Drop City

T.C. Boyle is an example of the writer whom one avoids because he's too productive. He's always placing stories in The Atlantic and Harper's and crowding out lesser known young writers. The ultimate overly profuse writer is, of course, Joyce Carol Oates. Enough said.

It turns out, though, for me at least, that Boyle is a damned fine writer. Drop City, a tale about a hippie farm "family" that transplants to Alaska and comes to a dark end, hits the spot as a gripping story, a bit of social history, and a portrait of a different, far-flung place and climate where the ordinary rules definitely don't apply. Entertaining and rewarding on multiple levels and in multiple ways. And damned fine writing.

Hippies meet frontier Alaska. Sounds like a setting for some seriously funny jokes, and I did find it funny watching a bunch of naive California folks, hooked on mind-altering substances and caught up in a group fantasy of self-importance, wandering off to a place where reality can and will re-assert itself.
I liked how this novel shows some of how conventional ideas like gender roles creep into even the most earnest bohemian groups, so that women are still treated as subservient, expected to cook and clean and allow men to use their bodies at will in the spirit of 'free love'. Traditional power structures still turn up in Drop City, and persist because the men who hold the greater power enjoy their positions and have no reason to show more freely give up their power. Since Boyle focuses on the POV of a woman, Star, we get to see the rather conventional ways women are treated within the nudist, supposedly egalitarian society the people of Drop City are creating. show less

After hearing so much about this book and repeatedly picking it up and putting it down in bookstores, I finally read it and I’m glad I did. T.C. Boyle is fast becoming one of my favorite writers and I’m sad that I didn’t start reading him earlier in my life. His ability to sharply define characters with dialogue, description and action is a finely-honed talent. He pulls no punches and doesn’t solely create people that everyone will identify with or even like. One thing I do like about Boyle, that others find irritating, is the fact that he doesn’t beat you over the head with an idea. He gives it shape and power and then lets the reader draw the conclusion. Some say this is lack of depth, but I don’t think it is because he show more has no depth, just chooses not to drag the reader down into it.

I really enjoyed the parts that told about life in such a remote and extreme place. It was a bit like little house on the prairie because of the lack of mod cons. Ces and his wife made almost everything they had including the cabin. But they loved it. The garden was a joy. The trapping a job. The dogs weren’t pets, they were necessary equipment. No power or running water either (unless you count the river). Their dependence and independence were balanced and the fact that they opted out was compelling. I was kind of jealous of their ability to confidently eschew most of the modern world. As much as I’d like to strip away all of my dependence on society and all of its mod cons, I cannot. They are too firmly part of how I view the world and how I live. But these folks don’t need that and can leave it behind with a sigh of relief.

The communal hippie lifestyle on the other hand, I have no wistful longing for. A person would really need to be selfless to live this way. To make it work, each person would have to care more about the whole than himself. Because only as a whole can it survive. If each member didn’t suppress her innate selfishness, it would collapse. I don’t have that kind of giving nature. As it turns out, very few did in this story. Sure, when times were good, they were all happy and loving and all was right with the world. But whenever some kind of hardship arose, those other core attributes of humanity came out with a vengeance. People started hording food, acting out violently from jealousy, abusing positions of leadership. All part of being human, but not helpful for a communal society.

And all the drugs were off-putting. How can people even function with that amount of chemical interference? Perhaps that’s part of the glue that holds them together though. Maybe it allows them enough illusion to keep functioning. Maybe it keeps the darker nature at a bay longer. At any rate, keeping a constant supply of pot and other drugs was paramount for the members of Drop City. I thought it would be more of a hindrance in Alaska than it was, but they still survived while stoned, although not as thoroughly stoned as they were in California.

Unlike The Inner Circle, this novel does have a plot, a goal, something that needs to get done. Sure, we get a lot of extraneous detail, but it is a joy to read and Boyle wrings emotion from the reader in many forms; anger, hope, joy and world-weary frustration. That’s what the hippies engendered in me anyway. They made me laugh with their dopey view of the world, but that also made me frustrated. Couldn’t they see what their problem was? They cherry-picked qualities of human nature, taking the ones they liked and leaving the ones they didn’t. Just because they didn’t like deceit, violence or selfishness, doesn’t mean they could escape them.

And they are not the only ones who long for escape. The other half of the tale starts with the small town of Boynton, Alaska. Situated at the end of the state highway, Boynton is about as remote as you can get and still have a road. People who chose to live here are pretty unique. They’re self-sufficient, yet know their reliance on others in the community is the key to survival out there. They want to be free and live off the land, but unlike the hippies who will soon descend, they don’t have any sunshine and bunnies illusions about nature. It is indeed red in tooth and claw.

When the hippies arrive, life soon separates the wheat from the chaff. Slackers take up with other slackers. Soon, light dawns on pot heads that they need to work to survive and work together and that means rules. It means following the rules and they finally get that they have to obey or die. They get their shelters built, some supplies laid and hunker down for the winter. But close-quarters living like this is new to them. It’s 50 below zero and there is no release from the constant chaffing of others’ bad habits. Things boil over, there is a separation into tribes and things get tense.

The natives do their best to help them, specifically from Cecil Harden and his very new wife and another local Joe, a fairly wealthy bush pilot, the sworn enemy of Ces. It is this conflict that escalates throughout and eventually culminates in extreme violence and tragedy, taking one of the hippies with it. In the end, the Hardens stay in Boynton, living an idyllic life for them and have as neighbors and friends, those of the hippie commune who are tough enough in body and mind to stay. show less

It is 1970 and a California commune devoted to peace, free love and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier - the unforgiving interior of Alaska - in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Naive and optimistic, the inhabitants of "Drop City" arrive only to find their utopia already populated by other young Alaskans who are successfully homesteading in the wilderness. As the two communities collide and winter sets in, unexpected friendships and dangerous enemies are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment and a roof over one's head. This is an entertaining look at the madness of the counter-cultural '70's and a statement about the American dream.

Star and Marco are a beautifully drawn couple, proving that Boyle can write a romance as well as anyone, and this book is a hilarious send-up of hippie culture with all of its flaws and excesses.
Many readers whose ideology is very compatible with this novel are probably put off by its cover in which nude people, lying face-down, make a crater in a lush-looking undergrowth. As the novel is the story of a failed commune, however, the cover is perfect.
"Free love" doesn't work out so well in practice, especially for the very young, very pretty women (both of 'em), who get real choosy real fast. (When a virulent strain of crabs breaks out in the commune, it doesn't work out too well for the men either). Equally impracticable: staying high show more on drugs 24/7 and the actual labor required 24/7 for communal self-sufficiency. In spite of the high ideals of the brotherhood and much guitar strumming, some in the commune are more locust than brother: vicious sociopaths determined not to pull their own weight and to devour every human and natural resource. As for the leader of the commune--you'll have to read the novel. Suffice it to say he is never celibate, or hungry, or lacking in cash or abuseable substances.
Boyle shows, in his inimitable ironic style, how the "establishment" gets "established", as our tree-house-dwelling young lovers are drawn inexorably toward parent-figures Sess and Pamela--and toward monogamy, sobriety (more or less), and the comfortable middle-class existence required to raise their babies and keep the locusts at bay. show less

Boyle is always entertaining - what I found most interesting about this story was the juxtaposition between the wrongheaded hippie idealism that was already fading in the 70s and the hardened survivalists eking out an existence in the Alaskan bush. The drugged-out free-lovers and commune denizens are pretty easy targets, but in the end Boyle's point is that there are good and bad folks in every community, and that hard work and respect for others are the main things that divide them.

I love Boyle's writing style and the way he paints a scene. Unfortunately, Drop City covered a topic I just wasn't interested in. Debauchery has never intrigued me so the prolific descriptions of free love and rampant drug use got a little boring. There were a few characters that I came to care about so that helped. Normally, if I don't enjoy a story I rate it lower but Boyle really is a gifted writer. 5 stars for the writing, 21/2 for the story.