Country: USA
Genre: Literary
Pages: 281
Synopsis:
The new patient in the psychiatric ward Randle Patrick McMurphy is quite the number. He has issues with authority and confronts the head nurse, Mrs. Ratched all the time. Soon, he becomes a leader figure among the patient and it becomes unclear who of McMurphy or Nurse Ratched actually wants them to get better. Both philosophies face off and the ward becomes somewhat of a war zone as McMurphy gets bolder.
We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?
There is this dichotomy amongst rock n' roll historians. There are important bands and there are good bands. One can be both, but there are "important" bands I couldn't get interested to unless I had mild dementia. I tried to get into Hüsker Dü or Pavement, but I simply can't. It's just not my thing. Emotional connection equals zero. On the other hand, The Ramones were both important and good. They shaped modern punk music by being the punkest possible punk unit. Same thing with Black Sabbath who shaped heavy metal by being the heaviest thing out there. I have no doubt Ken Kesey's ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST is an important book. It represents a shift in values, the drastic change of the sixties. It's just not in the same league than timeless books. Yeah, it aged.
The elephant in the room here is the movie adaptation. In 1975, director Milos Forman adapted ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST for the silver screen, starring Jack Nicholson as McMurphy and it's still as of today, a cinema classic. My disappointment in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, the novel, lies in the fact that the old saying doesn't apply here. Or at least I didn't find. The book wasn't "so much better" than the movie. Everything that made the movie great is in there, plus stuff that was left out for a very good reason. Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, who wrote the movie's screenplay, boiled down the essence of the power struggle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched and gave it a cohesion that the novel doesn't have.
So what didn't work for me exactly? I can't blame a novel for not holding up to its own historicity. My main issue is the prose, which also makes the novel unique, which makes me kinda torn about it. There's just no real rhythm to it, and rhythm and fluidity are two things I look forward a lot in fiction. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST is told from a first person point of view (an inmate). It's choppy, unequal and the narrator is very distant. He gets gradually pulled into the McMurphy/Ratched conflict, but it goes a long way before he does. I was expecting a certain dramatic construction from the novel, which it didn't have. There are lengths and event are unraveling in short bursts. I probably demanded too much out of this novel, I know. But I was disappointed.
“I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen."
Quick note on the racism and sexism in the novel, which Chuck Palahniuk is valiantly trying to brush off in the foreword. I know it's easy criticism, but you know. The bad guys are a nurse and three black orderlies. I mean c'mon. One woman and three black guys. It's really blunt. Only thing missing was an evil gay hospital director. I knew this starting the novel, so I hovered over the prejudiced parts, but still. If you decide to read ONE FLEW OVER A CUCKOO'S NEST, you should be warned. You won't hear me say this often, but watch the movie instead. It contains the core of the novel and chopped off all the driftwood. I'm happy I read it, but can't say I'm going to repeat the experience. In fact, I'm expecting it to loose relevance over the next decade or two.
TWO STARS
Book written by a writer who did time