How It All Goes Down
We know this book can be confusing and fragmentary, so that's why we're giving you the gist right here, right now. The novel breaks down into three parts. The first gives us a) the beginnings of the lonely weirdos who come together to form the gestalt, the unique life form that's the subject of the novel, and b) the Kew family, its foil or opposite.
Lone, the idiot, hears the telepathic call of Evelyn Kew, an innocent. They have this emotional merging of love—but not sex! We know where your mind is!—that gets them attacked by her insane father Mr. Kew. Evelyn dies, and the injured Lone escapes to be rescued by the farming couple Mr. and Mrs. Prodd. But not without first commanding, with his probing mind-power, Mr. Kew to kill himself.
We also meet Alicia Kew, who gets rescued now that the Kew mansion is empty of everyone else. Her sadistic father's anti-sex philosophy has taught her to fear the naked, but after therapy, she dances nude in the sun.
The farming couple helps Lone to learn to talk, but he decides he's not experiencing the true belonging he felt with Evelyn, so he goes off into the woods to create a shelter and be alone.
But then some young kids—Janie, a telekineticist (she can move things with her mind), and the black twins Bonnie and Beanie, who are teleports (they can warp from location to location)—move into his shelter after running away from their lonely lives. Lone kidnaps Baby for the group after the Prodds go mad over the strange infant's birth. Baby has the mind-power of super-computing.
The group builds an anti-gravity generator to help Mr. Prodd with his stuck truck, but Lone has to leave it on the farm because the farmer's left.
Part 1 concludes with Lone having a philosophical conversation with Baby about who he is. The infant explains that they belong together as a single creature: Lone the head to direct, Janie the body to care and repair, the twins the arms and legs to get stuff, and he, Baby, the brain. But Baby says they won't develop, since Lone is feeble-minded.
We're also briefly introduced to Hip and Gerry. Hip is an abused, brilliant boy who becomes popular and joins the Air Force. Gerry is an abused, angry boy who runs away from an orphanage at age eight. They join the gestalt later.
Part 2 gives us the gestalt as a teen with a serious attitude problem. The section consists of a therapy session between the angry Gerry, now fifteen, and a therapist named Stern. Stern mostly asks questions and prompts Gerry to recall memories, which return to the teen out of chronological order.
But here we'll go in chronological order. (You're welcome.)
Lone, before bringing Gerry to the shelter, finds Alicia in the woods dancing naked. He demands that she read books so he can take their concepts, via telepathy, from her mind in an effort to figure out what his gestalt organism is. His effort fails, but the two have sex before he leaves her forever. She has lost her courage to dance naked in the woods and becomes the strict, prudish Miss Kew.
Lone rescues Gerry at age eight and raises him in the shelter for three years. Gerry "bleshes" with the group, blending and meshing as part of the whole greater than the sum of its parts, a gestalt. But he remains angry because he lacks what the others have: awesome mind-powers.
Lone dies in a flash flood. Gerry, now age eleven, follows his instructions to lead the kids to Miss Kew's home for security. Gerry probes her mind the first day he and Alicia meet; it's the first real use of his special telepathy power. The experience is so traumatic that he stops probing.
He and the other kids, rather than grow as the gestalt, are raised by Alicia as Kews for three years. Her strict rules suffocate their true identity. Gerry and Janie fight to hold the gestalt together as Miss Kew tries to segregate the twins and send Baby away. Gerry finally kills Miss Kew, unable to be both her son and the second head of the gestalt. He doesn't understand why he's murdered her, so the next day, he goes to Stern's office hoping the therapist can tell him.
Stern and Gerry discover the phrase "Baby is three" is blocking the answer. The therapist secretly records Gerry talking and then plays the audio to make the teen drill deeper into his memories. Gerry remembers probing Miss Kew. He then tells Stern he's rejected a future as Gerry Kew and chosen to be the second, more powerful head of the gestalt.
Stern warns him that his gestalt needs to learn morality. The teen dismisses the suggestion and uses his probe power to learn what Stern knows, make him forget the session, and escape punishment for murdering Miss Kew. He decides the gestalt doesn't need morality and will simply do whatever comes naturally, namely defend itself.
In Part 3, the gestalt finally gets its act together. Janie rescues Hip from jail. He doesn't remember who he is or how he got there. Janie, not unlike Stern with Gerry, aids Hip by helping him process his memories. Hip finally realizes what happened.
He'd discovered a counter-magnetism force as a lieutenant. He arrogantly forced a Private First Class to help him track down the source of it. It was the anti-gravity generator Lone had left on the farm. Hip only wanted to discover it to become more popular. But the Private First Class sent the device flying away forever. Hip was ordered to undergo therapy with someone named Thompson. Hip attacked him because he looked like the Private First Class, and got discharged and discredited shortly after.
For seven years he searched for the inventor of the generator. He found his way to the town near the Kew mansion. There he encountered Thompson again, who made him smash a window. That was what landed him jail.
Gerry just wanted to be left alone in Mr. Kew's mansion. He hurt Hip to stop him from finding the potentially world-changing generator and thereby calling attention to the gestalt.
Janie helps him realize that the Private First Class, Thompson, and the inventor of the device are all the same person, Gerry, head of the gestalt. She tells him that it took so long to remember because he had to work out the memories by himself, with little aid from her, or he wouldn't have been able to get past the mental blocks Gerry put on him. She explains that she's impressed by his persistence and hopes he can teach Gerry to feel ashamed so the gestalt can become moral.
Janie and Hip confront Gerry. Hip decides the gestalt doesn't need a morality, as groups do, but an ethic, as individuals who change society do. Gerry, as sadistic as Mr. Kew, tries to use his probing power to subdue Hip. But Hip, with assistance from one of the twins, manages to tie Gerry up and blindfold him. Hip puts at the forefront of his mind the similarities between the two—they both were abused and sought popularity—and an ethic of humanism, helping humanity. He takes off Gerry's blindfold and tells him to read his mind.
The ethic tells Gerry to protect humanity and to revere his human ancestors and whoever the next advanced creatures are. Hip becomes the conscience of the life form. Gerry agrees to his philosophy, moved by Hip's empathy for him and the possibilities ahead for the gestalt.
That's when the rest of Homo Gestalt contact Gerry through telepathy. They invite his now fully mature gestalt into their society, which is humanity itself and the protector of it. Their group morality matches Hip's ethic. Now humble, Gerry's gestalt joins the Homo Gestalt society.