FICTION

LAST GO ROUND: A Real Western by Ken Kesey With Ken Babbs (Viking: $21.95; 238 pp.) To hell with the facts. There were these three fabulous rodeo riders; that we know. Competed for the first world championship, they did, in Pendleton, Oregon, in 1911. Jackson Sundown, Johnathan Spain and George Fletcher, and “to make sure posterity gets the point,” complexions in a rare photo are hand-colored: “One rider’s face is tinted Indian copper, one Caucasian pink, one a deep molasses brown.” Newspaper accounts are illusory. The fix was in--or was it? Arms were broken. Gold changed hands. No less a legend than Buffalo Bill is suspect. . . . “This is why we elect to conjure our three spectral riders out of the old tall tales, told over hot coffee around a camp fire, instead of the cold facts and half-baked truths served up by library stacks.”

That’s Ken Kesey writing, the Merry Prankster. He and buddy Ken Babbs spin their yarn with great excess. Entertaining. Wacky. Sometimes sappy. Best writing is at the end, in Kesey’s spirited evocation of real cowboys and broncos that are, literally, man-killers. But it takes a power of time to get there.