Book Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe.
This is my first book review in this space and it's an odd one because I have mixed feelings about it. The first thing you need to know is that it is a very famous "nonfiction novel." In fact, this might even be the father of the nonfiction novel. If you're truly interested I'd suggest you look it up yourself, I'm sure there is a nice story there somewhere. What I know is that Mr Wolfe was in cahoots around this time with a writer I am much more familiar with, Hunter S Thompson, in creating what was known as New Journalism, wherein the journalist was not the venerable impartial, fly-on-the-wall observer, but actually just the opposite. Thompson called it Gonzo Journalism and unabashedly not only inserted himself in the story but usually made himself the centerpiece. It's in this spirit that Wolfe wrote TEK-AAT.
Of course, it's far too simple to merely say that this book is a longer example of New Journalism. No, this is indeed a book, an artistic work of Wolfe's not just memory but also imagination. He is chronicling the story but he's also telling it in his own words through his own filter. What I'm trying to say is that there is no pretense towards journalism here, as there would be in a Thompson piece in Rolling Stone. This is important. The freedom from word counts and deadlines and the need to be clear and concise and coherent opened Wolfe up to expand his prose into to the unique voice he found for TEK-AAT, a voice that truly elevated the story into something timeless and artistic and valuable, something you perhaps can not say about the subjects he was describing.
For those uninitiated, this book is about the acid culture around San Francisco in the mid 1960s, in particular Ken Kesey and a group of his followers/admirers called the Merry Pranksters. Kesey was evidently a kind of messianic living legend at the time, and his Pranksters famous in their own right. He/they had the ambition to reach a higher form of mutual/group consciousness, which they facilitated through copious consumption of acid and intense openness and sharing of ideas and experiences. To be blunt, these people were the absolute stereotype of the drugged-up hippie, flower children to the extreme, covered in big ridiculous colored clothing and touring around the country in a converted school bus painted psychadelically in Day-Glo and totally amped for sound.
At one moment, I was sucked into the allure of this pursuit of a higher consciousness, but in the next, I was completely turned off by the its hypocrisy and ignorance. This represents a large part of why I have mixed feelings about TEK-AAT. Because it's a "nonfiction" novel, after all, you can't really fully extract the message from the "message." Being a proudly spontaneous actor, I am very much intrigued by the idea of the "Now trip," where everyone comes out front and almost unconsciously experiences the whole world around them in that exact moment. It's similar to how I feel about writing poetry: that it just comes and you sense it and feel it and don't think or edit just let it float and write itself. I believe in the power of the muse. However, I also appreciate that the muse cannot always be a-musing or else what's the point, what's yin without yang? And there was a somewhat telling moment toward the middle of the book (how do you like that for thorough and precise scholarly criticism?) when one of the Pranksters is admonishing someone else for being too intellectual, that they themselves are stridently anti-intellectual. Not that I consider myself any kind of highbrow intellectual, but isn't it almost cowardice that have this stance? Intelligent and mature thinking is what separates us from the animals, you know. Cognition alone isn't enough. I just don't find it terribly easy to admire something that strives towards ignorance, even if it's a willful or mutual ignorance. (Even more of a digression now, but this is probably a large reason why their movement more or less died, and why a book like TEK-AAT is more historical than philosophical today. In another part of the book a man is chastised for reading, because reading isn't contributing to the group experience. Nice thought, but what happens when the group gets a little bigger and too many voices are speaking at once. Their approach to life can work in doses amongst a group of friends but not really anywhere else.)
As with any book strongly associated with an idea, it's hard to dissociate your reactions to that idea from your reactions to the book itself. This caused me to put the book down for a week at a time more than once. I likely wouldn't have finished it at all were it not for the generally good quality of the writing, as well as the undeniable fact that it's quite an original book especially given it's context.
It's to Wolfe's credit that through much of the book he doesn't tip you towards sympathy or revulsion to the lifestyle he's describing. Mostly, he's simply leading you through Kesey's world, showing you what it's like both through his mode of description and the descriptions themselves. But I do think there is a chapter late in the book called "The Red Tide" where the POV shifts to the Mexicans, who are looked down upon by basically everyone (Wolfe included) as worthless, dirty ignoramouses. Through this lens the veil of bullshit seems to be lifted above Kesey et al to reveal the relatively pathetic and pitiful truths of their existence. There are other smaller bits where it seems we get a glimpse of the phony romanticism of the Prankster life, but this chapter cements it. After The Red Tide, the dream and the romance are over. Kudos to Wolfe for holding out so long. He made a good read for us.
(Sorry if this is disjointed/unintelligent/incoherent. I'm at work and have been distracted. Shame on you, work.)