Novelist T.C. Boyle is one of America’s prominent satirists. Without lurching into farce, he has been a gifted illuminator of the foibles at the heart of many grand endeavors, including Alfred Kinsey’s sexology and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic futurism. With Outside Looking In, Boyle probes the inner circle of another of another flawed utopian crusade, this time the 1960s LSD cult drawn to the renegade academic Timothy Leary.
In the early ’60s when the main track of Outside Looking In begins, LSD was legal. Psychiatrists prescribed it and the military and CIA ran their own tests. The drug was explored by prestigious thinkers who—minimally—thought it cast light on the workings of the brain and the recesses of the mind. Many believed LSD opened the doors of perception, allowing an immersive experience in the poly-colored multiplicity of the universe.
Leary (everyone calls him “Tim” in the book) emerged from that latter camp with careless claims for the drug’s efficacy as well as careless research habits. In Outside Looking In, he is charismatic and pushy, a megalomaniacal missionary bent on preaching the good news that personal freedom—not to mention enlightenment—could be achieved chemically. In painting the story’s backdrop, Boyle shows Leary working inside a substance-addicted society where everyone chain-smoked and numbed their depression and frustration at cocktail hour.
The main protagonist, a Harvard psychology grad student called Fitz, begins as an unlikely acolyte in Leary’s psychedelic crusade. He’s a gray-flannel 1950s organization man whose overriding values concern material and professional success. And therein lies his vulnerability to Leary’s blandishments. Lacking any strong convictions and willing to do what it takes to get ahead; Fitz is pulled along—reluctantly at first—into Leary’s crack-brained utopia. Lacking the rigor of a true scientist or the discernment of a true mystic, Leary hosts a party out-of-bounds more than an experiment in consciousness.
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Some of Boyle’s best writing in Outside Looking In describes the psychedelic experience, rolling “like waves mounting successively along an infinite beach” in “screaming ribbons of color,” “a free fall that would not and could not end.” The allure of LSD—the possibilities and the beauty—is clearly shown, as is the necessity of careful doses and conducive settings. The misuse of LSD as the ’60s surged along made the drug anathema to most serious researchers for half a century. The last few years have witnessed renewed interest. Outside Looking In is a reminder that in irresponsible hands, LSD becomes a dead end at best and a ticket to the abyss at worst.
