About the Book
-
Author:
- Ken Kesey
- Genre:
- Classics
Cover Story: Freaky…
Drinking Buddy: Vodka and Cough Syrup
MPAA Rating: R (pretty much all the trigger warnings)
Talky Talk: High School Angst
Bonus Factor: Best Villain Ever
Anti-Bonus Factor: Racism
Bromance Status: Over Thirty Years
Cover Story: Freaky…
A book this old has dozens of covers, but my copy has this abstract, colorful one. Ken ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test‘ Kesey would approve.
The Deal:
It’s the early 1960s, in a mental hospital somewhere in Oregon. Nurse Ratched holds absolute sway over her ward of about forty men. She and her violent aides set about correcting the men’s anti-social behavior. Changing them. Grinding them down and remaking them into something different and correct. She has total control over everyone in the ward, including the spineless doctor. She decides the treatment. She decides the medication. She decides when and if a patient should be released. Everything moves to mechanical clockwork. Everything moves to a beat. Her beat. Perfect control. Perfect symmetry.
That is until Randle Patrick McMurphy shows up on the ward. Sentenced to a hitch on a prison work farm for battery and gambling, McMurphy feigns insanity to land in the cushier mental facility to ride out his sentence. Six months of good food, lazing around the ward, and ripping off the patients in card games. A flawless plan.
The nurse cannot control this wild, Irish gambler. He stands up for his fellow patients. He organizes a basketball team and a fishing trip. He…sings!
McMurphy snorts in the face of the authority he’s always defied. The Big Nurse is just another uniform to thumb his nose at. Except…
In prison, they have to let you out by a certain date. In a hospital…they let you out when you’re cured. And who decides when you’re cured? Nurse Ratched. It could be months. It could be years. Time is on her side. And she can prescribe medication. Electroshock therapy. Brain operations.
Will McMurphy toe the line, scrub the toilets, and ‘Yes, Ma’am’ his way to release? Or will he stand up for the men who cannot stand up for themselves?
Drinking Buddy: Vodka and Cough Syrup
McMurphy is a swaggering, red-haired gambler, lumberjack, and Korean War hero. He fights, he plays cards, he enjoys a drink and a woman. But he’s not the main character.
‘Chief’ Bromden, our narrator, is a 6’7″ Columbia Indian who has been in the hospital for about fifteen years. He pretends to be deaf so the staff will leave him alone, which makes him privy to many of the ward’s terrible secrets. The son of his tribe’s chief, a former high school football star, a World War II veteran, and college man, he’s now a shattered wreck, cowed by the system that destroyed his people. When McMurphy arrives, Bromden expects him to fall in line like previous rebels. But he soon realizes McMurphy is no mere man. As another patient puts it, there are rabbits, and there are wolves. And McMurphy is no bunny.
MPAA Rating: R (pretty much all the trigger warnings)
McMurphy looks at life as an endless good time, and can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t share that philosophy. He sees his fellow patients as a bunch of rubes to be fleeced. More suckers to rip off at the gambling table.
Until he doesn’t. Until he realizes these men can’t fend for themselves. They need him. Harding, the repressed homosexual. Billy, the stuttering man-child. Sefelt and Fredrickson, ashamed of their epilepsy. George, the germ-phobe. Chief, who lost himself when his tribe was evicted from their land.
How much is this gambler willing to wager?
Incidentally, McMurphy is no flawless Messiah. It’s mentioned in his records that he was once arrested for (though not convicted of) statutory rape with a 15-year-old girl who told him she was ‘legal seventeen.’ I know it was over sixty years ago and the age of consent then was 16, but damn, I think Kesey could have left out that detail.
Talky Talk: High School Angst
I first read this book at about sixteen, during my angry, anarchist phase, and boy did it ever hit home. Bromden sees the world through the eyes of mental illness. The aides are robots. The nurse controls everyone through invisible beams. His medication contains tiny sensors. The world is a giant machine–‘The Combine’ as he calls it–and the patients are the ones who have broken down. One either submits and falls into place as another gear in the works, or fights the system and is ultimately recycled. When the government forced his father to sell their tribal land so they could build a hydroelectric dam, even recruiting Bromden’s white mother to the cause, the Chief finally started to break down.
Yeah, that really hit home with a nerdy, white, suburban high school kid who was chafing against authority, but couldn’t find words to describe exactly why.
Bonus Factor: Best Villain Ever
Most people are more familiar with the 1975 movie, with Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, and Christopher Lloyd. It has heart, but skipped a lot of the book’s meat, such as Bromden’s backstory, an earlier patient suicide, McMurphy’s relationship with the doctor, etc. Compared to the source material, the movie was a pale shadow.
Except for one role. Louise Fletcher, who played Nurse Ratched. I’ve rarely seen such a fine portrayal of smiling, clinical evil on screen. She did the character justice.
What worries me, Billy, is how this will affect your mother…
Anti-Bonus Factor: Racism
While McMurphy and Bromden are very likeable characters, they constantly refer to the thuggish aides as ‘The Black Boys’ or worse. The way Bromden describes them, they sound more like animals than men. While probably realistic for the era, it prevented me from truly liking him as a character.
Bromance Status: Over Thirty Years
I fell in love with you as a youth, and that love hasn’t faded when I listened to you on CD in my car this week.
Literary Matchmaking
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was my other high school anti-establishment book.
Damnation Island, by Stacy Horn, is a nonfiction account of life in an asylum.
As is Howard Dully’s My Lobotomy.
FTC Full Disclosure: I received neither money or a fishing trip with a couple of hookers from Portland for writing this review.
