Word: cuckoos
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SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION, by Ken Kesey. The author's first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, took place in an insane asylum and proposed the paradox that the only thing more intolerable to lesser men than the success of a good man is his defeat. This second novel, which repeats the theme in a larger setting and at longer length, is less effective for the added dimensions, yet is exuberant and brawling as the Pacific Northwest lumbering country it describes...
...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...
...nutcracker and darn near twists it off. A yokel sits on his front porch and earnestly whittles a new seat for a two-holer. Two young men stalk a birthday cake and then pump it full of bullets. One of them runs slowly across the screen, stark-naked. "Cuckoo!" says a clock on the sound track. "Cuckoo!" And it really...
...Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Dale Wasserman, hinges on a duel in a loony bin, and the play seems almost as disturbed and disturbing as its setting. Ward Nurse Ratched (Joan Tetzel) is a kind of female Fu Manchu with incredibly sweeping authority. If a patient steps out of line, she punishes him with electric shock treatments...
Played with fire and ice by Kirk Douglas and Joan Tetzel, Cuckoo's Nest is implausible, if scarifying, viewed as realism. Wasserman intends the insane asylum as a metaphor for the world. But instead of cracking sick jokes, he ought to have tried for outright theater-of-the-absurd. The play gains in tension what it loses in triteness by linking Nurse Ratched's oppression of the patients to her sexual repression of herself...