Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion is set in the fictional town of Wakonda (lol), Oregon, where a strike has brought the lumber industry to a standstill, except for one family: the Stampers, who make a private contract with the local lumber company to continue felling trees. (These small non-union outfits not associated with sawmills were called gyppo loggers, and in the real world they were as hated by their union counterparts as the Stampers are in Kesey's novel.) Hank Stamper, the oldest son of grizzled patriarch Henry, is just the kind of guy to make such a contract, not selfish, really, but stubborn, and insensate to what other people might think about him. But Hank needs labor, and few of the locals are willing to scab for the man they see as taking money out of their pocket. Lucky, then, is the return of Hank's half-brother Lee from school in the East. Lee and Hank have a complicated history: Hank may have been sexually involved with Lee's mother, who has recently committed suicide, and Lee has always felt in Hank's shadow. His return to Wakonda is a chance to either prove himself or defeat his brother--in his neurotic state he vacillates between these goals--both of which might mean making off with Hank's wife Viv, whose intelligence and sensitivity are wasted in that remote ramshackle house on the Wakonda River.
Sometimes a Great Notion is a one hell of a tome. Not only is it 700+ pages, it's stylistically frenetic, most notably in its habit of switching from third to first person without warning. Often I found myself reading whole paragraphs before realizing I'd been dropped into the first person, then having to go back and figure out whose head exactly I'd been dropped into. In moments of high physical or mental intensity, Kesey will even switch rapidly back and forth between, say, Hank and Lee within the same paragraph, often with liberal, but not perhaps clarifying, use of italics and parentheses. It's a big, beautiful mess, and in my opinion it tries to do too much. But it's clear that Kesey is trying, and often succeeding, to capture several levels of human experience, from the larger communal life of the logging town to the inner turmoil of the individual psyche. The ramshackle house, with its precarious add-ons supported by innumerable timbers and pillars to keep it from sinking into the river, is a symbol of the precariousness of the Stamper family, besieged both from without--as with the locals angry with their lumber contract--and within--by the inflexibility of Hank and the psychosexual vengeance of Lee.
Sometimes I felt like the boat needed to cross the river and reach the Stamper place, bobbing up and down on uncertain waters. But when the narrative finds moments of pathos and intensity, it's really something, as when [spoiler alert] one of the Stampers' most loyal associates is pinned by a log against the bank of the rising river, certain to drown before the heavy log can be lifted. The characters here are at the mercy of happenstance, including the torrential rains and natural remoteness of the coastal Oregon landscape, but even moreso they are the mercy of themselves, their stubbornness, their desires, their inability to see and speak to each other. As the passage above suggests, it may be the Stampers themselves who most resemble the weather, implacable, insensible, and unstoppable, even by themselves.
