"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

"Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney

 

Naturalistic contemporary literary fiction narrated in the 2nd person (which is extremely unusual in a novel) and the present tense.

The narrator works in the fact-checking department of a magazine but, since his model girlfriend left him, he has spent too many nights snorting coke through the hours of darkness in nightclubs to have any chance of holding down a job. This is a chronicle of a world too chaotic and self-destructive to be called hedonistic. It reminded me of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson or Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis.

It's beautifully written. The narrator, an eternal outsider, a wannabe writer who knows of Praxiteles and Socrates, is trapped in this self-imposed hell. But somehow he can keep his perspective in witty and perceptive observations of his fellow losers.

Selected quotes:

• “You have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “His friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis you met earlier in the evening who would not accompany you below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn't have a low life visa.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “Cheekbones to break your heart.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “His voice ... is like the New Jersey State Anthem played through an electric shaver.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “You like the way she moves, the oiled ellipses of her hips and shoulders.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “If there were a branch of the family business in a distant, malarial colony, you would have been shipped off long ago, sans quinine.” (The Department of Factual Verification)
• “You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical.” (The Department of Factual Verification)
• “We must locate party fuel. Cherchez les grammes.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “You don't like this role of bird with broken wing, especially since that’s exactly how you feel. The lame-duck husband. You'd rather be an eagle or a falcon, pitiless and predatory among the solitary crags.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “Elaine moves with an angular syncopation that puts you in mind of the figures on Egyptian tombs. It may be a major new dance step.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “You think of Socrates, the kind of guy who accepted his cup and drank it down.” (A Womb with a View)
• “You feel like an integer in a random series of numbers.” (A Womb with a View)
• “More and more you realize that sport trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “Above Forty-Second they sell women without clothes and below they sell clothes with women.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “She's still in media dress, as we say.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “You pass the Helmsley Palace - the shell of old New York transparently veiling the hideous erection of a real estate baron.” (Sometimes, a Vague Notion)
• “The man looks like he was carved by Praxiteles in 350 BC and touched up by Paramount in 1947.” (How It’s Going)

February 2026; 174 pages

First published  by Vintage in the US in 1984

My Bloomsbury paperback was issued in 2007.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Only here, only now" by Tom Newlands

A girl grows up in the squalor of an impoverished town, surrounded by drug addicts and petty criminals. Is there any hope that she can escape?

Cora Mowat is a feisty 14-year-old lassie with ADHD, growing up with her wheelchair-bound mother in 1994 Muircross, an impoverished (and fictional) town in Fife, Scotland, a place she describes in chapter one thus: “It was a manky wee hellhole set out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of the chicken nugget, surrounded by pylons and filled with moonhowlers and old folk and seagulls the size of ironing boards that shat over everything. Chaos and fighting and shite in your fringe, that was Muircross. ... The town looked like a handful of grey gravel chucked up the coast.” (Ch 1)

Right from the start you can hear Cora's distinctive voice and enjoy her unique and eloquent observations of her world. She is a damsel in distress, surrounded by peril. The dangers include getting pregnant, male violence, falling foul of alcohol abuse or drug addiction or a gangster boyfriend, being bullied for being different, getting sucked into a life of petty crime, or just giving up hope. Her only chance seems to be her mum's shoplifting boyfriend.

There's plenty of action in the plot ranging from a hilarious date with a Goth boyfriend whose car is attacked by burgers and shakes outside a fast food restaurant to the terrifying fate of the lad trapped in a phonebox with an ignited box of fireworks. Conflict abounds. There's menace and there's tragedy, there's dancing and there's death. She seems drawn to the damaged and the bullied, like the rollerblading girl at school whom nobody likes. And when she has a chance, Cora is an expert in self-sabotage. All the time I was hoping and praying she'd make it and fearing and expecting she wouldn't. This kept me turning the pages all the way to the end.

Cora is a fabulous character, a first person narrator growing up before our eyes. The peripheral characters are mostly complex and interesting. The stereotype, I suppose, is that kids from these backgrounds grow up damaged and there were certainly some who descended into personal hells. But of course poor people are normal people and despite their circumstances they could be kind and generous, and clever and thoughtful, and honest and decent. These characters are visceral and real. 

One of the characters is Cora's environment. Poverty abounds. Jacket potatoes with oven chips is a healthy meal, noodles in a chicken flavoured sauce is commoner fare. Gunner's signature dish is spaghetti with a sauce made from a can of chicken soup, milk and water with scrunched up crisps toasted under the grill for a topping. When she is given a decent pair of trainers she knows they must have been stolen. Everything in her world has a price and mostly it is too expensive for her. And the streets are litter-strewn, the community facilities are vandalised, and the seaside is a rubbish dump. 

The theme is hope despite this background of post-industrial urban decay. These characters might be weeds in a wilderness but most of them are struggling towards the light. 

This is realism in the tradition of Zola: his Germinal is set among the downtrodden and impoverished inhabitants of a coal mining village. The closest recent novel with which it bears comparison is, I think,  Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. 

Selected quotes:

• “Round here you lived in your town and then you died in your town.” (Ch 1)
• “He was a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker, hair shaved off, nose like a witch from a crap cartoon. just the one eye.” (Ch 2)
• “Round here the options for lassies like me were school or a wean, shelf-stacking or shoplifting, gin on the Shreddies or tongue in the socket.” (Ch 4)
• “Auntie Janine used to say that even wasps wouldn't land on my mam's cooking.” (Ch 4)
• “The smudgy blue evening sky made me feel so calm.” (Ch 7)
• “Most of all I hated the future - anything could happen there.” (Ch 8)
• “All adults ever did was tell you bad news or lies or make you eat things at a certain speed.” (Ch 12)
• “He laughed. ‘Been to the zoo once and think you're a tiger.’” (Ch 15)
• “Music was predictable and it gave me a wee bit control over my surroundings. You could rewind and replay.” (Ch 26)
• “It's like your bones have been crying out for light since the day you were born. Then heroin pulls you inside out.” (Ch 27)
• “Imagine you're a sexy wee delicate plant breaking through the first time. You could be growing anywhere in the world, and you twiddle your petally head round for a look and realise you're stuck for life growing in a crack in the tarmac in Whiteinch. Peeping out of the bit where the wires off a phone box go underground.” (Ch 30)
• “Kira had been right, there does come a point where you have to accept who you are and start living.” (Ch 33)
• “You feel useless through almost every second of school and now you're going out into the adult world with the tomato sauce moustache praying that people won't see the wee fraud you are. Some days you can't remember what’s in your own pockets, you can't hold a conversation without interrupting or humming Wet Wet Wet songs to yourself and you've never once been on time. Now the future you want depends on people thinking you're normal.” (Ch 33) Imposter syndrome before an interview!
• “Shame was just a cheap badly fitting neon ski jacket with a broken zip that you had to go around wearing forever, making you a flat-chested hunchback, reminding you of the past.” (Ch 36)

August 2024; 392 pages

A brilliant bildungsroman with a post-industrial decay realism setting.

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

"Less Than Zero" by Brett Easton Ellis

Clay, 18, returns to California from his New England college for a month over Christmas. He socialises and parties with his California friends, most of whom have parents who work in the movie industry or modelling etc. They could be clones: "thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices" (p 140). These spoilt rich kids drink, party, take drugs and sleep with one another in a hedonistic lifestyle which seems to have no cares or consequences. As the book progresses we get glimpses of a darker side: bodies and souls that have been wrecked by drug abuse, payments required, violence and death. But almost nobody seems to care.

Clay hardly ever does anything; he almost always observes.

This book includes scenes I found very disturbing:

• The watching of a snuff movie involving children being tortured and mutilated; subsequently those watching enact a copycat gang rape of a minor
• The discovery of the dead body of a young man in an alley which is treated as a thing to go and see
• Drug debt leading to male prostitution (Clay's - paid - role in this is to observe the sex act taking place; reinforcing his role as the eternal onlooker)

The style of the book is an unstructured ramble which put me very much in mind of the work of Jack Kerouac in, for example, On the Road. The narrator, Clay, goes from party to party recording what occurs with the impartiality of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. There seems no 'story'. It is only after we discover the reason for Julian's repeated attempts to contact Clay that the Faustian theme emerges: there are dark and sometimes savage consequences for the way you live your life. 

The documentary feel of the first part adds verisimilitude, as does the (typically American writers' habit of) regular name checking for consumer items.

The poor make occasional appearances as maids and bystanders. They are very much in the background like Bruegel characters in the corner of the eye, mutely making a point. They are often perceived as a threat: 

• "I don't like driving down Wilshire during lunch hour. They always seem to be too many cars and old people and maids waiting for buses and I end up looking away." (p 32) 
• "We pass a poor woman with dirty, wild hair and a Bullock's bag sitting by her side full of yellowed newspapers ... Blair locks the doors." (p 131)

The nihilism of this book (and not just in terms of the young people, or the extended California society, but in terms of the meaning of human life) is summed up in this exchange:

When we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end. 

'Where are we going?' I asked. 

'I don't know', he said. 'Just driving'. 

'But this road doesn't go anywhere', I told him. 

'That doesn't matter'. 

'What does?' I asked, after a little while. 

'Just that we're on it, dude', he said.

Other moments to treasure:

• "I don't watch a lot of the movie, just the gory parts. My eyes keep wandering off the screen and over to the two green Exit signs that hang above the two doors in the back of the theater." (p 88)
• "'You don't need anything. You have everything', I tell him. Rip looks at me. 'No. I don't. ... 'What don't you have?' 'I don't have anything to lose'." (p 177)
• "The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city."

This was the debut novel of Brett Easton Ellis. Clay makes a subsequent appearance, back at college, in The Rules of Attraction. BEE also wrote American Psycho.

Brilliant and disturbing. Catcher in the Rye on cocaine. 

September 2020; 195 pages

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

"Outsiders" by Howard S Becker

This sociological study of outsiders is by an ex-American jazz musician and includes fascinating portraits of 'marihuana' users (parts were written in the early 1950s) and jazz musicians.

The fact that the book is written when it was means that the chapters on drug taking are devoted to 'marihuana' which is obviously regarded as really rather naughty. Its study of 'dance musicians' is about musicians who want to play 'jazz'.  It also brands homosexuals as deviants:  "many homosexuals are able to keep their deviance secret from their nondeviant associates" (p 21); explaining how difficult it is for them to keep jobs. It is difficult nowadays even to understand how anyone can refer to homosexuality as deviance let alone a sociologist especially without putting the word 'deviance' into quotation marks. But it does make this book a rather fascinating unintended social history.

"What laymen want to know about deviants is: why do they do it? How can we account for this rule-breaking? What is there about them that leads them to do forbidden things?" (p 3)

"different groups judge different things to be deviant." (p 4)
Disease analogy (p 5)
Some forbidden acts are tolerated so long as they are not done openly (p 11)

Deviant 'normalises' behaviour thus:

• Not my fault: tossed by the winds: he is at the mercy of circumstances: it was society made me do it (p 28)
• Not wrong if no one hurt (p 28)
• Not wrong if you are righting a wrong eg beating up other deviants (p 29)
• Not wrong if your condemners are hypocrites (p 29)

"Members of service occupations characteristically consider the client unable to judge the proper worth of the service." (p 82)

"Musicians feel that the only music worth playing is what they call 'jazz', a term which can partially be defined as that music which is produced without references to the demands of outsiders. Yet they must endure unceasing interference with their playing by outsiders and audience ... In order to achieve success he finds it necessary to 'go commercial', that is, play in accord with the wishes of nonmusicians for whom he works; in doing so he sacrifices the respect of other musicians and thus, in most cases, his self-respect." (p 83)

"Only musicians are sensitive and unconventional enough to give real sexual satisfaction to a woman." (p 86)

"Musicians live an exotic life, like in a jungle or something. They start out, they're just ordinary kids from small towns - but once they get into that life they change. It's like a jungle, except that their jungle is a hot, crowded bus. You live that kind of life long enough, you just get to be completely different." (p 86)

Well written by an ex musician and really interesting about jazz. January 2017; 208 pages

"The Road to Eleusis" by Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman and Carla Ruck

Eleusis was a place where Athenian used to travel to take part in a religious rite which unlocked some sort of secret about the meaning of life; they were forbidden to reveal the secrets under pain of death and this prohibition seems to have been successful although in 415 BC Alcibiades and his chums were accused of "celebrating the Mystery at home with groups of drunken guests at dinner parties" (p 47). Perhaps it was not so much that the Mystery shouldn't be told but that it couldn't: "Even a poet could only say that he had seen the beginning and the end of life and known that they were one, something given by god. The division between earth and sky melted into a pillar of light." (p 47)

This 30 year old book attempts to explain the secret of the Mystery as being a drug induced hallucination. It notes that "There were physical symptoms ... that accompanied the vision: feat and a trembling in the limbs, vertigo, nausea and a cold sweat." (p 47) It claims that "What was witnessed there was no play by actors, but phasmata, ghostly apparitions" (p 47). Athenians had plays, they would have been too sophisticated to be taken in by mere drama, it claims. The authors note that the Greeks diluted their wine although "Greeks did not know the art of distillation" (p 51); nevertheless "The word for drunkenness in Greek designates a state of raving madness. We hear of some wines so strong that they could be diluted with twenty parts of water and that required at least eight parts of water to be drunk" (p 51). From this they conclude that the Greek process of making wine led to a product that was adulterated with psychotropic impurities "capable of inducing different physical symptoms, ranging from slumber to insomnia and hallucinations" (p 52). The drunken dinner parties therefore connect with the Eleusian Mysteries.

I got a little confused at this point. The authors had a number of suggestions for the source of the drugs used in the mysteries: impure alcohol, ergot on rye grain, baked into bread, sacred mushrooms, etc. So this left a number of questions in my mind:

• If the Greeks were used to ingesting psychotropic substances by accident in undiluted wine, bread made from infected grain etc, why were the Eleusian Mysteries regarded as special?
• Given that most hallucinogens produce markedly different affects in different people, or in the same person at different times, (the authors themselves note symptoms "from slumber to insomnia", two ends of a spectrum) how did the organisers at Eleusis ensure that everyone had more or less the same visions? (This assumes that they did; maybe a lot of people left Eleusis without any religious conversion.)

I think the authors have made the following points successfully:

• Greek wine was unusually potent for some reason
• Greeks were not unused to ingesting psychotropic substances
• Greek myths contain references to hallucinogens in the rites of Persephone, Demeter, Dionysus etc; there are references to Helen adulterating wine with 'nepenthe'; there are references to gathering mushrooms etc; there seem to be words which could be codes for hallucinogenic substances.
• The ceremonies at Eleusis certainly involved all the celebrants imbibing something in preparation.

But what we still need desperately to know is what else happened at Eleusis to give it such immense power to affect people.

I was a little disappointed in the structure of the book. It seems a loose collection of articles by the authors. Two of the articles seem to contain repeated material.

September 2015; 139 pages

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