Outside Looking In: A Novel

Fucking amazing, eloquent and bizarre; a trip of a book.

The lengthy intro was interesting but I had a hard time getting through the rest of the story. This is my first time reading this author. I did not feel any real attachment to the characters or the story. The accents in the beginning seemed kind of cheesy. I recommend reading Leary's biography if you're interested in this subject.

great book the ending bummed me out way good. j

I enjoyed this book a lot. Boyle writes fascinating characters around well-known ones. In this case, you get a look at Timothy Leary through a couple of different folks in his orbit around his time at and just after Harvard.

The author is incapable of writing badly, let’s face it. However, Boyle has covered all of this ground before while writing a much more engaging stories. No dark humor, no romance, just straight up tragedy. Put this down and read his book “Drop City” instead, which is also about a commune and a much better book.

I've read a number of nonfiction books that covered the same basic time period of Timothy Leary's study and experimentation with LSD as this book, so it was only natural that I was curious to see how an interesting writer like Boyle would handle this material. After closing the book and reflecting on it, I must say that overall it was kind of a bummer.
Sure, there is so much rich material when Richard Alpert (later becoming Ram Dass) teams up with Tim to hand out doses of acid to students and friends, simply asking them to write up their experience, so that they can “compare note," so to speak. Boyle does a fine job laying out a history of the discovery of LSD, and the takes the reader through Tim and Richard's ability to find benefactors that underwrite their fascinating group adventures at Harvard, then Mexico, and lastly at a huge estate at Millbrook.
The problem for this reader, was that Boyle tediously describes the emotional toll on our central family (Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology grad student, his librarian wife Joanie, and their young son Corey) and gives short shrift to the excitement, thrill, self-discovery, and the humor that was obviously present.
He's not the first author to clearly show the cost of doubts and jealousy that came about from years of freedom and experimentation, with drugs and various sexual partners, but when I pull myself back from the reality of the story, I realize that Boyle's fictional side of the book is a pretty bleak story. All of this core family's relationships may have been completely destroyed. It didn’t seem that Boyle explained enough about why Fritz and Joanie kept craving the drug and sexual experimentation, when their love for each other was bitterly fraying in clear sight. Maybe that one word—craving—says it all.
Part of the problem is that describing an acid trip with mere words in a novel is tough sledding, but I think Boyle is up to that task, he just didn't seem to want that to be as much of the story, as jealousy, dirty dishes, and another possible utopia gone bad.
I guess when I get to the core of the issue for me, I was simply saddened with where he chose to take this story. I was craving a more fulfilling story of sex and drugs. Crave on.

I think T. C. Boyle is a good writer so picked this up without really knowing what it was about. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru of the 1960's is the subject of the book and the naive and willing followers that came under his spell. The book reminded me a great deal of "The Inner Circle" about Kinsey. In fact, the term "inner circle" is used to describe those around Leary.

The story is told from the perspective of Fitz Loney, a psychology student at Harvard. Fitz and his wife Joanie along with their son, Corey find themselves in the inner circle of Leary. The first third of the book is probably the best as it describes the beginnings of the relationship while Fitz is a student at Harvard. The last third of the book is set in Leary's experimental commune in Millbrook and is basically a descent into drugs and utter chaos.

The book was interesting is that there are many historical incidents that are verifiable and which I did look up to read more such as the Good Friday experiment testing whether religious experience can be caused by drugs. An interesting read but it is in form very much like "The Inner Circle)

Just read. Like an acid trip. The story is all over the place from Herr Dr Albert Hofmann's lab assistant,
"Suzi Ramstein" drops 100 gamma of LSD as the first woman in history to trip! (Fiction). To a loser and drunk not able to fix his life from WonderFull trips.