I nearly made a grave mistake. Ken Kesey was taking his time, and I didn’t want to wade through crap to find the pony. Life is too short for bad books, and I almost stopped reading Somtimes A Great Notion. Kesey can weave many threads together, but he is a crazy bastard, and like all madmen, hard to know.
At the beginning of Sometimes A Great Notion, the dance of Kesey's puzzle pieces is unrecognizable, like a foreign language, but in time a pattern emerges as your own system develops to grapple with the storm. Maybe this initial intensity was a caveat to the beat generation’s electric Kool-aid. Knowing other Kesey literary descendants like Chuck Palahniuk made the wading easier.
The story starts as a violent waterfall, but after the plunge the reading levels out into a river. Here, among the eddies and floating logs, Kesey’s universal techniques as a storyteller emerge. Past the acid detritus lays a methodically planned, gorgeous creation. The descriptions of the Pacific Northwest alone canonized it. But the ideas represented here, Kesey’s ability to let us use other people's eyes to watch the world, are universal.
I once listened to author Clyde Ford describe his research into the earliest human stories in South Africa. He found in these proto-tales plots and archetypes still employed today: universals inherited through culture and maybe blood. Deft employment of archetypes relates all stories and characters to a reader. We become the protagonist, we see our fathers in the patriarch, our lovers’ become the faces of the heroines and heroes. My dad once told me something similar: there are only three stories; Man v. Nature, Man v. Man, and Man v. Himself.
I was emotionally connected more to this story of Hank, Joe-Ben, Viv and Lee because I am abroad. My home in Puget Sound was reflected in the Wakonda. The scent of cedars, the salty dock air, driftwood and wool sweaters. The worn pages, the forest floors, rusted rails and green ferns. The eagle, the Skagit, dark beer and pink fish. Maybe it’s Kesey’s doing, but my return has never looked so good.
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