Half brothers as they are they could not be more unalike. A dope-smoking John Coltrane fan whose head is a mess and recently botched a suicide attempt. Half brother Leeland (Lee) is the spectacle-wearing cerebral child gone east to get an education.
#SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION ANALYSIS MOVIE#
The alternative movie title – Never Give an Inch – Copyright 2019 Heritage Auctions The defining image is of him training as a swimmer by stroking upriver against the current and going precisely nowhere – swimming as he does in a river that no one else cares to even enter. Hank is the epitome of the western man, a cowboy with an axe rather than a gun. Father Henry has two sons by two different women – Hank is the brawny bull moose, ex-football star who no man dares cross, a chip off the block that shaped Henry, though not quite so unpleasant. The book centres around the Stamper family – a bunch of hard-nosed independent loggers whose motto is, ‘ Never Give an Inch’. Further, ‘ The novel is an important and unjustly neglected classic of American literature’. In, ‘ 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die’, Margaret Anne Doody declares the book is, ‘ A raw exploration of the survival of the American dream and a near-mythic fable of man pitted against nature, community, and big business’. Still, people keep trying and, ‘ Sometimes’, is as good a candidate as any. The defining characteristics might be that the GAN is not yet written, is endlessly debated and it will ruin everything if it ever does come to print. Nonetheless, there are claims that this might be the Great American Novel, a grail after which many seek, have sought, and endlessly written about.
Famous as he was it was almost as much as a personality than as an author (a particularly American affliction) and he might be best known for his Merry Prankster escapades. He did in fact spend research time with loggers. It’s set in the fictional logging community of Wakonda in the Pacific Northwest and Kesey – who looks like he may well have chopped down a few trees – seems to know his way around. It’s a doorstopper of a book running to over 600 pages and it is not an easy read, but it is very rewarding. Fewer though might be familiar with Kesey’s second novel, ‘ Sometimes a Great Notion ’, written in 1964 – which a good number would claim to be the superior literary work. There may well be even fewer who are not familiar with the film version, featuring one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest performances – wherein he acts rather than mugs his way through proceedings. It’s my guess that there won’t be many readers of this website that are not familiar with Ken Kesey and his most famous book, ‘ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ’. Man against nature, rugged individualism, small-town life, family, relationships, love and death – that sort of thing! Hopefully, the choice I have made embodies some of those themes that exemplify much that is American and that the writers we tend to admire pen songs about. It feels like a good idea to widen the scope of this feature with a novel or two, perhaps a volume that has been unjustly neglected. A dark family drama played out in a rough world of its own.
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