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Sometimes A Great Notion Paperback – January 1, 1965
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length628 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBantam
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1965
- ISBN-100965450279
- ISBN-13978-0965450270
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Product details
- Publisher : Bantam; First Ed edition (January 1, 1965)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 628 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0965450279
- ISBN-13 : 978-0965450270
- Item Weight : 1.44 pounds
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,397,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #156,261 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Ken Kesey was born in Colorado in 1935. He founded the Merry Pranksters in the sixties and became a cult hero, a phenomenon documented by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He died in 2001.
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I picked the book up again , older and (in theory) wiser. And this time around I found that the book was even more engaging then I remembered. This book belongs in the cannon of great literature.
Sometimes I lives in the town
Sometimes I haves a great notion
To jump into the river an’ drown”
“Goodnight Irene” — Lead Belly (1933)
“Sometimes a Great Notion” is a terrific, funny, tender, and psychologically demanding work of art that has few equals and no superiors in the entire body of 20th century American literature. Some parts “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Absalom! Absalom!” and “The Brothers Karamazov,” Ken Kesey weaves together a compelling story of a labor strike in a coastal Oregon town while simultaneously crafting a portrait of the Stamper family — Henry, Hank Jr., Leland, Vivian, and Joe Ben — expertly alternating between first person narrators w/o warning or indication (e.g. Faulkner), often in the middle of a paragraph. The Stampers quickly usurp the logging strike as the main window into what Kesey wants to show his reader about the doomed tragedy of masculine hubris (the family motto, carved on a board nailed to their wall, is: “Never Give A Inch!”). A closer read will pay higher dividends in direct proportion. This novel is outstanding as a combined celebration of artistic pathos, structural innovation, comic timing, and mastery of dialect. Highly recommended for serious readers as well as anyone who enjoys a story about relationships unveiling themselves at a tense and reflective pace. Also if you’re into logging.
“Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but it is more — let me see — more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way it overlaps....As prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody’s next year’s split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries.”
The writing is outstanding, beautiful. In particular, the description of natural events, animals and the outdoors; but tough going. It reminded me of the famous New York Times 1925 critique of Joyce’s Ulysses: “A few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend ‘Ulysses,’ James Joyce’s new and mammoth volume … but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it … save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.” But the reviewer then goes on to opine, “ ‘Ulysses’ is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century.” Ulysses is written stream of consciousness; A Great Notion is many streams of consciousnesses, often careening off each other like bumper cars. Kesey relies on random italics and different characters’ voices to let us know which head we’ve hopped into. And because his voices are skillfully differentiated, it often works … but he doesn’t make it easy. In one particularly difficult skirmish mid-book, Hank runs through first person, third person, and first person italics punctuated by in-paragraph diversions to Vi and Lee, to get his point across. Oftentimes we roll through four or five characters at a point in time. Usually this is skillfully done, a writer showing off his versatility and talent. Sometimes, it’s frustrating because the story stops dead, the prose gives no hint of whose head we’ve hopped into just when the reader might like to move along.
Then there’s the length. A thumb in Hemingway’s eye. And in that of Hudie Ledbetter, too, to poach a line from a very simple song for the title of a very complex book. The Amazon description starts: “A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast.” That, apparently, is the plot of the story. It’s mentioned tangentially in the first book-length half of the novel, which is extended character development and backstory. At about 150,000 words or so, the story begins, and, yup, that’s the plot.
The last half of the book is compelling. The death of Joby is heartbreaking and Hank’s one stupid mistake is just as painful because we’ve come to respect him, even if we don’t always like him. Hank’s firm knowledge that Leland will bed Viv is an interesting side of Hank, but I didn’t see the act itself coming. Maybe it was because I didn’t much like Lee, who seemed to me a self-absorbed prig. Viv was so lovely and down to earth that the act itself came as a shock, and Lee’s one-upmanship motivation was disgusting. I’m sure Kesey meant every gorge-raising bit of it.
When an author writes a book that’s difficult to wrangle, is he intent on putting his brilliance on the page, reader be damned? Self-centered? Selfish? All three?
Writing, 5-star ++; story-telling 3 -; overall, 4. Can’t be lower than 4. If you’re willing to read a 700-page book that begins with 300 pages of backstory, Sometimes a Great Notion is for you.
In Kesey’s rich decaying world full of rot and rotten livers and failed ambition sparked by early high school achievements and a crazily dangerous logging world which in an instant can widow a wife kill or unlimbers a man or end a dream, Kesey poses the question of what it means to be a man.
The novel could have used some editorial trimming, cleaning out the literary underbrush, Sometimes a Great Notion depicts some of the most compelling harrowing scenes I’ve read in a novel—in particular, the calm yet desperate slow-drowning of one of the most sympathetic characters as a result of a logging accident is something I’ll never forget.







