The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Wolfe embedded with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and documented the psychedelic counterculture with such manic precision that the book itself seems to have taken LSD. The defining document of the 1960s counterculture and a masterwork of New Journalism.
The loudest complaint is that it should have been “half the length,” Wolfe over-describing scenes past any narrative use. The faux-LSD-trip sections are the most divisive choice, “a hollow impersonation of Jack Kerouac,” about “as thrilling and contemporary as a Peter Max drawing.” Readers find it “clunky and monotonous,” the same drug-and-bus dynamic restated without variation. A recurring charge is that a square journalist is play-acting hip and failing, one dismissing Wolfe as “Hunter S. Thompson's bitch.” Several say he flatters the Pranksters into myth, the treatment of Kesey “a bit too messianic for me,” and a contemporary critic came away with “a sorry, sad, sordid head-ache.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
