Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina (1966)

A hip college student tries to avoid involvement in anything meaningful while living a life of hedonistic extremes.

Book Review:  What a long, strange trip it's been.  Richard Farina, a writer, musician, and songwriter, was killed in a motorcycle accident two days after the publication of this, his only novel, which lends an eerie reality to the frequent invocations of death (Thanatos) in the text.  Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, hilarious as it's meant to be, is an often misunderstood book.  Set in 1958 but with overtones of the '60s, the main character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a beatnik, hipster, proto-hippie, college student, and our deeply flawed anti-hero, refuses to conform to the rules of society: he is a bully, thief, and seducer. Seriously unreliable, he lives his life by a code of non-involvement, "exemption," in which he maintains his cool at all costs and refuses responsibility for his actions. Except he doesn't: there are consequences for this life. Although Gnossos is vengeful and willfully oblivious to the effect his actions (often fueled by drugs) have on others (generally those doing him a favor), he later feels guilt for these acts, and in a variant on the laws of physics, his willful acts are paid back doublefold by whatever gods there be.  In a darkly humorous and Nabokovian way he's charming; you might not want him for a friend, but you'd want to know him, from a distance perhaps. He's not for squares -- sex and drugs abound.  As with J.P. Donleavy's Ginger Man, the reader feels some sympathy for Gnossos' painful inability to conform. But while the reader may ponder the figurative bumps and bruises, Richard Farina has galloped pages ahead and Gnossos is now miles away, until his exempt status is threatened by love and he's drawn into the edges of campus insurrection.  The story is a wild ride, at times reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon, who knew Farina in college and wrote the introduction, and like Pynchon, the story is a little deeper than expected if you take the time to read it without prejudice.  The writing is notable for the Whitmanesque lists attempting to encapsulate the times.  The ending is unexpected but just right for the excellent Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.  Three final notes: (1) just as I feel Catcher in the Rye is best first read while in one's teens, this may be best first read before age 25 or so; (2) for those who will wonder, because it comes up, paregoric is a tincture of opium, apparently legal at the time; (3) I think many of the critics of this book either didn't catch the "pay the piper" theme, or didn't read to the end, which of course is typical of critics. [4 Stars]