SOURCE: Coleman, John. “You All Crazy?” New Statesman 91, no. 2345 (27 February 1976): 269-70.

In the following excerpt, Coleman explores the themes of sanity versus insanity and love versus hate in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Ken Kesey's novel [One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest] caused quite a stir when it first appeared in 1962, and rightly. I had heard vaguely of Kesey as a major prophet of the youth revolution, read some disjointed scraps of his somewhere or other, and knew that his book about life in a mental institution was supposed to have been written under the influence of LSD: the auguries were unpromising. But the other day I laid bold hands on the thing and found myself held enough to read it in a single session. Since events are transmitted through the now befogged, now pellucid consciousness of a huge half-Indian, Chief Bromden, it may be that some...