A moment in Tom Wolfe's [sic] On the Bus comes rushing like a flaming flamingo: Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters are noising across America in their stupid, drug-fueled, day-glo, mantra-rapping, strobe-lit 1939 International Harvester school bus, when they pull up in Houston at the home of Larry McMurtry, who shyly emerges with his little boy at his side. Spotting the freaks, he is naturally confused, but he is also naturally good-natured, until a character whom Wolfe calls Stark Naked, because she is, leaps from the bus and scoops up McMurtry's little boy, shrieking, “Frankie! Oh Frankie! My little Frankie!” McMurtry, desperate to believe that he is still living on Planet Earth, touches her on the shoulder and stammers, “Ma'am! Ma'am! Just a minute, ma'am!”

You know this sort of moment. You are suddenly flung into the company of lunatics who like you, and you are strung between wanting to be with it and praying that these people will blow up. If you do not know this sort of moment, read Sailor Song. It is Ken Kesey's first novel in twenty-eight years. May he wait twenty-eight more.

They were hardly great books, but there was something good and good-hearted in Kesey's first two novels, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), and so I wanted to like the new one. The '60s are so easily trashable these days. It would be nice to think of Kesey as one of the rhinestones in the trash. But he, or rather his writing, makes critical kindness impossible. The new novel is plotless and idealless and pointless in its overflow of parables, anecdotes, and caricatures. But that is not what transforms the reader's disappointment into sadness. It's the suspicion, born long before this book appeared but amply confirmed by it, that Kesey could have been a pretty good writer-writer, but chose instead to be a culture-writer.

A writer-writer writes to be read. A culture-writer writes to be oohed. The distinction may be vividly illustrated by the career of Norman Mailer, who made a Kesey-like choice many years ago. After Harlot's Ghost, Ancient Evenings, and Tough Guys Don't Dance; after the Hamptons movie, the T.V. boxing, the bullying, and the interminable parties, all that remains is the spectacle of a diabolically energetic show-off so desperate to be noticed that he will never be recognized. But if you go back to The Naked and the Dead, or further back to a short story Mailer wrote at the age of 18 called “The Greatest Thing in the World,” there is a writer-writer, raw but real. The pressure on writer-writers to become culture-writers has never been greater, and neither has the interest of the media in what used to be the literary world; and so more and more literary figures are becoming entertainers. And bad ones.

What is Kesey's new novel about? I'll try. It is set in the future, in the Alaskan fishing village of Kuinak, where the DEAPs (Descendents of Early Aboriginal Peoples) abound. As do the LOUD (Loyal Order of the Underdogs, who cry “woof”), Alice Carmody, the Angry Aleut (“she's always got to go against the grain”), and the hero, Ike Sallas, “the Bakatcha Bandit,” so-called for some unclear valiant activity during the environmental wars of the 1990s. (Don't ask.) Why Alaska? “Because Alaska is the end, the finale, the Last Ditch of the Pioneer Dream.” Into the midst of these pranksters sails a ship owned by a Hollywood movie company led by a mogul named Gerhardt Steubins, seeking to make a film of The Sea Lion, a children's book written by somebody named Ken Kesey. Then lots of things happen, I think. The movie-makers are so hot for their project, they murder a few Kuinakians, while Ike the hero seems to be off in pursuit of a drug-dealer. In the end the village explodes in an apocalypse that has to do with electricity, and everyone chants the word “Squid.”

In a recent Esquire, Kesey wails that East Coast critics will never understand him, while drawing on the supportive authority of, uh, Mailer. But the critics are not incorrect, except in their patience. For Kesey, again, made the choice of the culture-writer in taking encouragement from the wrong muses. His fiction is full of the kind of material that used to belong to the new journalism. This material is readily recognizable on several levels, the most accessible of which is style. Style to the culture-writer is not writing, but a kind of animated macho typing. Here is a characteristic passage from Sailor Song:

“Folks, the great Gerhardt Steubins!” A very old man with pewter-grey hair and black eye patch stepped into the room's silent gape. If Ike had hoped to find some sinister foreign mastermind at the center of this glitzy web, he was vastly disappointed; this mastermind had a drawl from the Ozarks and a grin like what was left from a baked Virginia ham. The internationally famous Gerhardt Luther Steubins was a big, turkey-necked shambler from the All-American South. Ike imagined that in his prime he had probably carried another couple dozen pounds of working muscle on that gnawed frame, but the old man still looked amazingly fit. The tan arms were still cabled and the gnarly hands looked like they'd seen a lot of rough use.

Such prose is busy dazzling itself with itself, which has the effect of keeping the reader out of the novel, the way people sometimes tell funny stories to keep other people at a distance: the laughter makes a wall. No wonder Kesey is so transparently worried about how the critics will receive him; he is them. His writing screams its own insecurity. Its intent is mainly to impress. Vitality is supposed to do the work of intelligence. Color is allowed to stand in for coherence. Above all, this is the sort of prose that prides itself on its own absence of discipline. Kesey is hardly the only contemporary American writer not to understand that it requires great discipline to seem undisciplined.

But the errors of the culture-writer are more than matters of style. He mistakes invention for imagination, and he adopts craziness as a view of the world. The first of these errors leads him to believe that bizarrerie is sufficient for art. Invent some wacky, improbable, unheard of person, language, or circumstance, and that will do it. (The influence in recent decades of “magical realism” has only made the situation worse.) Think of it this way. Invention in literature is like building a house starting with the porch. Imagination begins at the hearth, usually something quite simple and recognizable in human experience. From that core it may sprout wings, beaks, and flames, but the reader is always drawn to, and by, the core.

The culture-writer's most serious error, however, lies in his sense of life. He comes to see human experience as essentially wild and crazy. Whether he is led to this view by style and invention, or whether style and invention are the products of the view, the result is a literature that sees the world as purposeless and freakish. This is something much less strict and serious than irrationalism. Of such writing one does not ask, “What is here?” What is here is painfully obvious. One asks instead, “What is missing?” And what is missing are recognizable human conflicts and the thoughts and feelings of people one cares for. The collapse of such writing into mere effects is no surprise: this is literature that has lost touch with everything but itself.

The neglect of such fundamentals is owed, I think, to fear—the fear of appearing plain and unattractive. That fear in turn is fueled by a mistrust of the reader, who is not relied upon to take the time to appreciate the beauty in a simple story or a simple theme. Art thus becomes a window of opportunity rather than a window on life. Instead of living according to his own sense of time, the culture-writer produces prose for busy people. The only part of the reader that such a writer wishes to capture is his or her attention. And that is best done by making a noise.

Again, to be fair to Kesey, the world of the past few decades has justified such an assumption. We live in a culture that has a horror of a lack of publicity. The private life is scorned, except insofar as it furnishes the material for a public life. This may be good news for talk show hosts, but it is bad news for writers, for surely privacy is what makes writing writing. It is all very unpublic business, the work of the writer-writer. The work of the culture-writer is that of the public relations man. The irony, of course, is that the culture-writer is so eager to be fused with his times that he is likely to disappear with them. And so Kesey is as good as forgotten now. He also had the bad luck of being aided and abetted in his wrong choice by his readers, specifically by the '60s young who seized upon the celebration of anarchy in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and passed over the book's older and richer theme, which had to do with the conflict of good with evil. Kesey, too, went with anarchy. The kids of the '60s saw anarchy as what Kesey himself believed in, and eventually Kesey seemed to agree.

But between Cuckoo's Nest and the Merry Pranksters' ride came the writing of Sometimes a Great Notion. This was a book to reckon with, a morality tale as basically simple as Cuckoo's Nest and elephantine in the style of Wolfe (Thomas, not Tom), but clearly the work of a writer living and struggling inside his subject. You did not have to buy the story of the Stamper brothers or their battle (Kesey must have been the only counterculture writer to pit his heroes against the unions) to recognize a serious, private strain in the author. Love nature, trust your instincts, drop out, tune in: he was vulgarizing the old nineteenth-century message of Transcendentalism, but even in its vulgar form it seemed to have an authentic life in him. He was working something out for himself. He did not scream for attention; he was overheard.

It's amazing how much damage a single bus can do. Kesey's bus ruined him, as nature became electrified and instincts became laced with LSD and mescaline. True, he entertained millions. Kesey has always had a way of tugging at one's affection and admiration. There is no denying that within the antics and the books there are unmistakable traces of a good man wrestling for his soul. Even in the swamps and polar wastes of Sailor Song one feels the presence of an honorable searcher for “truth.” The search is still touching. The writing, however, is empty, and it leaves the reader empty. That is what happens when a writer allows himself to be owned by a moment. In the end he has to shout louder and louder to be heard, and Sailor Song is precisely such a shout. In the Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalogue, Kesey wrote, “O kkkk, I think I've got it.” But it got him.