Sailor Song

After writing two books in the early 1960s, both now established as American classics, Ken Kesey abandoned the novel in its established form. Over the past twenty-five years he has written many shorter pieces, but only now, with Sailor Song, brings his considerable powers once again to bear on a full-scale undertaking, giving us a unique and powerful novel about America. Set in the near future, the story takes us to the Alaskan village of Kuinak, a rundown fishing community of Deaps (Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples) and Lower Forty-eight refugees perched on the Western Edge of history. It's a scene rich with characters, like Alice the Angry Aleut, Ike Sallas (known as "the Bakatcha Bandit" during the environmental wars of the nineties), the town's indispensable "scoot" runner Billy the Squid, and the Loyal Order of Underdogs, who meet monthly for the Full Moon Howl. Into their peculiar midst sails a mighty ship of last hopes, loaded to the gunwales with a big-bucks Hollywood film company. This famous studio/yacht has come north to film a classic childrenás book, The Sea Lion. Unscripted transformations abound as the project stirs a new mix into the community, including a tribe brought down from the remote north. Sailor Song is an epic novel that revolves around the question: Does love make any sense at the end of the world? It's about things that endure and come around again - back at you, and back to you.

Publishers Weekly

Kesey ( One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ; Sometimes a Great Notion ) sets his latest grand, cosmic adventure early in the 21st century, complete with celefones, cardkeys, Mylar pumpsuits and scoot, the artificial stimulant of choice. Ike Sallas, ``mental activist'' and Backatcha Bandit of the ' 90s, lives in a trailer in the ``neo retro'' Alaskan fishing village of Kuniak with his fishing partner, Rastafarian Emil Greer. Kuniak is invaded by legendary film director Gerhardt Steubins, minions Clark Bstet no period Clark and Nicholas Levertov, and troops with plans to film the Eskimo legend The Sea Lion (a Kesey children's book). This ``unstained cartoon caricature of mythic native life'' contrasts with the ``dirt and despair and perversion'' of `` real native life,'' according to Alice Carmody, matriarch of Kuinak DEAPs (Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples). His baroque humor in top form, Kesey skewers religious cults, organized lodges and land developers as the madcap adventures culminate in the phantasmogorical conclusion on the open seas when Ike is caught in a maelstrom. This is a gargantuan novel of epic dimensions that feeds on the need for love and heroes at a time when ``the hero business ain't so hot.'' 100,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Aug.)