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Summary: Wonderfully Rendered Time Piece
Review: What an imaginative and fully realized world Boyle has created! Set in 1970 and shifting seamlessly from one narrative voice to another, the book is about a hippie commune in California that relocates to the harsh and unforgiving climate of Alaska.Their world collides with the locals, and in particular a mountain man, his new bride, and his bitter rival, which causes a variety of unexpected results. The characters are all so well drawn you wonder if Boyle knew some of these people. It's a simple well told story with colorful and interesting characters you want to know better as the book progresses.What more could you ask for?
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Summary: can't say enough about this book...
Review: Having read this book on a trip to Alaska, I can't imagine a more entertaining or instructive reading experience. This author knows how to tell a story. He doesn't get too caught up like some authors who intellectualize until there just isn't any plot left. Drop City represents everything I read books for - I learned a lot, I was totally entertained, I was literally swept away to another place and time. I love this man! I am so sad it's over! Enjoy!!
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Summary: Rousing adventure among 1970 hippies
Review: Exuberant, harrowing, and funny, Boyle's rousing portrayal of 1970 counterculture evokes the mixed feelings and angry clashes of that time. Set in a laid-back California hippie commune and a rural corner of Alaska, the novel is populated with misfits, layabouts, villains and sweet young things yearning for enlightenment. At the heart of the story is Star (formerly Paulette), who dropped out from teaching elementary school to go West with her high school friend and new lover, Pan (formerly Ronnie). Looking for Utopia, Star wants to believe she's found it in Drop City.And, milking goats one fine morning, after ditching the sexually opportunistic and coercive Pan and not getting high for three days, she feels maybe she has. "The moment was electric, and she could feel it through the soles of her bare feet, through her every pore; this was the life she'd envisioned when she left home, a life of peace and tranquility, of love and meditation and faith in the ordinary, no pretense, no games, no plastic yearning after the almighty dollar." At that moment she meets Marco, who's been "living simple" after running out on a possession charge and a draft notice. But that was two years ago and he's tired of drifting, though not free to rejoin society, even if he wanted. Neither of them really knows what they want, only what they don't want, like most everyone else in Drop City. But Marco begins to make a life there with Star, building things, getting to work on real latrines, finding himself some purpose. Boyle's depiction of the overcrowded ranch with its disgraceful sanitation, mushy food, and druggy rituals is tactile and vivid, full of chaos, noise and stink and occasional real horror, like a mother calming her two grubby children with tokes of marijuana or letting them drink LSD-laced juice. The people are real too, hiding their insecurities and venalities behind a curtain of righteous talk and incessant highs. Norm, 37, owns the ranch and refuses to set rules or deny welcome to anyone, even when charges of rape and racism polarize the place. And the county is coming, shutting them down. Meanwhile, Sess Harder, an Alaska loner hunkered down in a tight cabin on the Thirtymile, courts Pamela, an Anchorage girl who's had enough of city life. Theirs is a different kind of dropping out - no welfare and food stamps and brown rice and free love. Theirs is a calculated choice, honed with hard work and determination. Not that everything is hunky dory in the land of the midnight sun (and the most hellacious mosquitoes). There's Joe Bosky, for one, a mean, crazed bush pilot out for blood in his ongoing feud with Sess. Down the river from Sess is the neatly abandoned cabin of his mentor - Norm's uncle. And Norm's Drop City is on its way. Much of what happens next is predictable - the culture clash of hippies and frontiersmen and the human shake-out as the bliss of communal highs gives way to shorter days and frozen isolation. But nothing about this novel is ordinary. The characters grow and change and not always in the ways we want them to. Boyle's people are flawed and passionate and crafty. Their youth is buoyant and full of possibility, their naivety is sweet and pathetic, the opportunists among them are as mean (or selfish) as they come. The "catastrophe of the hour" is usually just that and no more, but not always. Boyle's prose is rich and pitch perfect, and the story - full of ideas, humor and suspense - grabs you from the start. This is one of those books you want more of; more of the brief, glorious Alaska summer and the winter-long Alaska night, more of the people determined to succeed there, more of their young lives and their good - or bad - or disastrous - choices. This is Boyle's best novel in years.
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Summary: Waiting for the sequel...
Review: I haven't been reading much fiction lately, but the review of the book in the New York Times made it seem irresistible. It turned out to be a real page turner, very involving and vivid. However, once I got to about 100 pages from the end, I realized I was going to be disappointed. There just weren't enough pages left to tell the whole story. That's exactly how it turned out. The book begs for a sequel. Winter just set in. There's lots more yet to happen. I'll wait for the sequel, and look forward to the film.
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Summary: What happens next
Review: As a reader, I am usually satisfied with whatever the ending may be, and not too curious about what happens next. With Drop City, I felt as if I was dropped off in the middle of a great tale even though it ended satisfactorily. I wanted more! What happened next? Too bad T.C. doesn't write sequals.
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Summary: Insightful, Truthful, Painful
Review: At its best, historical fiction brings the past alive in a way that pure history cannot (I am thinking of novels like Lincoln by Gore Vidal.) As I began reading Drop City, I was unconciously looking for shallow stereotypes and factual errors that often creep into books about that era. I was there, deeply, in the middle of it: California in the 60's. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and T. Boyle has shown it with great clarity. Although I know great writers have enough imagination to recreate an era they were not part of, I wondered how Boyle could have gotten the "drop" on it the way he does. I thought he was younger than I, and would therefore have only imagined the whole story. Then I looked up his birthdate: December 2, 1948, 6 days before my own. It would be a great book anyway, but now I know that, to some extent at least, he was writing what he knew. What a great read!
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Summary: "Flower power on the tundra."
Review: T. C. Boyle tells two parallel stories in his ninth novel. DROP CITY is about the realities of a 1970's commune in Sonoma County, California, where problems including the [violation] of a teenaged girl, sewage, and toddlers drinking [chemical] juice plague the community. For male characters Marco, Norm, Ronnie (aka, "Pan") and Sky Dog, the not-so-utopian commune is "all about the chicks." Boyle's novel is also about the realities of life in the Alaskan wilderness for newlywed Pamela McCoon and her grizzled husband, Sess Harder. When the Boyle's hippies decide to relocate their hedonistic circus to Alaska, causing the two cultures to clash at page 261 of the 444-page novel, we witness an amazing writer at the heights of his talent. DROP CITY is clever, insightful, and entertaining. G. Merritt
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Summary: Interesting Social Study
Review: I was interested in this book immediately. The book was well written and initially the characters seemed to have depth and reality. As the plot developed, some became one dimensional, very good or very evil. A co founder of a commune in Sonoma County wrote to the SFChron "Boyle took the most tragic occurences at various nearby communes... and created a Zap Comix version of alternative living that every body will just love to hate....Living close to nature is the best therapy one can receive, especially surrounded by loving and accepting brothers and sisters....Someday an author will write a truly inspiring novel about the communal movement..."
Rating:
Summary: Better and better
Review: From a brilliant but sometimes erratic writer, his best book ever. Some of the flaws that mar his earlier work are gone entirely. Loved this book and raced through it. True to life and history (I was there -- b. 1944) about the Sixties. A great read, and worth a thousand precious little MFA workshop "my childhood was unhappy and then my thesis advisor was mean" whiners. Loved it!
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Summary: Involving and Sophisticated . . .
Review: This is an amazing book! The characters were so involving that I couldn't put it down, but now that I've finished it, I have SO much to think about. I have to agree with others, this is my favorite T. Coraghessan Boyle book yet. READ IT NOW! And give it to all your friends, so you won't be in the position I'm in now: I can't wait to talk about all the relationships and implications, and the number one greatest death scene I've ever read. Ultimately this book is just a great read. There is also social commentary, but it is sophisticated. I don't think, ultimately, that TCB lampoons his hippies. Marco? That guy rules. Star? She's smart and loving and idealistic, and she's also strong and hardworking and forgiving. Pretty awesome girl. But, of course, not everyone in every group is the cream of the crop. Some of the hippies weren't as smart, some weren't as nice, some weren't as successful . . . just like some feminists are smarter than others, and present feminist ideals more clearly than others, just like some Christians are more open-minded than others and embody the spirt of their text more fully than others, and so on. To me, this is the most sophisticated, complete and HUMAN way to show a group -- especially one who's ideals and daring brought us, oh, civil rights and feminism and anti-conformist values, and successful counter-culture and anti-war protests and of course, sex,drugs&rocknroll. Just because the hippies didn't change every mind, they hardly failed. Which is how, I think "Drop City" presents the story. Indiviuality, one of the staunchest hippie ideals, whether hip (Marco&Star) or square (Pamela&Sess)is rewarded and celebrated -- since both couples uphold true hippie goals and not just the neo-hippie stuff we're so used to seeing. This here's authentic. The real deal.
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