SOURCE: Shone, Tom. “Going Cuckoo.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4712 (23 July 1993): 19.

In the following review, Shone assesses the plot, style, and themes of Sailor Song, commenting that Kesey's prose has the “bounce of a piece of verbal pop art.”

Asked how he lost all of his teeth, a character in Ken Kesey's new novel [Sailor Song] replies, “Would you like to know one at a time?” The response is typical of a book in which characters trail enigmatic and eccentric prehistories like ticker-tape streamers, and whose names are soaked in home-brewed mythology: Alice the Angry Alert, Billy the Squid, and the book's reluctant hero, Ike Sallas, the Bakatchka Bandit.

Home, in their case, is the small Alaskan fishing village of Kuinak, an ecological idyll in an otherwise decrepit twenty-first century. Populated by Deaps (Descendents of Early Aboriginal People) and a motley crew of social cast-offs from the south—including...