One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Think what you must, but the book that has been with me of late—the one I just finally finished reading an hour or so ago while I waited for the boys to rise—has been the Ken Kesey classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was on the high school summer reading table at the local book store, and of course I'd seen the movie, but I should have long ago read the book.

I had anticipated the intensity of the story itself—the horrible inevitability that awaits Randle Patrick McMurphy, the red-headed asylum inmate with the white-whale shorts who does battle of every kind with Nurse Ratched. I fell in quickly with Chief, the faux-mute/deaf Indian who narrates the tale. What I didn't see coming was the sentence-by-sentence power of the writing itself, the ridiculously unriddled but original details that made this book not a fast read for me, but a slow one.

Here's what Kesey does with a man's hand, which is to say, with a man's character:

I remember real clear the way that hand looked: there was carbon under the fingernails where he'd worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; there was a dirty Band-Aid on the middle knuckle, peeling up at the edge.... I remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone from hefting the wooden handles of axes and hoes, not the hand you'd think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was worked in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West.

There's a whole life story in these hands—no need to back story McMurphy in any of the staid, familiar ways. He's all right there, in a peeling Band-Aid. So much to learn from that.

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The Good Writer

"When asked why she wrote, she replied, 'Because I'm good at it.'"

That's Flannery O'Connor as quoted by Joy Williams in her New York Times Book Review review of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.

Because I'm good at it. And why not? Why not abandon all the philosophizing for a moment—put the moral avatars in one corner and the world peace makers in another, give the riff raff their pot of coffee (very black) and their prime rib (bloody rare), and make a declaration?

Flannery O'Connor wrote lonely, she wrote dying, she wrote in pain, she wrote through. Flannery O'Connor wrote, and she was good. Didn't need the world to tell her (though it did). She had no time to lose.

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