene,
by Huddie Ledbetter and John Lomax
by Huddie Ledbetter and John Lomax
Introduction
I was trapped in the heart of a cold and gray Wisconsin winter when a campus radical loaned me what he described as this great union novel by Ken Kesey. The name rang a few bellshe was the guy who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, dosed himself with LSD, went on the lam to Mexico after a drug bust, and hosted the fabled Acid Tests with the Hells Angels. I went home, sat in a corner chair, and read the first line, Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range... come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they emerge into the Wakonda Auga River...
That opening hit my head in the growing darkness around six p.m. When the sun came up the next morning, I was still in the chair and stayed there until sometime later that day when I finished the book. In between there was a lot of music, some cheap wine, then black coffee. After I devoured the final pages, a kind of silence descended because my friend was dead wrongit wasnt a union novel. When I heard what other folks said about itoften badI just shook my head and stayed mute. The book was greeted with reviews that ranged from contempt to damn near hatred.
Sometimes a Great Notion is one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century. The plot is simple: a difficult family refuses to abide by a union strike against a lumber company and keeps cutting down trees. What happens after that decision tells us a lot about ourselves and our country and Ken Keseys lust for freedom. The tale unfolds through the minds of successive characters. Some people find this confusing, though Im not sure why since it is the basic reality of every whiskey bar, coffeehouse, and family. Life is a bunch of people seeing and talking and thinking, or life is nothing at all. In Sometimes a Great Notion (and what better description is there of the promise of American life than this title?) everything is damp, lush, and threatened. The ground is ancient, the people midgets compared to the natural forces swirling around them, and victory does not mean peace and contentment but resistance. Kesey was the hero of a tie-dye generation, and yet he put out a huge novel that was flannel shirts, sweat, brutal labor in the woods, and almost prehistoric in its angers and loves and beliefs.
The book demolishes all the ways we have of defining life so it will become tame. Collectivism comes across as living death, individualism as actual death, resources as something disappearing as the family gnaws through a last virgin stand. The human-centered world vanishes at times, as the book suddenly inhabits the mind of a dog pursuing a bear or the sensations of a fish leaping in the river in a desperate effort to flee the growth on its gills. And the entire book is literally in the hands of a woman as she flips through a family album in an effort to explain the love and defeat she has witnessed and shared.
After delivering this monster statement, Kesey stopped writing novels for more than twenty years. Decades later, he offered this bit of advice to writers:
One of these days youre going to have a visitation. Youre going to be walking down the street and across the street youre going to see God standing over there on the corner motioning to you saying, Come here, come to me. And you will know its God, there will be no doubt in your mindhe has slitty little eyes like Buddha, and hes got a long nice beard and blood on his hands. Hes got a big Charlton Heston jaw like Moses, hes stacked like Venus, and he has a great jeweled scimitar like Mohammed. And God will tell you to come to him and sing his praises. And he will promise that if you do, all the muses that ever visited Shakespeare will fly in your ear and out of your mouth like golden pennies. Its the job of the writer in America to say, Fuck you, God, fuck you and the Old Testament you rode in on, fuck you. The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful. Anytime anybody says come to me and says, Write my advertisement, be my ad manager, tell him, Fuck you. The job is always to be exposing God as the crook, as the sleaze ball.
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