Outside Looking In by T C Boyle

Reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric KoolAid Acid Test and Boyle’s own Drop City, Outside Looking In, is set a few years earlier than Drop City, and concurrent with Acid Test, except it is set in Leary’s East Coast scene instead of the West Coast Kesey Pranksters.

It is not about Leary, he appears, it’s his world at Harvard and mostly Millbrook, but the novel follows a psychology grad student, Fritz, and his wife, Joanie, an upwardly mobile high school psychologist teacher. They have a young son. Fritz enters Harvard for and graduate degree to advance his career. They are a rather straight laced couple in 1963, a rather straight laced time. He is studying under Leary and they get all involved with the scene that evolves from that.

So there is LSD and surprisingly, alcohol, and a lot of it. I say surprisingly because it had not occurred to me that drinking would be a part of that scene. How naive! This is the early 1960s, everybody drank. Yet as the story goes, it has negative effects in some cases, and maybe lead to reckless things that went on needlessly in the scene. (I’m set up for being negative about alcohol because I don’t like it and hardly ever use it.) Of course all this is fiction, but now I assume Millbrook had a lot of alcohol consumption as well as some lovely Czech made LSD. Fiction, movies/books, alters facts to fit it’s needs.

Dick is in it too, the rich boy and the one booted from Harvard with Tim. He flies to Canada to get the Czech acid, pilots the small plane. This is Richard Alpert, later Ram Dass, of Be Here Now fame (he’s still here now, like Hawaii, on Netflix).
 

I had read something in passing before reading this book; that Boyle said he had never had a positive LSD trip, so I was concerned how LSD would be treated in the novel. Happy to say that I feel that the descriptions of the experiences, the trips themselves, are conceivable and close enough to my own experience with it to say, well written and true to psychedelic life. There is really not a lot of big scary LSD situations in it. I’m happy with this. 

LSD itself is a neutral, sort of passive, character in the novel. It has enormous effects but it varies of course with “set and setting” and can be very joyous and just as challenging, and all in the same trip. This is clear in the novel. LSD is mostly good in this.

The point of view in the novel shifts from a third person describing what Fritz is going through to being with Joanie and her thoughts, then back to Fritz, who is really the main focus of the novel.

It’s an interesting time now, 2019, with psychedelics experiencing another wave of more popular interest. This time more positive. It could be said and maybe suggested in the events of the novel that, Leary was really too reckless and ultimately damaged to reputation of LSD with his need to advance his own ego with it. The novel cast it all as rather cultish with the great leader who had gone further and therefore knows better and followers gathered around him and more of less adhering to the structure and games that Leary designed.

So in a way it is a novel about regular people who are involved with a personality and substance cult. In that way some of the events are easily transferable to any other cult. LSD doesn't make people become cult members, but there is a suggestion in the book, that one is susceptible to “imprinting” a feeling of deep connection to the person who has the LSD, controls it, gives it to a person for the first time and trips with them.
This might be so but I cannot say directly, because that is not the way I went into it. When I was 18 in 1970 I was at a tiny southern Ohio college visiting a friend. Someone, I don’t know who, had LSD that I had been hearing about for years and was eager to try. It was a good experience and I have gone back repeatedly through the years and continue to do so when I can get some LSD which is rare because I’m not socially connected to any scene where I can get it. I’m shy. (But if I can't connect to people maybe I ought not to be doing it anyway. I’m old so I know I’m going back to the pool seen enough, the ultimate transcendence.)

The people in Leary’s scene in the book are trying to do something with it, get someplace, achieve something. I think psychedelics maybe ought to be approached with more neutrality. Yes they are somehow connected to some kind of transcendence which is also associated with types of spiritual/religious experiences, mysticism. I don’t believe in loading up on anticipation of something like that prior to taking the substance. That stuff can also open one up to some of the cultish social set up and grow around these things.  
I suggest that is one is a newbie, forget about all that stuff and just take it and see what happens. I don’t think most people really need leaders and guide as much as people need to put themselves in leader roles. Ignore them. 


The novel has a terrific final scene and it made me laugh out loud.