"Outside Looking In" by T C Boyle

 

A novelisation of the story of Timothy Leary and his promotion of LSD.

After a 'Prelude' set in Basel in 1943 in which we learn of the discovery of LSD from the point of view of the discoverers research assistant, we move to Harvard in 1962 where Professor Tim Leary is conducting 'research' into the effects of psilocybin, ostensibly to see whether its hallucinogenic properties could be used in the treatment of mental issue (a debate still very much alive today, with some scientific evidence that it can but other suggestions that it is no better than alternative treatments). 

The psychologist researchers, and their families, start experimenting at parties in Harvard, before spending a couple of summer vacations in Mexico, before being expelled by the authorities and dismissed by Harvard and ending up living in a giant commune in New York State. Sexual boundaries start to dissolve, the children become feral, and the local authorities start to persecute them.

The first and third sections are narrated in the past tense and 3td person from the point of view of Fitz, a graduate student who feels himself on the outside and desperately wants to be part of the inner circle. The middle section is narrated by his wife, Joanie. 

The finish of the book was so sudden that, even though I knew there could not be more than one or two pages, I turned the page looking for the start of the next paragraph. And yet it was a good line to end on.

This novel links to real people and other works of art. Tim Leary was real and his Castalia foundation was named after the sect in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. The music of the Beatles is mostly despised by the psychologists who adore jazz and Satie's Gymnopedies. One of their heroes is Aldous Huxley; his latest novel Island is mentioned. Another is Ken Kesey, a fellow psychologist whose debut novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is also mentioned. Kesey later appears with his Pranksters in their coach, as documented by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

Wolfe's book is so outrageous - consonant with its subject - that it might be thought to overshadow this novel. But the two have different aims. Wolfe is celebrating psychedelia. Boyle is chronicling the damage caused by the hedonistic lifestyle - and it doesn't need to be mind-altering drugs, it could have been alcohol, or sexual promiscuity, or gourmandising, or even unbridled capitalistic consumerism - to the participants. Yes, the 'squares' in society are repressive but the true dangers lie in ignoring real relationships in the obsessive pursuit of elusive dreams. It could equally well apply to writing a novel.

I enjoyed this book. There were some delightful moments and there are some interesting descriptions of the hallucinations caused by taking these drugs, although that was somewhat downplayed compared to the more experimental fiction concerning drug abuse. It is particularly good at portraying the bleak realities of ordinary life, dramatically juxtaposed against the siren promise of chemical liberation.

Selected quotes:

• “Did you see the way the daffodils are pushing up everywhere? I thought somebody'd smeared the whole landscape with butter while we were asleep.” (Prelude)
• “Table legs. the antimacassar on the chair. The end table, the telephone, my shoes! Everything has a life of its own totally independent of us.” (Prelude)
• “This haggard red-faced pathetically ordinary woman who wouldn't have known transcendence if it swooped her up on angels’ wings and sailed her high out of the glittering crest of the universe.” (1.1)
• “Mid-January, bleak as the bottom of a shoe” (1.2)
• “Interiority by its very definition was exclusive, selfish even.” (1.7)
• “The village and its stew of smells.” (2.1)
• “She'd ... watched the full moon scroll its icy script across the face of every wave in existence.” (2.1)
• “They’d gone back to the apartment with the mouse turds, only to find that it too had been taken by somebody whose level of desperation must have been positively Dostoevskian.” (2.3)
• “Worlds collided, glaciers calved, civilizations marched across the landscape erecting temples and tearing them down and starting all over again.” (3.1)
• “Nothing quite fit right, as if the world were a suit of clothes that had shrunk in the dryer and had to be pinched and tugged till it stretched back out again.” (3.2)
• “A June morning, the air heavy as a wet sock and the sun hanging unencumbered overhead.” (3.4)
• “He saw himself as from a distance, a partially dressed great ape with a tube of tobacco in one hand and the concentrated residue of a caffeinated plant in the other.” (3.4)
• “For a long while he sat there on her bed while the sun backed away from him inch by inch across the carpet till it hung suspended in the window and finally dropped out of sight.” (3.6)

July 2026; 385 pages

First published in the US by Ecco Press in 2019
My paperback edition issued in 2020.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God