Oregon
Suggested by: Goodreads
Traveled: June 4-23

I am coming up gasping for air, choking and gurgling, and at the same time feel myself floating on my back as water streams gently over my ears. That’s how it feels to finish reading Sometimes a Great Notion. I feel as though something enormous has just crashed down around my shoulders, but instead of thundering, I hear only empty calm. If you could inhabit that split second between a faucet plunging water into a filling bathtub, and the stillness and delicate drips that happen right after it’s turned off, that’s where you’d find me. (Or, perhaps more appropriately, the moment just after a mighty tree is felled to the ground… but I’ll stick to metaphors within my personal experience).

First off, this is a fantastic piece of writing. I wholeheartedly recommend this beast of a novel, and have been doing so to anyone who will listen during the last three weeks it has taken me to read it. Things have gone more quickly on previous road trip stops, but I had to take time with Kesey’s creation. As Charles Bowden describes the Oregon landscape in the book’s introduction, “everything is damp, lush and threatened.” This is richly descriptive not only of the setting Kesey has dreamed up, but even more so of his prose. He has woven a story with characters teeming with depth and weeds; I couldn’t help but stop and relish the smell and feel of them.

I’ve just spent three weeks in a fictional town called Wakonda, where the logging union is on strike, and the enormous Stamper family of stubborn characters continues to cut trees under a non-unionized contract. The town is roiling, the winter rains are coming, and the youngest Stamper son has returned after years back East, ready for love or revenge, or whatever can pull him out of a debilitating identity crisis.

There were moments while reading Sometimes a Great Notion when I felt like I was going crazy. The narrative style is that of weaving together first person accounts that change from one phrase to the next. Interior thoughts and spoken conversation sidle against one another for space in a sentence. I found myself slipping into a strange, halting speak-think rhythm, getting glimpses of the static that goes on in other people’s heads. Kesey makes an omelet of the book, scrambling everything to create a story that belongs together. My feeling of madness only helped me more meaningfully encounter this story of people and what they do when they’ve reached the edges and can go no further.

Read this book. Get caught up in the madness with me. And when it feels like it has gotten too loud for you to handle, Kesey will throw you a line or a moment or a corner of a moment that will settle you back into the resignation of floating.