Sometimes a Great Notion

Ken Kesey

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 long-winded, 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 88, 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 two- hundred-page cessation of action in Moby Dick. If you thought that was painfully unreadable, Sometimes a Great Notion may well send you into apoplectic fits.