Drop City [Paperback]

T.C. Boyle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 2004

It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier—the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska—in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naïve optimism, the inhabitants of “Drop City” arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other young homesteaders. When the two communities collide, unexpected friendships and dangerous enmities are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment, and a roof over one’s head. Rich, allusive, and unsentimental, T.C. Boyle’s ninth novel is a tour de force infused with the lyricism and take-no-prisoners storytelling for which he is justly famous.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With Drop City, T. Coraghessan Boyle offers proof that he has become one of America's most prolific, gifted storytellers. Set in the 1970s, Boyle entertains readers with the denizens of "Drop City," a counterculture California commune that welcomes anyone wanting to live off the grid, use drugs, and practice free love. Boyle sublimely captures the sociology of its rebellious members, who doubt the sincerity or beliefs of newcomers, express some insecurity about nonconformity, and chastise outsiders while remaining oblivious to their own hypocrisy. Marco, Pan, Star, and other "cats" and "chicks" live hassle-free until dissention and cries of racism mount amid increasing run-ins with the local government (a young girl is raped, installation of a sewage system is mandated, a mother lets her toddlers drink LSD-laced juice). Seeking refuge, the citizens move north, to Alaska, to reinvent their utopia, but soon learn the natural environment is more unforgiving of a lackadaisical lifestyle.

Drop City is funny, evocative, and well-paced, shifting between the hippies and the Alaskan locals--primarily Sess and his new bride Pamela (a city dweller who arranged stays with several trappers over a few weeks to determine whom she would marry)--until the two cultures collide. Balanced between plot and character, Boyle excels at describing the physical world and his characters' interaction with it, whether portraying the harshness (or sheer beauty) of the Alaskan wilderness, the simple survival routines of its grizzled inhabitants, or the sounds wafting through Drop City: "the goats bleating to be milked or fed, the single sharp ringing note of a dog surprised by its own hunger, the regular slap of the screen door at the back of the house--and underneath it all, like the soundtrack to a movie, the dull hum of rock and roll leaking out the kitchen windows." Truly American in spirit, Drop City is a strong novel of freedom and those in pursuit of lives of liberty. --Michael Ferch --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Boyle has a wonderful eye for the comedy of imposture when the self-deceived themselves practice deception. His ninth novel, which centers on the travails of a hippie commune, Drop City, in the early '70s, gives him plenty of poseurs to work with. Drop City, in Sonoma County, Calif., is run, in a manner of speaking, by a gold-toothed purveyor of Aquarian notions, Norm Sender. The Drop City family includes Pan (aka Ronnie) and his high school pal Star (aka Paulette Regina Starr), who have fled from the East Coast together; two rather predatory black dudes; and a variegated crew of longhaired "cats" and flower-child "chicks." Star, sweet but often naive, is the opposite of Pan, beneath whose free love patter lurks an unnerving rapacity. Star soon hooks up with Marco, whose solid virtues are concealed beneath his veil of hair. When "The Man," in the person of the Sonoma County sheriff's department, condemns the property, Norm, who has inherited other property far away in Boynton, Alaska, proposes a tribal migration north. Meanwhile, the news in Boynton is that local trapper Cecil "Sess" Harder is marrying Pamela McCoon, after an eccentric courtship ritual. Sess's major problem lately has been a violent feud with Joe Bosky, the local bush pilot. When the Drop City hippie bus rolls into Boynton, a comic clash of civilizations ensues. Building utopia upriver from the Harders, Drop City's denizens discover that polar climes demand rather drastic behavioral adaptations. Boyle understands the multitudinous, sneaky ways innocence insulates itself from ambiguity-but in this novel he leavens that cynical insight with genuine sweetness. While the Day-Glo of the hippie era has long since faded, this novel brings it all back home-and helps us see how much in the American grain it all really was.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (January 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142003808
• ISBN-13: 978-0142003800
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (136 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #231,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Read, But Boyle Can Do Better, December 2, 2004

By 

G. Bestick (Dobbs Ferry, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Drop City (Paperback)

Several years ago, I saw Welsa Whitfield perform show tunes and torch songs at a cabaret. She sang arch renditions of sentimental ballads, drawing out the emotion in the songs and mocking it at the same time. Her act didn't really cohere because you can't have it both ways. You can't be ironic and sincerely poignant at the same time.

This same issue - the messy conjoining of irony and sincerity - affects much of T.C. Boyle's fiction. Boyle is probably the most talented of the Boomer-generation fiction writers. He can do novels of epic sweep as well as pointillistic short stories. He's a fiendishly imaginative plotter, a supple stylist, and can assemble big casts of eye-catching characters. And he's laugh- out-loud funny. Boyle is also the most frustrating writer of his generation because he uses all this talent for the ironic take, the quick score, the easy laugh. Capable of being our Dickens or Balzac, the writer who defines his time, he mostly settles for being a deft satirist.

Which brings us to Drop City. The plot is straightforward enough. A group of hippies wear out their welcome in Sonoma County, California. Their leader, the quasi-charismatic Norm, owns some land in Alaska his uncle left to him. The hippie cavalcade moves north, where their goofy communal hedonism smacks up against the harsh realties of life in the Alaskan bush. The counterpoint to the hippies is a young trapper, Sess Harder, and his new wife Pamela. Sess and Pamela befriend the hippies, and the lives of the hippies and the locals mingle with some comic and some tragic results.

There are easy targets here, and Boyle hits them without overly straining himself. He skewers the Love Generation's meretricious idealism, greedy intake of flesh and illegal substances, the chaos of communal egalitarianism. The epiphanies are pretty straightforward too. Star, one of the hippie chicks whose consciousness Boyle drops us into, figures out that sexual liberation is a better deal for the guys than the girls. Her boyfriend, Marco, realizes that pleasure-seeking self-indulgence isn't such a great survival strategy when the larder is low and winter's coming on.

This would have been news around 1971. But Drop City was delivered to us in 2003. If it's history we're dealing with, Boyle might have given us a deeper look at the motives of his patchouli-scented tribe. Beneath the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of that era, there did exist a meaningful critique of the spiritual emptiness of suburban American life. That critique generated a mass movement that put the best and brightest of an entire generation out on the road, searching for something better. Enormous effort went in to developing alternative structures and processes; it wasn't all comic or misguided. Had Boyle given his hippies more depth of motivation, their commune's demise would have been more resonant, or at least more poignant.

But Boyle doesn't do poignant. What we get in Drop City are some funny riffs on hippie pretentiousness, some strong descriptive writing about the Alaskan bush, and a story that's clever enough to keep you turning the pages. Read it, enjoy it, and you'll probably stop thinking about the characters ten minutes after you put it down.

All of Boyle's novels offer at minimum a fun ride. He moves nimbly around the American landscape and has a fine eye for the ridiculous. Budding Prospects deals with a later era of Northern California pot smokers. The Tortilla Curtain, a look at illegal immigrants in Southern California, is almost great, but he just had to drop in his patented hipster irony. A Friend of the Earth is an imaginative ecological dystopia. The Road to Wellville is about nineteenth century utopians who preached truth and salvation through cereal grains instead of lysergic acid diethylamide. World's End won a Pen/Faulkner award.

Boyle is also a deft short story writer. You can catch most of them in TC Boyle Stories. Pay special attention to the story "If the River Was Whiskey." It demonstrates the kind of power Boyle can achieve when he lets a little emotional sincerity seep into a narrative. That particular story is a standard he should hold himself to, instead of squandering precious writerly juices on five finger exercises like Drop City. Here's hoping that Boyle, as he rounds into the final turn of his productive career, will use his immense talent to rise to the greatness of which he's capable.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He does it again, February 5, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Drop City (Hardcover)

T.C. Boyle comes through once again with a complex tale, full of insight, twists and turns, great writing, and overall satisfaction. The guy hasn't written a bad thing yet and my only complaint is that he hasn't turned out more jewels like this one. But then, I suppose he's into quality, not quantity. Suffice it to say that I'm a major Boyle fan and this is my favorite so far.

Also recommended: Even Cowgirls get the Blues by Robbins and Bark of the Dogwood by McCrae

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ants & grasshoppers in the Age of Aquarius, December 30, 2004

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Drop City (Paperback)

I've admired Boyle since his debut novel, Water Music, but I admit being let down by most of his later work--the themes are great, but their execution left a bit to be desired. His talent is enormous, his ambition's contagious, his ideas are fertile as ever. But does he have the discipline to make it into the highest ranks, whose eminence I believe he can reach if he toughens up his attitude? He's the boy who likes to act the rebel, the drop-out he once was, but all along he has the makings of the PhD he became. This contrariness still simmers.

As others have noted about Drop City, Boyle's talent shines, but he's capable of much more. I do find that his ironic style has in recent work subsided a bit, giving way to measured compassion in his stories, such as many of those in After the Plague. One of the stories in that collection dealt with a serial test of potential mates in Alaska, which may be the origin of what here is the Sess and Pamela plot.

[...]. His love of boastful fakes and the ensuing macho punchouts continues here as in his other fiction, but it does get tedious even if he's good at it. I have taught his story "Greasy Lake" to college students, and much as I enjoy his bravura narrative in small doses, it can become "testiduneous"(to use a word from GL I found again in DC) over the long haul.

The two brawling contingents, hippie "grasshoppers" and sourdough "ants," do not even meet until the 280's in pagination. Lots of exposition precedes, often the most interesting feature of Boyle's writing being the details: how a commune tries to feed the folks, how you trap wolves, what a dark winter feels like in Alaska, how hippies need foodstamps and welfare to "live off the land." If you let your eye fall upon individual paragraphs, you'll find nearly invariably well-crafted, energetic, restless prose, which itches to leap off the page free of cliche, full of fresh metaphors and clever observations. Problem is, the book's structure flits from character to character in its indirect narration, and the omniscient voice of the controlling speaker filters only sporadically through a cast of sometimes insufficiently differentiated people whom you find not enough empathy for.

Sess and Pamela and Marco earn the author and thus the reader's sympathy, but Boyle's much better at male than female "consciousness." So, after a few hundred pages of calculatedly witty insights, the reader may well weary of being so much inside other people's heads without a whole lot of dialogue or relief from the omnipresent buzz of inner monologue. It's a pattern common to much of Boyle's ouevre, where his strength of commentary and his weakness of sneering coalesce.

I'm as pessimistic as the next faux-misanthrope, but while Boyle has progressed in his ability to care for his fictional humans despite our real clumsiness and hormones and ideals and hypocrisies, this novel fails ultimately to live up to its promise. I'm glad I read it, having learned a lot about the "how-to" issue of the time and places, and I wish Boyle well as he continues to improve. If he was a rookie, this'd be a remarkable season. Two decades on, this veteran still has to fulfill his potential with a bases-loaded home run. He can do it, but he has not yet. Here, form meets content, as the communal dream fades and the issue of survival, headhunters vs. basket-weavers as one character muses, comes to another inevitable Boyle smash-up.

By the way, the author's a true gentleman; I met him at a booksigning when Water Music came out--he and I the only ones there!--and his biker mien belies a much gentler soul. See "Greasy Lake" for this/my/his authorial fallacy:)