Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Published 1964 · 715 pages · 196,625 words · about 16 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is Sometimes a Great Notion to read?
Sometimes a Great Notion scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Kesey mixes logging and river slang with literary diction and Leland's bookish register. It is more earthy and demanding than Gatsby but far from the allusive density of Ulysses.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Sentences run long and switch speaker and tense mid-paragraph, with italic asides cutting in. The effect is closer to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying than to plain prose.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The story is grounded in saws, rivers, strikes and family fights, but ideas about individualism and community press beneath. It sits near The Road in concreteness with more thematic reach.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- Logging detail, family history and several plot strands arrive at once across a very long novel. The density is closer to Doctor Zhivago than to a light read.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Perspective slides between Hank, Leland, Viv and others, and the reader has to piece together motives and history. Meaning is inferred more than in Gatsby, less than in The Sound and the Fury.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- The 'Never Give a Inch' sign, Henry's lost arm, the river and the rain carry sustained meaning. The symbolism is strong but anchored in physical detail, like the green light in Gatsby.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Kesey's comic exaggeration and Leland's scheming create some distance between what characters claim and what they feel. The tone is mostly earnest and bawdy, closer to Moby-Dick's humor than to Lolita's deceit.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The strike plot reaches a decisive close, but the ending leaves the brothers' fate and the meaning of the Stamper creed open. It resembles Gatsby's closed plot with open meaning.
- Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
- Voices, times and perspectives weave together with backstory in large blocks, and the flow of time is non-linear. It is more fragmented than Anna Karenina and less than Absalom, Absalom!.
How Sometimes a Great Notion is regarded
Sometimes a Great Notion holds a literary regard score of 65 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.