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A review by monty_reads
Outside Looking In by T.C. Boyle
4.0
I know other authors meld fact and fiction in their work, but I’d be shocked to learn any do it as seamlessly (and compellingly) as T.C. Boyle. He’s done it many times before (architect Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women; explorer Mungo Park in World’s End; breakfast cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville; sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle), and in Outside Looking In he turns his eye on the 1960s LSD explorations of Timothy Leary.
Leary isn’t the book’s protagonist, but he looms large over the proceedings. The focus is ostensibly on a group of Leary’s Harvard grad students, and the focus of THAT group is Fitz Loney and his wife Joanie, struggling young parents who find themselves inexorably drawn into Leary’s inner circle. What begins as a series of gatherings where the students (and their spouses) dabble – quite modestly – with psilocybin escalates over several years into an extended experiment in communal living and herculean drug ingestion stretching across Mexico and practically the whole of New England.
Look: I’m not a drug guy. I’m anxious and neurotic and too much of a control freak to think hallucinogens could EVER be good for me. I generally find most books and movies detailing this kind of thing to be sort of tedious. Watching someone else’s good time isn’t much fun.
But it’s to Boyle’s credit that I was fascinated with this entire book, from its lengthy Swiss-set prologue detailing scientist Albert Hofmann’s ingestion of the world’s first LSD to its cynical, bleakly funny conclusion where we see the ultimate cost of this experimentation on FItz and his marriage. (It also sports one of modern literature’s greatest last lines.)
Like all Boyle’s stuff, Outside Looking In somehow manages to be laugh out loud funny while also wrapping tendrils of creeping dread around your ankles. I’ve seen him do this trick before, and I still don’t know how he pulls it off. You know it’s not going to end well for anyone, but you still have a hell of a time watching it happen.
Leary isn’t the book’s protagonist, but he looms large over the proceedings. The focus is ostensibly on a group of Leary’s Harvard grad students, and the focus of THAT group is Fitz Loney and his wife Joanie, struggling young parents who find themselves inexorably drawn into Leary’s inner circle. What begins as a series of gatherings where the students (and their spouses) dabble – quite modestly – with psilocybin escalates over several years into an extended experiment in communal living and herculean drug ingestion stretching across Mexico and practically the whole of New England.
Look: I’m not a drug guy. I’m anxious and neurotic and too much of a control freak to think hallucinogens could EVER be good for me. I generally find most books and movies detailing this kind of thing to be sort of tedious. Watching someone else’s good time isn’t much fun.
But it’s to Boyle’s credit that I was fascinated with this entire book, from its lengthy Swiss-set prologue detailing scientist Albert Hofmann’s ingestion of the world’s first LSD to its cynical, bleakly funny conclusion where we see the ultimate cost of this experimentation on FItz and his marriage. (It also sports one of modern literature’s greatest last lines.)
Like all Boyle’s stuff, Outside Looking In somehow manages to be laugh out loud funny while also wrapping tendrils of creeping dread around your ankles. I’ve seen him do this trick before, and I still don’t know how he pulls it off. You know it’s not going to end well for anyone, but you still have a hell of a time watching it happen.