The wilderness, it seems, is hungry and will claim what it will.įurthermore these are the kind of people I was raised around: hunters, loggers, men and women who did hard labor for a living and who lived close to the land and the wilderness. There is an implicit sense of the consumption of the wilderness, both in the form of the river chewing away the bank, constantly threatening the Stamper house, and in the very nature of logging as a profession: my father has known several of his own friends to been crippled in logging accidents, or to have lost their lives to such accidents, something which Kesey does not overlook or shy away from in this novel. In many ways this story feels like a 630 page love letter to the Pacific Northwest in all of its green, wet, cold, harsh, and miserable beauty.
#Sometimes a great notion characters Patch
Having been born and raised in Oregon, visiting the Cascades for hiking, camping, hunting, and fishing at least once a year, and spending a great amount of my childhood in a small patch of Oregon ash on my family’s farm, there was something about the descriptions in this story which resonated deeply with me. While the narrative style is reminiscent of the forest into which the story is set, the point of view is as fluid as the river which is slowly eating away the bank into which the Stamper house is set. The point of view is fluid, but without telling transitions: in one moment you’re in the perspective of Hank Stamper, and within a breath, without the relief of a line break or so much as a new paragraph, you’re in the perspective of Indian Jenny mixing and matching indigenous and Christian magics. The book as a whole is anything but straightforward: the narration twists and turns in on itself, as a friend of mine described it, it seems to mimic the tangled roots of trees, or the tumbling tangle of the forest itself. The plot of this novel is itself somewhat blunt and straightforward, but it is also secondary both to the building of the cast of characters and to the style of writing itself. I seemed to have forgotten that Ken Kesey was, well…Ken Kesey. I went into it anticipating that it might be rather blunt and straightforward, to match with the manner of the kind of people the story revolves around. It’s my father’s favorite book, and one of my best friends’ favorite book. I finally started reading it because it felt, well, thematically appropriate, given that I’m living in a dying logging town in the Pacific Northwest.
I picked it up shortly after reading One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in high school, then let it gather dust for a decade.
It’s difficult to know where to even begin with this book.
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