Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Non-Fiction
Pages: 416
OK. Where do I start? This book is mainly about Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over A Cuckoo's Nest. During the sixties, Kesey lead a group of people that had no particular purpose, but to advocate the use of LSD. They called themselves "The Merry Pranksters", which is a little "Happy Days" for a bunch of degenerate drug users. For the first hundred pages, I suspected Wolfe himself to have named them. Yeah, but that's it. Kesey and his pranksters are the subject of the book, but not really. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is also a lot about Tom Wolfe.
Published in 1968, it was Wolfe's first full length narrative effort. A whopping 416 pages of Ken Kesey's drug adventures, written with sometimes the most sincere attempt at journalistic objectivity and sometimes with a strange playfulness. That makes for a clunky text that shows Wolfe was torn in between his writing roots and his burning desire to write a novel. It was such a nagging issue, I felt like dropping the book myself and go read The Bonfire Of The Vanities. Wolfe's loyalty to journalism makes him betray one of fiction's main rules: Show, don't tell. For long, twenty-plus pages verbous chapters, he relates what he sees without any structure and with as little interaction with the pranksters as possible. He draws the portrait their road trip from a line that starts with Kesey in jail and ends up with Kesey in jail, as a grim illustration that any attempt to bend the rules of the system will be punished. Tom Wolfe seems pretty confident in his opinion that drugs are bad.
Here's what I don't get. Wolfe wrote an afterword, saying that the journalistic approach wasn't enough to convey the spirit of the pranksters and that he had to insert those playful twists of his, to give the reader the complete experience. Although, many interviewers have asked Wolfe about his tenure among the pranksters. Every time, he made a point that he never tried LSD and that he gave a single run to marijuana. Not that I'm some kind of drug advocate myself, but it's hard to picture Wolfe as anything else, but a disconnected older brother that the pranksters left out of their circle most of the times. His "anthropological" observation sound like stories he made up while witnessing a culture he didn't understand and hearing a new language he didn't know. In all truth, as fascinating of a subject Ken Kesey might be, Wolfe doesn't seem to like him at all.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a failed experiment, but it's not a big flat F. It's visible from Wolfe's style that a structured novel would suit him better than a gang of LSD abusers. Comically enough, he crosses paths with Hunter S. Thompson (a personal favorite) when the Pranksters and the Hell's Angels party together. This is pretty cool since he seems to hold him in the highest regard. Tom Wolfe has an obvious god given ability with words, but he's also out of synch with his subject and very aware of his talent. It makes for an awkward book that doesn't convince me he's anywhere in the same league than Thompson and Mailer in terms of journalism or fiction.
