Outside Looking In - T C Boyle

It's no secret, the high opinion I hold of T C Boyle.  It's only a month or two since I reviewed A Friend of the Earth on this blog.  I have to admit, though, that I prefer his offbeat picaresque novels to his offbeat academic novels.  I was disappointed by The Inner Circle (2004) and likewise not hugely enthused by this, an account of the early experiments with LSD by Dr Timothy Leary and his acolytes from Harvard.  There's no question about Boyle's ability - he writes like a dream, with irresistible pace and vigour (second only to Stephen King among contemporary US writers, in my opinion) and is always on top of his subject matter.  But Leary, and before him Alfred Kinsey, were the academic mindblowers of Boyle's youth; he is of the generation that came after, and either revered or disowned them.  For him, you have to be one or the other; there is no middle ground.

So here Boyle bolts a fictional grad student, Fitz Loney, onto Leary's ream at Harvard.  Fitz is older than some of his peers, having had to earn a living to support his wife and now teenage son.  He needs Leary's support for his thesis and thus starts attending psilocybin Saturday nights at Leary's house.  He supportive wife Joanie goes with him and throws herself wholeheartedly into the process.  This leads them, in Leary's wake, to Mexico and then New York State where properties are put at the disposal of the 'family' of academics and their children.  Psilocybin is supplanted by LSD, referred to as 'the sacrament', and academic research goes out of the window in favour of continual tripping and sex.

I had no problem keeping with the book but it didn't enthrall me.  The characters, many of them of course real, never really developed.  Leary in the book is as consensus history views him - an intellectual light-weight, a showman opportunist rather than a dedicated teacher.  Is that really all he was?  If so, why did so many intellectual and artistic heavyweights fall for his charms?  I suspect these are questions that any novel involving him so centrally has to address.  And Boyle really doesn't.

On the plus side, I was intrigued when Boyle swapped the narrative viewpoint from Fitz to Joanie for the middle section.  I liked the slightly different standpoint he uses here: where before and after it is 'Fitz' who experiences events, in this section it is just 'she' and 'her', which works well in contrast, and suits her character.  I also really liked the Prelude, set in 1943 Switzerland rather than Kennedy-era America, in which an obscure chemist develops and samples psilocybin, and which I found both funny and charming.

Ah well, we can't always have it all...