Drop City

Rating:
Summary: Boyle's Best
Review: I have always been a big Boyle fan, but this is my favorite of all his books. I think "Drop City" is amazing and I'm so impressed with what incrediably broad appeal it has. This has love affairs and sex drugs and rocknroll in perfect balance. There is the ideal mix of humor and tenderness, and it is fast paced and exciting while also being ruminiative. Five stars, all the way. A winner.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfaction
Review: Deft, wise, assured, and entertaining, T.C. Boyle's new novel is a sure-fire wintertime treat. The time is 1970. Drop City is Norm Sender's commune outside of Santa Rosa, California. Actually, Drop City is a commune wannabe; at this point it's nothing more than a crash spot for a fluid population of counter culturists who come by, do a lot of drugs, groove on the free love, and wander on down the road when they need a real meal or a serious wash. Over time a core group has formed which includes the 40-ish Norm, Star and Marco. Star is smart even when she's stoned, and Marco is the only guy--pardon me, cat,--who actually does any physical work to improve things at Drop City. "It's all about the chicks," one cat says. Yep, it is up to the women to cook, clean, wash, and offer themselves freely to the men. If any female ever wakes up and realizes that the emperor has no clothes, Drop City will fall apart.

That same summer, Sess Harder is on his way to town to try his luck as one of Pamela's three suitors. She's an Anchorage woman who wants to live in the wilderness and is looking for a husband to do it with. Sess is a trapper with a cabin eight miles upriver from the closest tiny settlement, and he, and the life, are exactly what Pamela wants. She has saved herself for this.

Norm runs into trouble with the county and his ranch just about the same time that he inherits a cabin just downriver from Sess, and Drop City goes on the road to live off the land in northern Alaska. Obviously this is going to be a play-pattern mismatch, and Boyle has set up that both Sess and Marco have terrible tempers and checkered pasts. Both have an enemy. The two capable women, Star and Pamela, have very different beliefs. And winter comes very early in that part of Alaska.

Having set up an intriguing culture clash, Boyle unspools with exquisite tension a story that does not develop as expected, yet everything plays out in a completely plausible fashion. "Drop City" works on many different levels, tickling the mind and satisfying the demanding reader.

Rating:
Summary: Boyle is moving into his prime-this is a great book.
Review: I've had an uneasy relationship with the authorship of T. Coraghessan Boyle. He has always obviously been a gifted and imaginative writer with a great sense of both grandeur as well as an eye for the circumstances of society's more marginalized inhabitants. More than that, he has a great eye for, and ability to render in words, the physical surroundings of his characters-whether it be the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness as rendered in this book or, say, a desolate roadside ravine as so definitively described in The Tortilla Curtain. And, on top of all that, he's a great storyteller.

However, there has always been an unpleasant aspect to Boyles work. Boyle has typically written as if angry at the unseen reader-as if he knows unauthorized persons are entering his world. There has been an aggressiveness and sharpness to his style that grates and irritates.

Until now. With Drop City Boyle seems finally to be able to write without this underlying angst. The result is his first fully formed and truly accessible work. Finally the reader can sit back and enjoy the story. And the story is wonderful.

With a keen eye and laser like efficiency Boyle recreates and dissects the "free-love" communal subculture of the 1970's. This is not the romanticized nostalgia trip of an aging hippie. This is as much a social commentary as it is a novel. Boyle seeks to-and succeeds in-demonstrating the incredible naiveté, hypocrisy and stupidity that was at the root of the communal life.

As usual the story is intricately woven and rendered. The plot is well developed and constructed and plays out in a well-paced manner. The characters here are among Boyles best ever-fully formed, evocative, ingratiating in an albeit loathsome sort of way. It is, however, his mastery of his description and rendering of the physical environments and surroundings of the communes that really sets this Boyle effort apart.

That and the maturity to write a story that allows the reader full entry.

This is a great book.

Rating:
Summary: Near or Far the Past's Truth Lacks Gloss
Review: Prior to this novel my experience with T.C. Boyle has been limited to collections of his short stories. The author states that those of his readers who admired, "The Tortilla Curtain", or "A Friend Of The Earth", will find that, "Drop City", is the book they have been waiting for. The book begins in 1970 on a California commune, and were the book another attempt to romanticize and embellish the lifestyle documented in this book, I would likely have stalled after a handful of pages. There is no doubt the decade that ended with 1970 was a momentous one The United States and in many other nations, but the reasons that are worthy of note are often overlooked when glimpsed through the distorted view of Timothy Leary and the legions who attempted to expand their minds chemically, reject conventional society, while all the while leeching their existence from the local welfare office.

Boyle claims that, "we are in the dusk of human life on this planet", whether his tongue is firmly planted in his cheek I don't claim to know. What I can say is that he only states that thirty some years ago we "seemed" to be at the dawn of the same planet. Of course it appeared as dawn to some, and to many of the players in this book, for running away from anything you don't like, or in many cases, truth be told, fear, is a false dawn at best, and pure self delusion in truth. It is simply a fraud, and that is the life that Boyle brings to readers through this book. There is no nostalgia in this book, no, "hyperbole or high jinks common to novels of the sixties", to use the author's words. So, if your memory of the sixties is full of longing to return to them this book is not for you, don't touch it, it will scald your hands and your precious memories, as altered as they may have been when created and continue to be.

"It's all about the chicks", states one commune member, and with those five words condemns the free-love nonsense associated with the decade. Love is free to males, males who are free to pimp out "their" women whether they wish to participate or not. Women are a form of exchange or currency in this book, and those who don't go along are condemned with a facility that today still nauseates. Getting back to nature is no more than the pollution and use of the environment on a scale that is a prelude to the larger scale that takes place today. The communes were a virus; they took, consumed, used up, and moved on. They respected a utopia that never was and slowly became the cynics they claimed they had left behind in their childhood homes. Their imagined contribution was transitory and destructive. A brief period of social dysfunction dressed up and hidden from themselves and those who looked on from a distance. Reality was to be avoided at all costs; a state of constant narcotic induced fantasy was required to live in their phony communes.

Everything and everyone that intruded was brushed aside, kids bothering you, no problem, give them their juice laced with LSD, it would get them off your back so you could indulge yourself, be responsible to no one and for nothing. Trust was a convenience; non-traditional relationships were a momentary diversion, while theft, violence, racism, destruction of the group and the environment they claimed was so precious was the norm, not the exception.

Today's neo hippies and retro freaks equate the music and images with a life that never was. The heroes they listen to have often long since killed themselves while expanding their minds, and even the last stars of that dysfunctional time like Timothy Leary did linger, but not as anything more than dysfunctional burned out oddities, walking, mumbling casualties of the lifestyles they preached. Leary's final great quest was to display himself, to be a drug indulged death beamed live on the internet.

All that ails the world today is the same that was destroying it during the Age of Aquarius, Woodstock, and running away to Canada. The difference is we have become more efficient at the destruction. And while Boyle may rant at deforestation I would like him to explain why we deforested our own country, and now are astonished that others are doing the same. It may be true that we wish others to learn from the stupidities we committed, but there were those that sounded the same alarms as we committed Genocide against Native Americans, and created dust bowls where farms could not function. So now the dust bowls are created in another locale, and why should anyone listen to us? Our concern is not for them, but for the damage we may suffer thousands of miles away.

Boyle absolutely dismembers the entire fraud that communes, free love and the drug popping culture of the sixties truly was. There was no shortage of hypocrisy in the sixties, and I had a great deal of fun reading Boyle as he brought all the dropouts securely in to the fold with all those they claimed to have separated themselves from.

The ending of the book is priceless.

Rating:
Summary: The Virtue of Lifestyles?
Review: I'm very much in agreement with "vitaminj's" review from earlier this year. I'm appreciative of Boyle's talent and the deft drawing of his characters. I simply wasn't overly impressed with this particular story.

I do appreciate, however, the restraint Boyle used in keeping easy moral judgments at bay and his ability to resist a certain tidiness. Early in the novel, he alternately featured the hippies of Drop City with Sess Harder and the folk of the Alaskan frontier. I imagined a predictable outcome of this contrast in which the two groups would square off in a battle of lifestyle wills. Instead, the melding and merging that occured emphasized commonalities that made it seem as though the two camps were so different, they were virtually the same.

Rating:
Summary: You can almost smell these hippies...
Review: "Drop City" is an episodic novel which gradually builds in power as T.C. Boyle's cast of flawed characters try to live their utopia. His breathless prose perfectly matches the druggy travails of the Drop City commune's residents. Presided over by their guru Norm Sender, their California experiment fails in the face of what they all perceive as the larger failure of America, and Boyle chooses to concentrate on two parallel couples, Star/Marco and Sess/Pamela, whose common rejection of "plastic society" leads them to cross paths in the wilds of Alaska when the commune goes north. But by exposing these hippies to the worst their beloved Mother Nature has to offer when the winter sets in, he's found a great symbolic way of separating the essential traits from the opportunism of the 1960s/70s era. With 20/20 hindsight, Boyle knows where our sympathies mostly lie, and locates in his characters the traits which both preceded and survived the hippie generation--because they were always the true fundamentally American values in the first place. Through Marco and Star, Boyle allows us to share their ambivalence towards the "free love" and "brotherhood" ethic which seems to blind their cohorts to the reality of hypocrisy and exploitation of uber-slackers like Ronnie and Franklin, who make life difficult for the rest of the commune. The Alaskan woodsman Sess Harder, on the other hand, holds no illusions about human nature, and is simply waiting for an opportunity to finally confront his archnemesis Joe Bosky, another woodsman who "interviewed" with his new wife Pamela for backwoods marriage and has been screwing with them ever since. It all comes together in a satisfying conclusion, unlike many novels nowadays which seem to lose steam.

Rating:
Summary: Drop City Review
Review: The thing I found most enjoyable about T.C. Boyle's Drop City was the amazing ability Boyle has to enter into a character's head. The novel is told from the perspectives of five different people: three hippies, who decide to move to Alaska with the other members of their California commune (named Drop City), and two native Alaskan residents who live in the area that the hippies choose to inhabit. Each of these characters is so vividly and accurately portrayed, so lifelike, realistic, and utterly convincing, that it seems at times that the book was written by five separate people. Of course, Boyle's humorous and unique use of language are constant throughout, uniting the different viewpoints and proving that the book was written by one experienced and talented author. The verisimilitude of the characters, combined with the subtle comments on human nature Boyle disperses throughout the novel, make Drop City a truly involving and captivating read. I finished the book very quickly, and wanted it to last even longer than its 497 pages. At times hilarious, at times depressing, and always realistic, the novel is truly hard to put down. This was the first work by T.C. Boyle I've read, but I definately plan to read more, and hope that the other works I read have the same authentic characters, humorous way with words, and poignant insight to the nature of human beings that all made Drop City so enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: A Reactionary Tale
Review: This novel was very engaging and accurate in it's depiction of the drug-addled and heady days of the 70's. The citizens of Drop City South were idealistic, naive and most of all irresponsible. Their move from California to Alaska seemed logical in the plot and ludicrous at the same time. The ability of Boyle to juxtapose these idealists with the realism of life in Alaska by real environmentalists and survivors of the Alaskan life was brilliant. By the end of the book you realize that it has levied a scathing criticism of the idealistic hippies. I found the ending disappointing and anti-climactic; but the characters were endearing and multidimensional. It was a good read and I would recommend to those looking for a glimpse into the counterculture of the 70's as well as the life of Alasakan settlers.

Rating:
Summary: Drop City: Life on the Edge
Review: Drop City is a novel about the edges of America and the idea of the frontier, both literally and figuratively. A group of hippies living on a 1960s California commune decides to pack it up and try their hand at life in the Alaskan wilderness, beyond the reach of The Man.

The description of Drop City's migration to the north is intertwined with the story of the modern-day mountain men and women of Boynton, Alaska - living off the land, they are also dropouts from "straight" society in their own ways.

T.C. Boyle is masterful at examining the dream of the frontier, and all its limitations, through a large and diverse cast of characters. Each player's narrative voice conveys a unique perspective: drugged haze, frustrated masculinity, awe in the face of Nature's power, and transcendant happiness are just a few of the feelings the reader will experience as the narrative moves between the characters. The hippies Star and Marco, and the frontier couple, Sess and Pamela, are the true survivors in the story, and you will be rooted to your seat as their happiness is jeopradized again and again by the freaky, unhinged characters that surround them. "Drop City" is a compelling, emotional and suspenseful tale of life on the edge of sanity, society, and basic survival, and a thrilling depiction of the beauty and danger that ensues when people choose to live this life.

Rating:
Summary: The Fox News Version of the Sixties
Review: I picked up this book with a certain amount of trepidation, because the sixties has become a favorite time to mock amongst those who are made uncomfortable by earnestness other than their own. But I had read some stories by Boyle and was impressed, and in the bookstore, I flipped to a random page and was struck by the power of his use of metaphor.

There is indeed lots of wonderful writing in this book, and if a novel's power were determined at the sentence level, this would be a great novel. But the plot is murky, the motivations of the characters are unknown, the faithfulness to the time fails miserably, and worst of all, the author has created a large number of characters whom he obviously despises. Over and over while reading this book I was reminded of an episode from the TV show Dragnet, popular at this time, which depicted a fellow who was trying to live according to Tolstoy's philosophical dictates. Joe Friday responded to him in the way that has since been adopted by Fox News commentators--scolding with no response allowed. That's what this book felt like.

There's lots of mockery of people living in communes here. I lived in a commune during this time period, and some of the descriptions were apt, but the author was stuck on the surface of the experience. The dirt and disorganization of communal life were more important to him than the emotion and the experience. You don't care about mess when you are trying to create something completely different from the nuclear family, when you doing something as difficult as sharing money. Speaking of money, Boyle's hippies are dependent on money from a leader with inherited wealth and on welfare and food stamps. This is news to me. I never met anyone from that time who was taking advantage of either of those programs, and while there were many leaders of the radical movement (as opposed to hippies, a separate breed) who were from wealthy families, the fact that they were involved in radicalism meant that their families cut them off from that wealth.

For a historical novel, there are many anachronisms. Some are minor, like mentions of DMT or chadors in what was supposed to be 1970. This immediately made me suspicious of how this author would treat this time period--and also of the efficacy of his editors, who should have spotted mistakes like that. But the biggest anachronism was the absence of the War in Vietnam. Many people, including Boyle, have forgotten how omnipresent the War was during this time. Every night you could see people getting shot on the evening news. You could see photos of people getting burned alive in the magazines. You could see kooks running around with "Bomb Hanoi" buttons on. You could see regular, massive, violent demonstrations against the War. There were even a number of bombings of war-associated buildings. And of course, there was the draft and the deaths, which really brought the War home. But in Boyle's version, the war has almost no effect on the characters. A couple of the men are draft dodgers, but you have no sense at all of why, and when it comes up, like when they are facing the crossing of the Canadian border, the war and the draft feel like annoying historical details rather than what they were--an impetus for action. In this book's world, the war is something unfelt. And that's not how it was at all for anyone at that time, freak or straight.

I felt very frustrated with this book on a number of levels. It's a cheap shot, as another reviewer has mentioned, but I guess that's to be expected. We have yet to come to terms with this time period. However, it also fails as a novel, not ever giving us any reason for why the characters do what they do. For instance, you don't know why Pamela wants to offer herself up as a mailorder bride to a guy living in the Alaskan bush. Her only motivation appears to be that she had fun camping there as a child. Huh? And at the end, the only truly authentic characters seem to be a couple of guys who live by killing fur-bearing animals. This is presented as somehow "true" and "real" in ways that making a living by selling beads and candles is not. When I finished the book, I wondered if the author were drawing a parallel between these hunters and the War. But no, that was way too subtle a reading.

It's a shame to see someone with talent wasting his time on a self-congratulatory screed posing as a novel. I can't say it's surprising, though. Nowadays people lap up self-righteous scolding. It doesn't make for good story-telling, though.