In T.C. Boyle’s Trippy New Novel, Characters Turn On, Tune In and Drop Lots of Acid

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/books/review/t-coraghessan-boyle-outside-looking-in.html

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OUTSIDE LOOKING IN By T.C. Boyle

As a kid growing up in southwestern Virginia, I lived down the street from a cloistered visionary named Greg, an older boy who read books and spoke in zealous declarations.

One day of summer vacation when I was 9, Greg declared that we would build a monorail. This was an era of global oil shocks and nuclear meltdowns, and Greg was of the fervent belief that the monorail might save us all. It’s true that monorails at this point did not figure prominently into the rural imagination, and certainly not mine. But I knew there was one at Disney World and so I was, for a time, all in.

For his project Greg assembled a small team (me) and he selected a location — his half-acre backyard, where he once led me on a brief tour. Mostly, though, he sat inside, making sketches and declarations. There were, as I recall, a lot of sketches. I sat with him in his kitchen, dream adjacent.

As it turned out, we never even broke ground. After two days, I grew weary of watching Greg sketch. Our intentional community, once so cohesively bound by purpose, splintered because I really wanted to leave Greg’s kitchen. Greg abandoned the project, no doubt realizing that it’s not easy to become a difficult genius. And it’s too bad — had Greg been more fiendishly charismatic and capable, had he attracted a few more acolytes, had he maniacally pursued his salvific vision of backyard mass transit, he might very well have grown up to become the subject of a T. Coraghessan Boyle novel.

With a soft spot for the crackpot, Boyle has, over many years and novels, made hay with American iconoclasts and ideologues, myopic seers who strive against the currents of convention. We are an experimental nation — a nation of spectacular hypotheses and failures — and Boyle has been drawn repeatedly to doomed schemes and communities (the biosphere, the hippie commune, the wellness cure, etc.). He writes with a youthful and sustained energy that parallels the zeal of his dreamers, and that ultimately attenuates their failures. There are few writers who seem more American.

Boyle has constructed novels in tight orbit around Alfred Kinsey (“The Inner Circle”), Frank Lloyd Wright (“The Women”) and John Harvey Kellogg (“The Road to Wellville”). Now, in “Outside Looking In,” his 17th novel in 37 years, Boyle’s subject is, surprisingly, the acid evangelist and counterculture icon Timothy Leary. The surprise is not that Boyle turned to Leary; the surprise is that it took him this long to do it. Brilliant, obsessive, defiant, narcissistic, messianic and ambitious, Leary is for Boyle a low-hanging fanatic.

Though President Nixon allegedly called him “the most dangerous man in America,” Leary today is rather less notorious. Readers of a certain age may not know that Leary was, in the early 1960s, a clinical psychologist at Harvard, where he touted the mind-expansive qualities of psychedelic drugs; that as part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project he administered psychedelic drugs to prisoners and divinity students; that he encouraged his students to use drugs, and he used with them; that LSD was legal at this time; or that Harvard fired Leary in 1963 for, among other things, “fail[ing] to keep his classroom appointments.”

After a prelude about Albert Hofmann’s synthesis of LSD in Switzerland in 1943, Boyle’s account covers the years 1962-64, a period in which Leary and retinue — grad students, minor celebrities, independently wealthy dilettantes and a monkey — retreat from authority in order to establish a community around LSD, or “the sacrament.” From Leary’s wrecked rental house in Cambridge, the “psychonauts” move to a beach hotel in Mexico and then finally to a 64-room mansion in Millbrook, N.Y. Their “sessions” constitute groundbreaking research into human consciousness, not unlike the important work done by collegians during Spring Break Daytona.

[ How does a writer put a drug trip into words? ]

Most of the novel resides in the perspective of Fitzhugh Loney, one of Leary’s graduate students. (The middle third, roughly, shifts to the perspective of Fitz’s wife, Joanie.) After mild initial reluctance, Fitz and Joanie, young parents to a teenage son named Corey, eagerly cast off the burdens of conventional life to join Leary’s coterie. (Boyle is our great dramatist of the inner circle.) Fitz is ostensibly a researcher, but in a neat turn Boyle positions him as a subject of Leary’s grand experiment.

Though there are troubles and omens, Fitz and Joanie remain committed and enthusiastic trippers throughout the move to idyllic Mexico and then to rural Millbrook. Gradually, however, the experimental life becomes a slog. This novel is not, it must be said, full of surprises. As it turns out, constant drug use and free love may not be good for your marriage, family or academic career. If you’ve studied history — or if you’ve read other Boyle novels — you know well the arc of utopia.

The mansion in Millbrook, regarded by its inhabitants as a “spaceship” or “planet,” is a setting perfectly suited for Boyle’s methods. It’s the kind of microcosmic, nested world — dome, estate, island, sanitarium, commune — that he has utilized in previous novels. And in “Outside Looking In” there is yet another crucible inside the crucible — the human mind, rearranged by LSD. During one of Fitz’s trips, “worlds collided, glaciers calved, civilizations marched across the landscape erecting temples and tearing them down and starting all over again.” Meanwhile, Joanie on LSD feels “the texture of the carpet beneath her as if it were the portal to the center of the earth and she was dropping down the molten sides of it over and over again.”

This kind of travel writing is a challenge. It’s not easy to evoke the spiritual or therapeutic dimensions of a psychedelic drug, and ultimately the novel is not quite persuasive about the allure or potential of LSD as transformative ego suppressant. Michael Pollan’s recent book testifies to the salubrious power of LSD, and I was prepared to have my mind expanded by a fictional account of Leary and crew. But the drug use of Boyle’s psychonauts seems, almost immediately, decadent and dull. The trips are amazing, but they don’t lead anywhere. Fitz and Joanie begin in the spirit of exploration, but that gives way quickly to the spirit of escape, an endless and thoughtless party. They seem as doomed by counterculture as by culture. This is probably the point — “more and more, they seemed to be going outward rather than inward,” Fitz realizes late in the novel — but the inward journey never seems that vital or convincing. LSD does not radically alter Fitz’s sober perspective, at least not in an appealing way. Consequently, the novel’s trajectory is not pronounced, and the inevitable dissolution of the community is less compelling.

Stylistically, Boyle has always moved down the page in a skier’s crouch. He is a spirited downhill writer, capable of creating energy by virtue of his own pace and verve, and that is certainly the case here. This is not the best T. C. Boyle novel, but it’s without question a T. C. Boyle novel — kinetic, conceptual and keen. Moreover, when you take a step back from the book you can begin to appreciate that Boyle — much in the spirit of his quixotic and ambitious subjects — has now completed his own impressive public art project: a Mount Rushmore of American Fanatics.