Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: Style and Vision

Introduction

Tom Wolfe's rigorous journalistic approach, combined with his masterful use of stream-of-consciousness narrative, marks The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as one of the most effective and compelling investigations into the psychedelic experience of the 1960s. Wolfe's uncompromising research provides a solid factual foundation for the book. However, it is his effective use of imagery and description that brings the characters and events to life. Wolfe's lush imagery and narrative have led critic Brian Abel Ragen to compare The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to a picaresque novel. Ragen's argument is valid, and it is this very picaresque quality — in combination with Wolfe's journalistic approach — that makes The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test both an informative and compelling read.

Summary of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a non-fiction account of the life of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. Wolfe's book follows Kesey's life from his beginnings as a promising middle-class athlete and academic. Kesey was voted the boy most likely to succeed and went on to university on a creative writing scholarship. As such, he was an unlikely person to eventually become one of the most notorious figures in the psychedelic world.

At university, Kesey became involved with the hippie movement. Wolfe chronicles Kesey's involvement with notable 1960s figures like Neal Cassady, Larry McMurtry, and Jerry Garcia. Wolfe follows Kesey in the period after he published One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962, when Kesey and his followers moved to the woods in California using royalties from the book.

Kesey then led a group of psychedelic sympathizers across the United States on a 1939 International Harvester bus. They intended to visit the New York World's Fair for the release of Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion. Wolfe describes the bizarre world of the Pranksters, including notable figures like Mountain Girl, Babbs, The Hermit, and Timothy Leary. The book describes the Merry Pranksters' world in full — from the free sex and acid-laced Kool-Aid, to arrests and faked deaths, to the seemingly unlikely alliance with the Hell's Angels. Wolfe also recounts the Pranksters' conversion of a large anti-Vietnam rally into an acid-laced party.

Returning from the trip, the Pranksters stay at Kesey's Oregon farm, where they hold group acid tests open to the public, featuring special lighting and the music of the Grateful Dead (then called the Warlocks). Kesey is arrested for drug possession and hides in Mexico as a fugitive. He and the Pranksters eventually return to San Francisco and find a culture far more open and accepting of acid. The book ends at Winterland Stadium, as the group stages what is to be the largest acid test. Ultimately, the effort fails, and Kesey loses many of his followers as they drift off, confused, into the night.

Wolfe's Journalistic Approach

Wolfe's writing style is one of the most powerful and effective aspects of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe approaches the book with the authority, tenacity, and insightfulness of a journalist, having conducted thousands of interviews in his research. Even in the most bizarre and trying of circumstances, he maintains his journalistic need to document and investigate. In describing his surreal and frantic encounter with Kesey in jail, Wolfe notes: "I take out a notebook and start asking him — anything. There had been a piece in the paper about his saying it was time for the psychedelic movement to go 'beyond acid,' so I asked him about that. Then I started scribbling like mad, in shorthand, in the notebook" (7).

Wolfe also meticulously gathers detailed accounts from Pranksters and participants in the acid tests, painstakingly following Kesey and his crew through their variety of experiences and experimentations. He is careful to reveal the individualistic and accepting nature of the Pranksters: "Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip" (65). Wolfe's journalistic rigor persists to the very end of the book, as he chronicles Kesey's loss of control during the "graduation" in the giant Winterland Stadium, unabashedly describing how Kesey's movement abandons him, leaving him to conduct the show in a white satin cape and leotard.

Wolfe's style in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test exquisitely captures the stream-of-consciousness psychedelic narrative of his subjects. His successful attempts to deliver this effect include an ample use of ellipses and run-on sentences. His descriptions of the world are filtered through the acid-induced reality of the Merry Pranksters. In describing a sunset, Wolfe notes: "Dusk! Huge stripes of Day-Glo green and orange ran up the soaring redwoods and gleamed out at dusk as if Nature had said at last, Aw freak it, and had freaked out" (124).

Stream-of-Consciousness Narrative and Imagery

Often, Wolfe's descriptions are so steeped in hallucinogenic imagery that they approach the incomprehensible: "there was lightning everywhere and I pointed to the sky and lightning flashed and all of a sudden I had a second skin, of lightning, electricity, like a suit of electricity, and I knew it was in us to be superheroes and that we could become superheroes or nothing" (27). While such passages may appear nonsensical, they showcase Wolfe's mastery at depicting the psychedelic reality experienced by the Merry Pranksters.

Wolfe's dialogue is consistently both flowing and realistic, revealing the realities of hallucinogenic indulgence in an insightful and non-judgmental manner. He reveals a humanity and authenticity in the stoned-out hippies that a lesser writer could never have managed. As a result, both the internal and external dialogue of the characters is equally complex, obscure, and intelligent: "We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives — we are always acting on what has just finished happening… The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will never really be able to control the present through ordinary means" (129).

The lush imagery and stream-of-consciousness narrative of Wolfe's work have led critic Brian Abel Ragen to compare The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to a picaresque novel. Wolfe's descriptions of the Merry Pranksters conjure a variety of stunning and vivid images. His accounts of the hallucinogenic experience consistently hinge on unforgettable imagery and description: "But these are words, man! And you couldn't put it into words. The White Smocks liked to put it into words, like hallucination and dissociative phenomena. They could understand the visual skyrockets. Give them a good case of an ashtray turning into a Venus flytrap or eyelid movies of crystal cathedrals, and they could groove on that…" (40).

Conclusion

Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is one of the most powerful and revealing works on the psychedelic world of the 1960s hippie experience. Wolfe's tenacious research and investigation make the book informative and revealing. However, it is his picaresque and lush imagery that brings the book to life, infusing its characters with humanity and spirit. Taken together, Wolfe's journalistic approach and stream-of-consciousness narrative combine to make The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test a revealing and compelling work of non-fiction.