THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408120524
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
LAST GO ROUND
A Real Western
KEN KESEY WITH KEN BABBS
Viking. 238 pp. $21.95.
IN HIS RAMBUNCTIOUS new book - described as ``A Real Western'' and not a novel - novelist Ken Kesey, with longtime ``saddle pal'' Ken Babbs, transports himself and the reader back to the first world championship bronc-busting contest at the Pendleton (Ore.) Round Up in 1911.
The story is a curious mix of hard fact (actual photos of the Round Up and the yarn's main characters fill several pages), of the coloring that events acquired by word of mouth over the years and of Kesey's gritty determination (both he and Babbs live in Oregon) to make the tale intimately personal as well as authentic.
The resulting book, Last Go Round, is full of the lingo and lore of the Old West, spread thickly around the early rodeo circuit and cowboy-and-Indian shows. Even Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West troupe have a part in the re-created Pendleton spectacle.
Kesey, now 59 and living on an 80-acre farm, is probably best known as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test drew on the trip that Kesey made across the United States in 1964 in a converted school bus; later Kesey told his own story about that adventure in The Further Inquiry. Some of his other credits include Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey's Garage Sale, Sailor Song and even some children's books and a play.
In Last Go Round, the author sketches one living, breathing character after another, all the way from Buffalo Bill's professional strongman, Frank Gotch, with his mulish ways, to a hard-bitten cowgirl or two and a medicine man whose preaching had earned him the sobriquet ``Parson Montanic.''
The odds-on favorites to carry off the biggest prizes at the Pendleton Round Up - which include a $700 saddle - are two old acquaintances, both smart performers, both popular among rodeo followers: George Fletcher, who is black, and Jackson Sundown, of the Nez Perce Indian tribe. They buddy up with a newcomer, a white Tennessee youth, Johnathan E. Lee Spain, through whom the author tells about it all.
There is leather-slapping fun in the action, delight in Kesey's taut command of words and tension in awaiting the outcome of the climactic conflict: How do the plainly superior riding, roping and bulldogging abilities of Fletcher and Sundown win out in an arena in which cynical and racist reality foretells that neither is going to be allowed to take away the title of champion?
The way this conflict works out gives Kesey's imaginative production of a ``real Western'' much of its oddly satisfying impact. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
JOHN BAUGUESS
Ken Kesey, left, and Ken Babbs bring to life the early rodeo circuit
in ``Last Go Round,'' their fictionalized account of the first world
championship bronc-busting contest in 1911.
by CNB