Explore Sometimes A Great Notion Presented By Ken Kesey Formatted As Digital

is one of the most underrated and ambitious books I have ever read, and I have struggled to give the review it deserves, of which I humbly think I may not be capable.


"Under normal circumstances the house presents an impressive sight: a twostory monument of wood and obstinacy that neither retreated from the creep of erosion nor surrendered to the terrible pull of the river.
"

The house is a metaphor for the Stamper family, a family of loggers battling against a strike and the forces of nature in order to fill a contract.
At the center of this story is a struggle between the older brother Hank epitomized by the family slogan "Never give a inch" and the younger nerdish one Leland.
At stake is the survival of the family, Among the many other characters are Henry, the patriarch Hank's sexy but unhappy wife Joby, the good hearted cousin ever willing to get the job done a couple of union workers an observing bartender an aging drunken whore named Indian Jenny and a lot of others characters that are drawn so exquisitely you could never think of them as anything but themselves.


The book starts with a quote from "Good Night, Irene," from which the title is drawn and which prefigures the ending, and there are numerous quoted lyrics and musical references throughout the book thus enabling me and others to fill a Bingo square for a book where music plays a large part.
On p.of my copy, I observed that nine ten songs were referenced in just one paragraph, So, taking a note from Kesey, I will say here in this review that I felt the theme song for this book should be Kenny Loggins' ! song, "This Is It.
" Google the lyrics and you will understand a lot about the book: EVERYTHING is on the line,

Sometimes his style creates a music or a rhythm of its own,

"Clinging to each other in a paroxysm of overripe passion we spun the fight fantastic, reeled to the melodious fiddlecry of rain through the firs, and the accelerating tempo of feet on the drumhead dock, and the high whirling skirl of adrenalin that always accompanies this dance.
. . jointly trampling my surprise, Andy's shock, and Hank's astonishment underfoot in the action, "

This lyrical sentence is followed by the parenthetical "I have to kill you now, It's what you've been begging for so long, . . "

This is not an easy book to read, Point of view and tense are changed mid sentence, sometimes separate by parentheses, sometimes by capitalization, sometimes by italics, At first it is hard to follow, This is something you get used to once you are into the novel, but it can seem daunting, The form of the book follows its function that is, the style is what tells the story in the most authentic way, It's all about honesty, because Kesey tells us about that in this quote:

"I could now possibly go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, possibly with will power, patience, and the roper chemicals but being accurate is not necessarily being honest.
"

So my advice is to just hang on for the ride, The tension builds and builds, like riding up a rollercoaster, You will be rewarded. By the end of the book, it will be a railgrabbing wild ride and one you give up the rest of your activities as you fall to the very last page.


With such heavy material to work with, Kesey lightens it here and there to surprise us and make us laugh,

" each had created his own elaborate and logicalsounding reason for being out so late
, so far from town, and so near the property of their enemy, but when Hank didn't ask for reasons, did not even seem inclined to ask for their reasons, they wisely chose to keep silent, realizing that any alibi or excuse they offered would be received probably without question, maybe even without comment, and certainly without belief.
"

He crafts descriptive prose evoking concrete images,

"I crossed the street and entered the Sea Breeze Cafe and Grill, the very apotheosis of shortorder America: two waitresses in wilted uniforms chatting at the cash register lipstick stain n the coffee mugs bleak array of candy insomniac flies waiting out the rain a plastic penful of donuts and, on the wall above the CocaCola calendar, the methodical creaking creep of a bent second hand across a Dr.
Pepper clock the perfect place for a man to sit and commune with nature, "

There is a lot of crazy in this book, Paranoia. Unresolved issues from childhood. A certain amount of madness takes hold of Leland, There is a long ramble of life truth philosophy at some point:

"But, . . a man has to get so he can deal with these Public relations, before he can truly make it, Make it like that alone in some shack. A man has to know he had a choice before he can enjoy what he chose, I know now. That a human has to make it with other humans, . . before he can make it with himself, " And then, acknowledging the chicken and the egg conundrum, he says that the opposite is also true, And then, he asks, "But didn't he still wonder if he were really choosing his shack or still just hiding in it" This goes on until he says, "I walked on, back toward camp, trying to decide if he was saner or crazier than when I last saw him.
I decided he was. "

There are many themes man against nature, religious references man nailed to a log, and historical references Hiroshima you could write a very long book about this book, and lest you think I am already doing that, I will close shortly.


Here is one last quote that describes the impact of of a lifechanging explosion,

"For the reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off the reaction occasionally outdoes by way way of repose the event that stimulated it and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.
"

This book will take a long time for me to forget,


I must admit that the premise for this novel a strike in the logging industry during thes didnt exactly set my heart aflutter with excitement, but I loved Keseys writing so much in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest that I really wanted to give this one a chance.
That turned out to be an excellent decision,

The crux of this novel, to me, was the complicated relationships that we have with one another and the deep rooted hurt that lives quietly within us.
Our parents, our siblings, our spouses, What is it like to feel intense hatred for someone and be cursed to incurably love them at the same time What do you do If youve ever had a less than perfect relationship with a family member, if youve ever experienced the sting of betrayal from a parent, if youve ever left home and returned a stranger unable to relate to your kin or if youve spent your life trying to escape only to come full circle you will relate to Leland Stamper.


Keseys writing blows me away, The novel is dense and scattered and the language is rich and beautiful, The narrative switches between different characters points of view constantly and several times within one page, It took some getting used to but once I acclimatized, I liked it, Kesey seamlessly illustrated the way every moment is seen through different eyes and interpreted differently, A conversation, a decision, the smallest gesture nothing is absolute, Everything we think we know is just a result of our perception,

This novel is deceptively intricate and contains keenly

observed power struggles between brothers, between white collar and blue collar, between workers and bosses, between husbands and wives, between dreams and cold hard reality and a twist on a good ole fashioned Oedipus complex thrown in for good measure.
Its about the consequences of our decisions and the way one moment can change the rest of ones life, Its about absolution and letting go, Its about love.

This book is heartbreaking, engrossing and very underrated,
Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion Bantam Windstone,

I really, really wanted to like this book, An underread novel by an acknowledged American master of letters with a core of fans who consider it one of the best novels of the last century.
What could be better Well, to put it in as few words as possible, Kesey's writing style,

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest works, and works so well, because it's tight, It's terse. It says what needs to be said, Kesey knows what he wants to say and says it, You get the idea. It's been compared to A Christmas Carol a number of times, and with very good reason, But if Cuckoo is Kesey's Christmas Carol, then Sometimes a Great Notion is Kesey's Bleak House, It's longwinded, rambling, incoherent, and could easily have lost three hundred pages from its final length without anyone noticing anything had gone when your main character doesn't get to the place where all the action is happening until page, and still hasn't gotten his baggage from the bus terminal eight miles away fifty pages later, you know there's a whole lot of extraneous material therein.
And while that makes sense within Kesey's chosen stylistic framework the story is told by a
woman flipping through a photograph album, there's just too much of the rambling and not enough plot advancement.
It's like being stuck in a whole novel of Melville's twohundredpage cessation of action in Moby Dick, If you thought that was painfully unreadable, Sometimes a Great Notion may well send you into apoplectic fits,
" Sometimes I lives in the country
Sometimes I lives in town
Sometimes I take a great notion
To jump into the river an drown"

I know little about Oregon State, what little I do know is that it's damp almost all of the time, has it's fair share of trees and woodland, and it's where 'The Goonies' and 'Stand by Me' were filmed, and River Phoenix was born there.


Ken Kesey's 'Sometimes a Great Notion' is quite simply a contemporary American masterpiece, set on the rain soaked Oregon coast, the fictional town of Wakonda early in the's.
The story, if you could call it that, is surrounding a logging family The Stampers, who cut and procure trees for a local mill in opposition to striking, unionized workers.
They live in an old house built out on the river and pretty much keep to them selves, and due to current circumstances are the scourge of the town.
I wouldn't exactly call them hillbilly folk, but they're not far of, There is the old croaky father Henry, sons Hank, and Leland recently returning from the east coast, and hank's partner Viv,

The bitter strike is at the centre of the novel, which sees the labour force demanding the same pay but for less hours due to the on going problem of less demand in this market.
The Stampers who own and operate their own company decide to continue logging to supply the regionally owned mill, but cause fury with the locals.
A Union man is called to town Mr Dreager to try and solve the dispute, the Stampers play dirty and won't budge, The Striking details remain largely in the background, You are left wondering on certain points, But the story truth be told is all about the day to day lives of the Stampers, they completely steal the show, A huge chunk of the narrative takes place within the walls of the Stampers residents, and has an almost voyeuristic sensibility, and conversations between family members can seem to last for tens of pages at a time.
Now I made reference to hillbillies, and the dialogue here takes some getting used to, There is lots of slang talk and derogatory comments made throughout, even the 'N' word gets used a lot, but this simply reiterates the "off the beaten track" type of people we are dealing with, living out on the river in seclusion, they take to hunting and setting traps for animals,as a way to provide for food when getting into town is difficult.


Atpages things do eb and flow here and there, and can get slightly tiresome, but that's just me being picky, because on the whole it's length is something that the further you go on the less of a problem it becomes, you become totally involved in this damp and dreary community your feelings for certain characters change from hatred to that of pity.

The novel's multiple characters speak sequentially in the first person, seemingly without alerting the reader to whom they are listening to, this can get confusing as narrative will skip from one to the other without any idea of knowing so, again you just get used to it over time.

If I could sum up the Stampers in one word that would be 'Stubborn', the house for example appears to be about to fall apart at any time, the interiors are awash with er.
. . mess, they are living so far in the past, but nothing and no one will get them to change, they firmly hold their ground!

The most intelligent of the pack is Leland, who returns to Wakonda after years spent on the east coast with his mother, he is attracted to Hank's Viv, and late on in the novel the two will come to loggerheads, there is also an incident that could see their resolve shattered, and the lastpages or so are set up for what appears a climactic and tense finale, but going on the overall nature of past proceedings, don't expect some huge grand spectacle of a finish, you will be let down.
The slow pace stays for the whole duration,
Another important aspect of Notion is the weather, It rains. It rains constantly even when it's dry it's still wet and damp, The river swells, the town has puddles the size of small lakes, and residents continually shake their caps of rain water, have constant colds, and foul stinking attitudes they carry around forever! Kesey brings the whole place to life, in such vivid and articulated way, this is the great strength of the Great Notion, and has to rank up there with the best contemporary novels of all time! I am still mystified why this seems to have gone into obscurity even around the time of first publication: was is marketed badly, or did people simply not like it Not sure.
All that matters to me is my own unforgettable reading experience of reading it,

An astonishing masterpiece! Talking of the great American novel then this has to be up there with the best of them.
.