Sometimes a Great Notion

Reception

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, who had traveled with Kesey and his companions on the bus Furthur, noted that initial reviews of the book varied widely.[3] Commenting in the Saturday Review in a 1964 piece entitled "Beatnik in Lumberjack Country", critic Granville Hicks wrote: "In his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey demonstrated that he was a forceful, inventive and ambitious writer. All of these qualities are exhibited, in even higher degree, in Sometimes a Great Notion. Here he has told a fascinating story in a fascinating way."[3] Also in the Saturday Review, John Barkham wrote: "A novelist of unusual talent and imagination ... a huge, turbulent tale ..."[3] In Wolfe's old paper, the New York Herald Tribune, Maurice Dolbier wrote: "In the fiction wilderness, this is a towering redwood."[3] In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Charles Bowden called it "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century."[4]

In 1997, a panel of writers from the Pacific Northwest voted it number one in a list of "12 Essential Northwest Works".[5] One critic described it as "...what may well be the quintessential Northwest novel".[6] Wolfe and others compared it to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! in both form and content.[7] Wolfe also noted, however, that Time characterized it as "a big novel—but that it was overwritten and had failed."[3]


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