Review: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Audiobook)

I enjoyed the audiobook of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, read by Tom Parker.  Parker did an excellent job of reading, using many different voices to distinguish the characters in the novel.

 

If you haven't read it, the premise of the novel is this:  A man sentenced to time in an Oregon work farm decides it would be easier to get through the six months if he passes it in a mental facility, so he starts “acting crazy.”  Yes, this bears some relation to Hamlet.

The man, McMurphy, gets transferred to the mental institution only to discover it’s run by a dictatorial nurse, Nurse Ratched.  Then he discovers that, since the state committed him to this institution, he isn’t just in for six months, he’s in until they decide to release him.  It’s all downhill from there.

McMurphy manages some spectacular successes in trying to get the other men in the institution to stand up to “Big Nurse”—including an essentially unsupervised ocean fishing trip with a prostitute, and an evening visit from another prostitute—but it doesn’t matter.  Or does it?

The story is narrated by another inmate, Chief Bromden—“The Chief”—who has been pretending to be a deaf-mute, but isn’t.  McMurphy’s stay in the institution becomes a major turning point in The Chief’s life.  But to tell more would mean spoilers.

Kesey wrote this book after working at a VA mental facility in Menlo Park, CA.  While there, he volunteered to participate in experiments with hallucinogens, including LSD.  This undoubtedly increased his awareness of the grey areas where reality meets fantasy and delusion; which came in handy while writing this book.

I thought Cuckoo’s Nest did a good job of creating the atmosphere of an asylum.  The book made me think about how we treat mental patients, and what we mean by “mental problems.”  After a while I agreed more with The Chief’s (and Kesey’s) opinion that the system simply wanted patients to behave “like normal well-adjusted members of society.”

In the second half of the book, Kesey stretched my credulity, though.  I couldn’t accept that the institution would allow inmates to leave on an unsupervised outside trip—although it turned out it wasn’t unsupervised, since the doctor ended up going along.  But it would have been unsupervised except for that. 

Also, the revelation that most of the inmates of this ward are there voluntarily surprised me.  Yet this is also social commentary:  They have been told that they should behave in a certain way, and they want to behave that way.  So they check themselves in to the asylum in the hopes of “getting better.”

It also seemed to me that McMurphy underwent a change of character towards the end of the book.  He kind of gave up about ever getting out of the institution.  Earlier he’d been accused of just being out for himself, to make money through gambling, for example.  Now he seems to overcompensate—going out of his way to not be selfish; which leads fairly directly to his tragic end.

I saw the film of this novel a long time ago: 1977.  Later, when I learned that the novel was narrated by The Chief, I found it hard to believe.  The film completely focuses on McMurphy.  The Chief is just another character among many; although he performs the final liberating act of the narrative.  In the book, however, the “Chief Point of View” makes a lot of sense.  It ties the treatment of the individual inmates to the state of American society as a whole, and to the treatment of indigenous peoples (Kesey objected to the altered point of view).

The ending of the movie stunned me in 1977. Of course, I was thinking from McMurphy’s point of view.  Seen from the point of view of The Chief, the ending seems much more coherent.  In a large sense, the book is about The Chief, not McMurphy.  This gives you quite a different perspective on the novel.

A good book—an interesting book—an engrossing book.

A word about Tom Parker.  He has recorded many audiobooks.  I highly recommend this audiobook as well as his recording of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums.  I do have some reservations, but I’ll get to them in a future article.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).