DROP CITY by T. C. Boyle

 Finished Sa 12/12/20

This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I first finished on Su 10/14/07 and had bought at the library book sale that summer. 

A hippie commune in 1970 near the Russian River northwest of Sacramento, CA relocates 3,000 miles north to Boynton, Alaska- 'Drop City North'. 

TC Boyle's 9th novel; released in 2003

From the KIRKUS review:

"Boyle’s protean imagination works overtime in his thickly plotted ninth novel, a big, racy tale of the conflict between a radical utopian commune’s idealistic visions and the simpler imperatives of survival in the Alaskan wilderness.

In Drop City, a California hippie enclave in 1970, we observe through the eyes of its newest members: “Star,” a restless dropout from her parents’ straight life, and Mario, a hardier type who drifts into the City because he knows he wants to build things. Boyle then shifts to Boynton, Alaska (near Fairbanks), where homesteader Cecil (“Sess”) Harder and his new wife Pamela begin their life together in Sess’s well-stocked cabin in the deep woods. As parallel chunks of narrative further introduce us to both sets of characters, a ludicrous auto accident brings the heat down on Drop City, and its putative guru Norm (whose inherited wealth pays the bills) leads the group’s relocation to Alaska, where the peace-and-love people collide with the Harders. A cruel winter, sexual and racial disharmony, and Norm’s decision to pull up his personal stakes exact their toll, and the story churns fatalistically toward its violent climax, on Halloween, in sub-zero cold. Boyle has worked this territory before in several sensationally effective stories, but never with such telling detail and devastating characterizations. The best of the latter include the stoical Sess and warmhearted Pamela, murderous trapper (and Sess’s mortal enemy) Joe Bosky, and weak-willed Ronnie Sommers (a.k.a. Pan), a lethal combination of ingenuous flower-power and uncontrollable appetites. Boyle (After the Plague, 2001, etc.) never fails to enthrall and entertain, but the mordant tragicomic momentum is perhaps too explicitly subordinated to his agenda—revealed in such sequences as the aftermath of a scary episode that endangered Drop City’s toddlers (“They [i.e., the adults] didn’t want to save children, they wanted to be children”).

Probably the fullest picture of the hippie culture of the late ’60s since Marge Piercy’s early fiction, and one of Boyle’s best."

The novel is about two 'alternatives' to 'The Straight World'. The first is a hippie commune in northwest California and the other is a remote village in the Alaskan interior populated by hunters and trappers. Two societies that appear to be opposed- one is pure hedonism and the other is an uphill struggle just to live, but they are all people who march to different drummers from mainstream society. 

"To live outside the law, you must be honest'- BOB DYLAN

My favorite scene is where a terrible traffic accident occurs and the driver and passenger are tripping their brains out.

Also the racial and social tension between a couple of black hustlers (rapists) and the 'peace and love' crowd.

This is a novel where the plot is secondary to the quality of the writing. Truly this is a book to be savored. 

I found another novel by T. C. Boyle in the stacks and it is in my queue.