Recently I have been working away at my 1966 reading list. As always, I am finding that novels in the middle of a decade show changes that have been building up in both subject matter and style. This first novel by Richard Farina is now known as The Classic Novel of the 1960s. Sadly, the author died in a motorcycle crash two days after its publication, but that was like a coda to the story. Gnossos Pappadopoulis, the hero of a wild campus revolt, was the sort who might die in a similar way.

Set on a fictional college campus based on Farina’s alma mater of Cornell University, the story begins as Gnossos roles back into town after a wild summer out west. The fall semester of 1958 begins and some of the more adventurous students are ripe to rebel against the strict morality codes regarding student housing. If you were in college then you remember. Curfews for the girls who were locked into their dorms and sorority houses after 10:00 PM. A Women’s Judiciary Board disciplined coeds who did not make it back before curfew.

Students began to protest as Spring ramped up the hormones and a demonstration in May, storming the home of the University president, resulted in suspension of four upperclassmen, Farina among them. Or I should say, Gnossos Pappadopoulis was suspended.

That would have been irreverent and entertaining enough, but through Gnossos’s relationship with a certain young woman of wealth and privilege the tale expands into socio-political territory. Having read so many of the books of the time as well as growing up in the time, I attest that Farina nailed it!

I don’t know for sure how much Farina had been a reader of earlier experimental writers, but I felt the influence of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, even Henry Miller. I do know that when I got to college the scene was loosening up for boys and girls. It went from getting warnings about PDA (public display of affection) in the lobby of my dorm to coed dorms in about three years during the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Most of us at the time read Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me while getting high and practicing Free Love! This time I had to track down a copy from a used-book site

This is my hands-down, desert-island favorite novel, and like all favorite novels, my own adoration is rooted in such particular tastes I understand why very few of my friends like the book.

Farina was a successful folk musician, playing with his wife Mimi Baez and touring with Bob Dylan and her sister Joan in the 60s. The Cuban-Irish author was also a published poet, and wasn't known for his fiction until this novel, his first and last. Three days after its publication, Farina was killed in a motorcycle crash.

This novel stands on its own even without the coincidental pedigree of its author (friends with Pynchon at Cornell). Essentially a 60s campus novel set at a veiled Cornell in the 50s, our perspective is a unique third-person limited omniscience written in the same tone and voice of the protagonist, Greek itinerant Gnossos Pappadopolis. There's a level of farcical allusion and playful lyricism that put off many readers, but rewards close reading. It allows Farina to encapsulate a wide range of topics without appearing false: the youthful hubris of immortality, here called Immunity; the naive spirit of protest and general counterculture billowing on campuses nationwide in the Age of Aquarius; the outside world, a place of spurious rules and authority figures best ignored as long as possible; and even, despite the protective bubble of the college setting, real consequence and sadness. Farina tackles almost every American issue in this beguiling text, all through the eyes of one of Kerouac's "mad ones."

Of course, the bubble of Immunity pops in the end, grounding the book in a reality all too familiar for 60s children. The journey there, with its unforgettable characters and set pieces (and that language!), is one I take at least once every year.

Great novel..."On The Road'..on a college campus.

When I read the book first I loved it - unsurprising since I am an unreconstructed beatnik. It has a wonderful tinge of Jean Shepherd's night people about it, the clinging to the wierdness of kidhood amid the melange of college life and the turmoil of hip insurrection. However it isn't nearly as original as it seems as I realised when I read "The Ginger Man" by Donleavy after which it seems to have been modelled. Still, Farina is a really interesting figure and the book exudes a sense of fun and self-conscious, self-dramatising wit that means I would always recommend it.

Another one of those American writers who made a big splash when they came out and pushed literature in new directions (and was a major influence on Pynchon to boot), but who has largely been forgotten now. A lot of wacky counterculture-era lit comes off as obnoxious, juvenile, and self-important now (Tom Robbins, an unfortunately sizeable chunk of Burroughs' and Vonnegut's output), but Been Down So Long holds up. Like A Confederacy of Dunces, it's funny and picaresque enough to hold strong. Do yourself a favor and go pick this one up, it deserves a place in the American canon.

Much as I wanted to like it, I just couldn't get into it. I have two of his folk albums with Mimi Farina. They're better.

O.K., so I read it while in college in the 60's so it might be a bit dated for some. For me, however, it was a brilliant first book by an promising author who died in a motorcycle accident while returning from a party to celebrate the publication of the book. (He was, coincidentally married to Joan Baez's sister, Mimi.) It certainly capture the Zeitgeist of the later 60's and early 70's as I experienced them. A witty and socially relevant reading of that era.

Someone recommended this book as the quintessential novel of the 1960s. Well, I'm a child of the 60s -- but I found the book a confused mess, and didn't get far before giving up. The protagonist is a drunken college student and con-man who is remarkably unlikeable. Nothing that he does goes well. Including the sex. Or the drugs. Anyway, I read a chapter or two, then started skimming, until it became clear that I pretty much hated the book. Not for me!

Like many other 60s college grads, I heard the rumor that my school (Ohio U.) was the basis for this coming of age, surreal 60s college scene novel. Written by Joan Baez' brother in law, who died the night of the publication party for this book in a motorcycle accident, it still holds up after all this time.

I read this in the late sixties and wasn't impressed back then. I first experienced Richard Farina as a mediocre singer and songwriter, and his fiction writing fell into the same category. I guess that much of his reputation rests on his good looks and his early death in a motorcycle accident - also his friendship with Thomas Pynchon. None of which has anything to do with good writing.
I have no desire to reread this. I'll trust my early memories.

Read this at a particularly poignant time in my young college life. Lots happened during the 1978 through 1982 time period that I can relate exceptionally well with this writer and this particular book. Right up there with "The Graduate" and "The Crying of Lot 49" -- both kind of coming-of-age books read at the same time as "David Copperfield." What struck me as particularly ironic was the fact that the author, Richard Farina, died in a freak motorcycle accident a few days after this book was published. Like J. Garcia and the Grateful Dead sing, "what a long strange trip it's been [since]" thanks to the likes of DeLillo, Farina and Pynchon. I wished Farina had lived longer to write more but that might not have suited this rebel well. Live hard, die young and leave a good looking corpse probably were this author's dogma.

A campus novel - a great voice, husband to Mimi (Joan Baez's little sis)and college pal of Pynchon. Great stuff - like a literary animal house, hip, clear-eyed, quick, maybe Kerouac's kid brother - both Ivy League btw.