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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ken Kesey

Start date: April 1, 2015

Finish date: April 30, 2015

Discussion: Group Reads

Why we're reading this: It's on the Time 100 List…more
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Group Reads

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What Members Thought

Dec 04, 2021 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, american-20th-c, made-into-movie, novels

I adored this movie with Jack Nicholson and finally got around to reading the book. What a revelation! Extremely well-written from the perspective of Big Chief (a fact for whose absence the author deplored the movie script), what I didn't realize was how the book is a prescient critique of the late 50s/early 60s USA with racism and other -isms raising the social temperature close to the boiling point, with the problems of undiagnosed (and little understood) PTSD (here following WWII and Korean a I adored this movie with Jack Nicholson and finally got around to reading the book. What a revelation! Extremely well-written from the perspective of Big Chief (a fact for whose absence the author deplored the movie script), what I didn't realize was how the book is a prescient critique of the late 50s/early 60s USA with racism and other -isms raising the social temperature close to the boiling point, with the problems of undiagnosed (and little understood) PTSD (here following WWII and Korean as this is before the massive US deployment into the Vietnam quagmire), as well as the abuse in institutions of mental health. It is an absolutely wonderful book that sticks in your gut like a shiv. Had the committee given Faulker a deserved 2nd Pulitzer before he passed away (but out of guilt I am assuming for passing over Light in August, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying and giving it to him posthumously for The Reivers almost grudgingly - I am reminded of how the anti-Semitic Nobel committee himmed and hawed for almost 20 years before grudgingly awarding Einstein his Physics Nobel), I am fairly sure that Kesey would have won it for this extraordinary book.

Some quotes:
"Failures, we are - feeble, stunted, weak little creatures in a weak little race. Rabbits, sans whambam; a pathetic notion." (pp. 160)

"The secret to being a top-notch con-man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it." (pp. 192)

"That's what McMurphy can't understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we'd be easy to get at."

Stockholm syndrome:
"It was a fine woodsmoked autumn day, full of the sound of kids punting footballs and the putter of small airplanes, and everybody should've been happy just being outside in it. But we all stood in a silent bunch with our hands in our pockets while the doctor walked to get his car. A silent bunch, watching the townspeople who were driving past on their way to work slow down to gawk at all the loonies in green uniforms. McMurphy saw how uneasy we were and tried to work us into a better mood by joking and teasing the girl, but this made us feel worse somehow. Everybody was thinking how easy it would be to return to the ward..."

great description:
"punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, so fresh from the factory they're still linked together like sausages, a sign saying "NEST IN THE WEST HOMES--NO DWN. PAYMENT FOR VETS", a playground down the hill from the houses, behind a chickenwire fence and another sign that read "ST. LUKE'S SCHOOL FOR BOYS". There were five thousand kids in green corduroy pants and white shirts under green pullover sweaters playing crack-the-whip across an acre of crushed gravel. The line popped and twisted and irked like a snake, and every crack popped a little kid off the end, sent him rolling up against the fence like a tumbleweed. Every crack. And it was always the same little kid, over and over."

Beautiful foreboding:
"The house drifted past. He yawned and winked. "Taught me to love, bless her sweet ass.
Then -as he was talking -a set of taillights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do...
While his relaxed, good-natured voice doled out his life for us to live, a rollicking past full of kid fun and drinking buddies and loving women and barroom battles over meager honors -for all of us to dream ourselves into." ...more

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