Book Review: Outside Looking In: A Novel by T. C. Boyle
T. C. Boyle has a penchant for examining countercultural issues, especially those from the sixties and seventies. One of his previous novels, Drop City, concerns a commune of hippies that decides to relocate from California to Alaska; the transplanted freaks are ultimately unprepared for the stark realities of the harsh climate and struggle for survival. In Outside Looking In, Boyle focuses on the early 1960s and Timothy Leary’s initial experiments with psychedelic drugs and communal lifestyles.
After a prologue set in Switzerland in 1943, in which the scientist who initially discovered LSD’s radical properties gets unexpectedly blasted out of his mind, Boyle cuts to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962. The story is told in three parts through the viewpoints of Fitz and Joanie, a couple with a teenage son. Fitz is a Harvard graduate student in psychology who is studying under Leary. In the first part, through Fitz’s viewpoint, the couple begins to become part of Leary’s “inner circle” by attending weekend psychedelic parties. They initially take psilocybin and gradually move on to the much more potent but then-untested LSD. At the time, both these drugs were legal, and Leary had Harvard’s approval to pursue the project. In part two, told through Joanie’s point of view, Leary’s followers spend two summers in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where Leary has booked an entire seaside hotel. In this idyllic setting, they continue to indulge in LSD, psilocybin, marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs, supposedly in the name of research. During the second summer, the authorities in Mexico deport them.
In the third part, told through Fitz’s point of view, Leary is gifted a 64-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, and he invites the entire inner circle and their families to move in. They continue their so-called experiments, which basically amount to staying stoned and drunk most of the time, sharing communal chores and activities, and concocting ever-wilder schemes to expand and unite their minds. One of these involves drawing the names of two random people from a hat; the selected couple spends a week together, freed from household duties and encouraged to partake of large amounts of LSD. When Fitz is paired with an eighteen-year-old teenage girl, he develops an obsessive infatuation with her, losing interest in his wife and son and everything else around.
The Millbrook section traces the deterioration of the group’s harmony, which is inevitable, really, considering that they are united around Leary’s charisma and overindulgence in hallucinogenic substances. The drugs eventually render them at least partially glazed and dysfunctional, and Leary proves to be an untrustworthy guru; by the end of the book he is planning to take off for a six-month-long honeymoon in India with one of the multitudinous beauties that he regularly sleeps with. This last section, to my mind, is a bit tedious; Boyle takes his time detailing the inescapable deterioration, and it is particularly onerous because Fitz is so enamored with his teenage heartthrob that he can think of little else. Joanie eventually gets fed up with the commune and Fitz’s shenanigans and leaves with their son, and Fitz hardly even notices or cares.
In conclusion, it’s an interesting novel, and absorbing in parts, and I would recommend it but with reservations. The last third, as I mentioned, really does stretch out too long, and the climax comes with a fizzle rather than a bang. It doesn’t touch on any of the legal problems that are ahead for Leary; it ends with the so-called inner circle helplessly enmeshed in an experiment gone awry, an experiment that has descended into a mishmash of dysfunctional relationships and drug-muddled minds.
