"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe

 Journalism, rather than fiction, but New Journalism in which the reporter is submerged within the events he is reporting, and the book is structured using novelistic techniques; but in this case rather more Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, than Truman Capote's utterly detached In Cold Blood. 

It is written in the breakneck, breathless, runaway prose of Kerouac's On the Road of which it is a direct descendant (indeed Kerouac has a walk-on part and Neal Cassady, the model for Kerouac's hero Dean Moriarty, is an important member of the Pranksters). The prose is laced with hippy words and comes into its own when describing the LSD trips that the Pranksters experience. But there were times when I wondered whether it was a little self-indulgent and needed a severe pruning or at least a little self-restraint; it was a sort of Californian hippy rococo. 

The style is also much more Thompson's with a huge nod to Kerouac, especially ; indeed, one for the characters in this book is Neal Cassady who was the model for Kerouac's Dean Moriarty. Other name checks include the Grateful Dead, house band for the Acid Test, Owsley, the first creator of quality mass-produced LSD (and later a sponsor of the GD), Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg.

The book follows the adventures of Ken Kesey (real life author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) as he travels with a bus-load of stoned hippies (the 'Merry Pranksters') across America from San Francisco to New York and then starts a series of "experiences":  discos/parties in which the attendees take LSD (not yet illegal in California at the time): these are the 'Acid Tests'; in one of them LSD is used to surreptitiously spike the Kool-Aid which somewhat disastrous experience provides the title of the book. It continues to describe Kesey's flight from the law following his arrests for drugs offence and his exile in Mexico, while the Pranksters started to disintegrate, and his return and the fizzling out of the movement.

The influence on the Merry Pranksters of Robert Heinlein's sci fi novel A Stranger in a Strange Land is acknowledged; the book claims that the La Honda location of the HQ of the Pranksters is the same place where the mystic brotherhood in the Heinlein novel gather. The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse is also cited.

The book also claims that the Pranksters, the Grateful Dead and the Experiences were the creators of acid rock and a direct influence on the Beatles Revolver, Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper. These were very early hippies, around 1964; they attend a Help-era Beatles concert on San Francisco when nothing can be heard apart form the screaming of young girls. They are more or less direct descendants of the beatniks; they find a fellowship of outlawry with the Hells Angels.

It is a fascinating chronicle of the early days of LSD use on the West coast of America but it is sometimes hard to cut a path through the overgrown jungle of the prose.

Selected quotes:

• "Everyone is picking up on the most minute incidents as if they are metaphors for life itself." (Ch 2)
• "In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world.  ... but it screens out the most wonderful part of a man's potential experience without his even knowing it.  ... the drugs opened these ancient doors." (Ch 4)
• "the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive" (Ch 4)
• "The Now Trip exercise, in which you try to catalogue the information your sense are bringing you in the present moment. You make a rapid series of statements beginning with the word 'Now': 'Now I feel the wind cooling the perspiration on my forehead ... Now I hear a bus coming up the drive in low gear' ..." (Ch 10)
• "The Hermit memoirs, in which real life and his Hermit fantasy ran together in wriggling rivers of little boys and lost hunters whom only the Hermit could rescue." (Ch 11)
• "He talked in clots of words." (Ch 11)
• "Amputated apartments, as I called them The seats, the tables, the beds - none of them ever had legs." (Ch 11)
• "Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you." (Ch 11)
• "No Left Turn Unstoned." (Ch 12)
• "Outlaws, by definition, were people who had moved off dead centre and were out in some kind of Edge City." (Ch 13)
• "Bummer was the Angels' term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world's term for a bad trip on LSD." (Ch 13)
• "They start grumbling, like a bunch of prisoners who haven't been fed but don't know whether this is the time for the slave revolt or not." (Ch 15)
• "The Pranksters were not the world's greatest at the mechanics of things." (Ch 18)
• "Cassady had a microphone and started rapping." (Ch 20)
• "A pair of jockey shorts show faintly under the leotards ... just the right touch." (Ch 27)
• "Oh, did we give in to Fear and Doubts, which a good head cannot afford, and thereby stop a brave cat doing his thing." (Ch 27)

July 2022; 366 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West

 Tod Hackett is a young artist, head full of Goya and Daumier, working on sets in a Hollywood Studio in the 1930s. Behind the scenes, he knows that it is all pretend. The streets are full of wannabe film stars, but he is interested in the others. "Scattered among these masquerades were people of a different type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, bought from mail-order houses. ... they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred. ... they had come to California to die." (C 1)

One of these unfortunates, whom Tod befriends, is a dull, heavily built retired hotel bookkeeper by the name of Homer Simpson! Others include Faye Greener, a wannabe actress, and her vaudeville comic father Harry, an ever-angry betting-mad dwarf called Abe, and two cowboys: Earl and Mexican Miguel. They live on the margins of tinsel-town, but their lives have a sordid reality that the movies can't imitate.

The book includes possibly the most graphic scene of cock-fighting in literature.

A short book with some very short chapters.

A great novel about those who live in the shadows behind the arc lights.

Selected quotes:

• "He was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes." (C 1)
• "It was their stare that drove Abe and the others to spin crazily and leap into the air with twisted backs like hooked trout." (C 2)
• "If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn't even have time to sweat or close your eyes." (C 3)
• "Most people, he had discovered, won't go out of their way to punish a clown." (C 6)
• "He hurriedly labelled his excitement disgust." (C 8)
• "Homer was too busy with his growing excitement to speak or even think. He closed his eyes to tend it better, nursing carefully what he felt. He had to be careful, for if he went too fast, it might wither and then he would be cold again." (C 8)
• "His hands kept his thoughts busy. They trembled and jerked, as though troubled by dreams. To hold them still, he clasped them together. Their fingers twined like a tangle of thighs in miniature. He snatched them apart and sat on them." (C 12)
• "Any dream was better than no dream and beggars couldn't be choosers." (C 13)
• "Although the events she described were miraculous, her description of them was realistic.  ... She ... seemed to think that fantasy could be made plausible by a humdrum technique." (C 13)
• "His legs were so straight that his dungarees, bleached very light blue by the sun and much washing, hung down without a wrinkle, as though they were empty." (C 14)
• "Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he couldn't express anything wither subtly or exactly. They wouldn't permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree." (C 15)
• "He had seen young birches droop like that at midday when they are over-heavy with the sun." (C 17)
• "Tod suddenly became very conscious of his dull, insensitive feet bound in dead skin and of his hands, sticky and thick." (C 19)
• "His servility was like that of a cringing, clumsy dog, who is always anticipating a blow, welcoming it even, and in a way that makes overwhelming the desire to strike him." (C 20)
• "His generosity was still more irritating. It was so helpless and unselfish that it made her feel mean and cruel, no matter how hard she tried to be kind. And it was so bulky that she was unable to ignore it. She had to resent it." (C 20)
• "It was one of those blue and lavender nights when the luminous colour seems to have been blown over the scene with an air brush. Even the darkest shadows held some purple." (C 21)
• "She was very much the lady. It was her favorite role and she assumed it whenever she met a new man, especially if he were someone whose affluence were obvious." (C 22)
• "She repaid him for his compliment by smiling in a peculiar, secret way and running her tongue over her lips. It was one of mer most characteristic gestures and very effective. It seemed to promise all sorts of undefined intimacies, yet it was really as simple and automatic as the word thanks." (C 22)
• "Without any noticeable transition, possibilities become probabilities and wound up as inevitabilities." (C 22)
• "None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed across the red plush of the chair back." (C 22)
• "His big hands left his lap, where they had been playing 'here's the church and here the steeple', and hid in his armpits. They remained there for a moment, then slid under his thighs. A moment later they were back in his lap. The right hand cracked the joints of the left, one by one, then the left did the same service for the right." (C 22)

October 2020; 163 pages

Selected by Time magazine as one of the hundred best novels since Time began (1923)

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God