The Strength of One

SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION by Ken Kesey. 628 pages. Viking. $7.50.

A good man is hard to find, and intolerable to men and gods once he is found. The age of the anti-hero tends to overlook this fascinating half-truth, which is the durable paradox at the core of Oedipus Rex and Othello. But Ken Kesey used it well in his short, cruelly focused first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. McMurphy, laughing con man and indestructible alley fighter, cons his way into an insane asylum to escape the drudgery of a prison farm. His battle is with Big Nurse, the white-starched emasculator who bulls his ward, and he beats her every round except the inevitable last one. And, capering defiantly toward the lobotomist's knife, he pipes the other inmates toward self-respect, a service they resent all the more because the journey terrifies them.

Kesey's second novel, which is longer and less well focused, reworks the same theme, and with almost the same hero. The effect is not that of an author repeating himself because he has nothing new to say, but of a man whose mind has been seized by something that will not let it free.

At Arm's Length. Hank Stamper is a McMurphy who stops rambling and gambling and comes home, with a pretty wife jouncing on the back of his Harley-Davidson, to boss his father's logging operation in Oregon. He had been a phenomenal high school athlete, strong enough to hold a double-bitted ax at arm's length for 8 min. 36 sec.; at 36 he is still able to bare-knuckle the swagger out of the biggest lumberjack in the Northwest.

Stamper's strength is as the strength of one, and naturally none of the self-divided souls around him can tolerate so much indivisible virtue. The towns people are feuding with him because he won't join a logging strike (this may be the only novel about workingmen in which the strikers are villains), and his bookish young half brother, Lee, is trying to break him.

Will the weight of envious mediocrities and malevolent mischance bring Stamper down, or will he be able to float his log booms down the river in time to meet his contract? The question sounds like rank melodrama, but it is not; Author Kesey's novel is big and clumsy, but its questions matter very much.

Or some of them do. Half Brother Lee, the book's lago, lacks the flawed strength required for the role. He is just not very interesting, and when it is revealed that he hates Stamper because he once slept with Lee's mother, the reader does not care enough to believe or disbelieve the gimmick.

Big & Twisted. Kesey has given himself space for some funny, sharply drawn minor characters and some fine logging scenes. But there is too much of the tedious Lee, too many thrown-in anecdotes. The book suffers from a Thomas Wolfish effort to be as big and brawling as the country it describes. The attempt blurs Kesey's view of his real theme--the weakness of the strong and the persistent tensility of the weak.

But the view is there. And the best of it is the dim understanding that comes to Lee and the townspeople: they can't stand for Stamper to win, but they feel cheated and confused when he begins to lose. But Kesey understands that intolerable as a good man may be to men and gods, his defeat is even more so. Perhaps in that paradox is the twisted tragedy.

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