Hard-Drinking Irish Jesus

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
p. 1962


[Aye, there be spoilers in this review. I have blacked them out accordingly and if you wish to read them, simply highlight the text.]

Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is an American literary staple, but it flew under my radar until just recently. I had never read the book, seen the Broadway musical or even the notorious 1975 film version starring Jack Nicholson (though, by the description I’ve read, it sounds like a fairly accurate adaptation). It’s really been my loss all these years, because this novel is an experience that you can sink your teeth into, and it’s easy to see not only why it’s so popular but also why it is so widely banned for its controversy.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the story of a psychiatric ward under the strict supervision of the emasculating ‘Big Nurse’ Mildred Ratched, who comes into conflict with brash, fast-talking, hard-drinking newcomer, R.P. McMurphy, a man faking insanity to escape from the work farm he’d been sentenced  to for gambling and fighting. It is clear from the start that McMurphy is not expecting the challenge brought before him by the harsh, disapproving Nurse Ratched, but it does not deter him from his goal.

McMurphy and Ratched really possess this novel, yet it is told entirely through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a Native American man who has spent over a decade on the ward pretending to be a deaf-mute and witnessing the inner workings of ward politics firsthand. Bromden, who ruminates often on the subjugation of his father and his people as their land is slowly taken over by what he refers to as the Combine, is the only one who is allowed to see through the secret window into the person McMurphy really is. The Irish rogue is at first a curiosity to the ward’s inhabitants, then a hero as he teaches them to stand up for themselves against the Big Nurse and learn to laugh again, bringing life to the ward where before any semblance of joy or disorder was immediately silenced. What ensues is a battle of wits and willpower as McMurphy and Ratched fight for control of the ward.

It took me a while to get into this book. I found Part 1 (over 100 pages and roughly half of the novel) to be a bit dull. Apart from eliciting a few laughs here and there at McMurphy and Ratched’s posturing, not much happens aside from your typical stage-setting. It isn’t until Part 2 when McMurphy realizes the reality of his predicament—that he could be kept long past his original sentence if he continues to get on Ratched’s bad side—and scales back his antics, that the story perks up. And it isn’t until the end of Part 2, when McMurphy makes the conscious decision to say ‘to Hell with it’ and continue his crusade against the nurse’s conformity, that the character truly comes alive. That McMurphy stayed on knowing his freedom was at stake because he knew the other patients needed to see his rebellion turned the jokester into a true hero, while still making him endearingly human.

I must admit, even though I saw McMurphy’s eventual fate coming from a mile away, it was still so devastating to see him martyred like that. The entire final act of this book is just demoralizing in general. I felt terrible for all the patients and furious at Big Nurse who defied the most basic rule of healthcare provider in order to maintain her aura of power. It’s all a very potent allegory for society and the book is rich with metaphor to be picked apart. It’s a shame that the idea of a hard-drinking, womanizing rogue as a Christlike figure is so offensive that the book has been widely banned over the years, because it would make an excellent teaching subject.

I strongly encourage fans of the movie and people who’ve never experienced either book or movie to read this novel. It is surprisingly satisfying and an American classic. It’ll make you laugh and cry and all the other emotions that the ‘Big Nurse’ would rather you just keep to yourself. But that’s exactly why we need characters like McMurphy in our lives—to remind us to never take life too seriously.

What Really Matters is What You Like, Not What You Are Like

High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
p. 1995

My first full book of 2014 is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, the story of Rob, a guy in his mid-thirties who owns a record shop and has just been dumped by his long-term girlfriend, Laura. This latest in a long series of rejections in Rob’s life sends him on an internalized tailspin that eventually leads to contacting his top five exes in a quest to figure out what exactly went wrong in his life.

High Fidelity is my first foray into Nick Hornby’s work and I suspect I will be seeking out more. Hornby has a refreshing style—hilarious and relatable. Rob Fleming is a fantastic protagonist, too, even when I want to strangle him, and I wanted to strangle him a lot. That’s just the thing, Rob is not a perfect person, far from it, but he possesses this strangely pathetic self-loathing that is just too perfectly realized to not be relatable. Sure, maybe we haven’t messed things up as poorly as Rob has done—or maybe we’ve done worse—either way, Rob’s downward spiral, though at times cringe-worthy, is wholly engaging. You want to see Rob’s road to self-realization, you want to see if he’ll actually get there, because if someone as screwed up and self-centered as Rob Fleming can make peace with himself, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.

High Fidelity is definitely a dated story. Obviously the idea of owning a profitable record shop in this day and age is laughable, even more so than it was a couple decades ago, but for the more obvious reason that the technology has become obsolete. The resolution—Rob’s reentry into the world of deejaying—also kind of falls flat by today’s standards, though maybe it wasn’t so laughable when it was written. 

More importantly, Rob and his record store cohorts (which he can barely call friends, though they’re probably the best ones he’s got) cram every minute of this novel with pop culture references and being a good two and a half decades younger than Rob and his friends, I understandably failed to comprehend most of them. You can pretty much guess at their meaning based on context, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve missed out on something—like someone is purposefully making references that go over my head while I’m standing in the room.

At the story’s start, Rob is of the mentality that “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” This thinking is, of course, erroneous, but not far off from the things that dictate our pop-saturated culture today. It would be interesting to see what Rob would look like if his story were taking place right now, but no doubt he wouldn’t get three pages without being declared the biggest ‘hipster’ alive and the story would get buried unless it took the parody route and played Rob off like a tool. The only reason this story—and Rob as a protagonist—works is because it was written before ‘hipster’ entered the vernacular and thus lost all meaning.

For all the story’s faults, its dialogue was realistic and its style was catchy and you can’t help but feel for Rob in spite of his faults. When Laura’s dad passes away after a long illness and she tearfully calls Rob up (initiating their slow drift back into each other's orbit), Rob’s monologue when receiving the news is one of my favorite bits in the story:

“I think about people dying all the time, but they’re always people connected with me. I’ve thought about how I would feel if Laura died, and how Laura would feel if I died, and how I’d feel if my mum or dad died, but I never thought about Laura’s mum or dad dying. I wouldn’t, would I? And even though he was ill for the entire duration of my relationship with Laura, it never really bothered me: it was more like, my dad’s got a beard, Laura’s dad’s got angina. I never thought it would actually lead to anything. Now he’s gone, of course, I wish... what? What do I wish? That I’d been nicer to him? I was perfectly nice to him, the few times we met. That we’d been closer? He was me common-law father-in-law, and we were very different, and he was sick, and... we were as close as we needed to be. You’re supposed to wish things when people die, to fill yourself full of regrets, to give yourself a hard time for all your mistakes and omissions, and I’m doing all that as best I can. It’s just that I can’t find any mistakes and omissions. He was my ex-girlfriend’s dad, you know? What am I supposed to feel?”

The end of the story implies that Rob has become a better person through the experience of reconnecting with his exes; I’m not certain I agree with that, and the final state of his relationship with Laura feels off to me, but I kind of like that it’s hard to decide if Rob’s really a changed man or not. It gives the story some ambiguity and makes you really think about how you’d have handled it all in his shoes.

I remember seeing the John Cusack film version of this years back and kind of liking it, and in celebration of reading this book, I watched it again, only this time I kind of hated it. I think it was a poor adaptation of this book. They got most of the action right, and Cusack is actually the perfect choice to play Rob, but the whole thing felt a lot less charming than the book. Maybe it’s the conversion trip across the ocean that did it, maybe it was the script or acting, or something else. The book just feels more genuine.