THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST by Tom Wolfe

They say that if you can remember the 60s, then you weren’t really there.  I’m a bit younger than the people in this book, and I wasn’t in California in the 60s, where most of the action takes place.  The main character and leader of the pack is Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion.  I loved both of Kesey’s acclaimed novels, both of which were made into movies, and generally I like Tom Wolfe.  However, this is sort of a loose biography of Kesey’s LSD experimentation period, and I wasn’t that fond of it.  One of the main characters is actually the bus, named Furthur (intentionally misspelled), which makes a cross-country trip, helmed by Neal Cassady, the real-life Dean Moriarty from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, as well as a sojourn into Mexico, when Kesey is on the run from the authorities.  The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” came along after this period, but in some ways it applies here as well.  Kesey has sort of a cult following that drinks LSD-laced Kool-Aid at one of their soirees, but so do some unsuspecting guests.  Of course, if you’re going to a Pranksters party and don’t expect LSD to be floating around, then you must have been totally out of touch and you wouldn’t have been at the party in the first place.  Apparently, Kesey was a very charismatic man, but his charm did not come through on the page for me.  I did find it fascinating how these great writers found each other:  Kesey, Wolfe, Larry McMurtry, and others.  Wolfe mentions Kerouac only in connection with Cassady, and although I didn’t love this book, Wolfe is a way better writer than Kerouac, in my opinion, and Wolfe steers clear of language that would make the book feel dated.