Published by Methuen,1985, softcover,637 pages, condition: good.
The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sailor Song is a wild-spirited and hugely powerful tale of an Oregon logging clan.A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Henry, the fiercely vital and overpowering patriarch; Hank, the son who has spent his life trying to live up to his father; and Viv, who fell in love with Hank's exuberant machismo but now finds it wearing thin. And then there is Leland, Henry's bookish younger son, who returns to his family on a mission of vengeance - and finds himself fulfilling it in ways he never imagined. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals, Ken Kesey crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.
The novel is a wicked and extravagant black comedy cleverly disguised as a family and social drama.
Look Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow.
An estranged son, bent on taking revenge upon his older brother, reunites his hardheaded family
And at times, almost certainly, a little sneak of memory would slip past your whipping boy and you would be whacked just as hard as ever by that jokers bladder of reality, of pain and heartache and hassle and death. You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned end when it counts you would sure as anything clear up just enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society. Yes, I sighed again, in the long run insanity would be the same old cold-hearted drag of too solid flesh, too many slings and arrows, and too much outrageous fortune.
Sometimes a Great Notion is a book of collisions: reason against foolishness, spirit against flesh, sanity against madness, individual against community, man against nature one against many.
It took no more than that first day to bring back all his faults; sparse though our communication had been it had taken only a few seconds at each exchange of words to convince me that he was crass, bigoted, wrongheaded, hypocritical, that he substituted viscera for reason and confused his balls with his brains, and that he was in many ways the epitome of the kind of man I regarded as most dangerous to my kind of world, and certainly for these reasons should I seek his destruction.
But even if one wins, victory is an ambivalent thing a stick with two ends a coin with two sides
Man is a gregarious being and herd either makes one conform or destroys one.
