Word: stamper
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...