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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.
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But Drop City is a quickly tedious and predictable book that's been written many times--by Denis Johnson (*Already Dead*), for instance. Boyle seems self-consciously smug in his own brazen mediocrity at times, going for adolescent gross-outs and tired narrative scenerios.
Drop City is, most of all, a book about the waste and decay and lassitude of a certain segment of the author's generation. If that "does it" for you, read my 2 stars as 5. But the arrested emotional development of the novel's characters, so clearly described, seems to be the end in itself here--more than any other American author I've read, Boyle seems to take a perverse glee in demonstrating his virtuosity and then not going any further. I used to think he just wasn't writing up to his potential. But maybe he is.