Outside Looking In

If Timothy Leary is watching from the great beyond, “he must be wondering what took T.C. Boyle so long to write a novel about him,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Boyle has skewered many of history’s hucksters, and he’s done it again here by focusing on a square, early-1960s recruit of the Harvard iconoclast who preached the mind-expanding power of LSD. Because the mentee makes the mistake of getting his family involved, this “superbly paced” novel becomes “a farce laced with tragedy.”