The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Drop City, by T.C. Boyle
reviewed by Brian Budzynski

T. C. Boyle. Drop City. Viking, 2003. 444 pp. $25.95.

In this, his ninth novel, T. C. Boyle turns his snarky eye on post-peace, man, pre-Prankster hippiedom. The denizens of Drop City, CA, are, on the surface, what one might expect: high-school dropouts who’ve decided to tune out and turn on, draft dodgers, children born into the antitrade of communal living; confused, naive, and eager, the lot of them. Their big-bearded leader is a middle-aged “visionary” whose philosophy of LATWIDNO (Land Access To Which Is Denied No One) eventually brings the Law down on Drop City and propels those inhabitants with the spirit for it to journey to Alaska for a fresh start. Enter Sess Harder and his city-turned-mountain-wife Pamela and their ongoing feud with fellow mountaineer Joe Bosky, airplane-flyin’ lush and trap poacher. While at first these characters skate on the dangerously thin ice of caricature as they watch their disparate yet collective desire for love become a raw struggle for survival against the at-times-ruthless landscape, Boyle’s slippery method of making each flawed individual capable of his or her own form of transcendence (though none quite capture it), while avoiding the purplish, overmetaphored writing that drowned his last effort, A Friend of the Earth, reveals in even the smallest roles a lazy (but mostly genuine) fascination with the world and its extremes of beauty and ugliness. Drop City offers neither an ending of joyful liberation nor sadness and pain, though there is plenty of both running throughout the novel, in competing measures, to go around. The members of Drop City and their adoptive brethren are left, instead, with a kind of potential—a starry hope that could either snuff itself out like a wet match or burn indefinitely. The soul of this novel is so full and earnest, so realistically fragile, so accepting of its own stumbling youthfulness, you might gladly go down either road and never look back.