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 bells— he was the guy who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, dosed himself with LSD, went on the lam to Mexico after a drug bust, and hosted the fabled Acid Tests with the Hell’s 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 wrong—it wasn’t a union novel. When I heard what other folks said about it—often bad—I 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 Kesey’s lust for freedom. The tale unfolds through the minds of successive characters. Some people find this confusing, though I’m 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.