Drop City - Hardcover

Boyle, T.C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670031720 ISBN 13: 9780670031726

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2003

Synopsis

The members of the Drop City commune clash with Alaskan homesteaders who live near where the commune has recently moved, as both groups struggle to for love, nourishment, and shelter. By the author of A Friend of the Earth. 60,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

With Drop City, T. Coraghessan Boyle offers proof that he has become one of America's most prolific, gifted storytellers. Set in the 1970s, Boyle entertains readers with the denizens of "Drop City," a counterculture California commune that welcomes anyone wanting to live off the grid, use drugs, and practice free love. Boyle sublimely captures the sociology of its rebellious members, who doubt the sincerity or beliefs of newcomers, express some insecurity about nonconformity, and chastise outsiders while remaining oblivious to their own hypocrisy. Marco, Pan, Star, and other "cats" and "chicks" live hassle-free until dissention and cries of racism mount amid increasing run-ins with the local government (a young girl is raped, installation of a sewage system is mandated, a mother lets her toddlers drink LSD-laced juice). Seeking refuge, the citizens move north, to Alaska, to reinvent their utopia, but soon learn the natural environment is more unforgiving of a lackadaisical lifestyle.

Drop City is funny, evocative, and well-paced, shifting between the hippies and the Alaskan locals--primarily Sess and his new bride Pamela (a city dweller who arranged stays with several trappers over a few weeks to determine whom she would marry)--until the two cultures collide. Balanced between plot and character, Boyle excels at describing the physical world and his characters' interaction with it, whether portraying the harshness (or sheer beauty) of the Alaskan wilderness, the simple survival routines of its grizzled inhabitants, or the sounds wafting through Drop City: "the goats bleating to be milked or fed, the single sharp ringing note of a dog surprised by its own hunger, the regular slap of the screen door at the back of the house--and underneath it all, like the soundtrack to a movie, the dull hum of rock and roll leaking out the kitchen windows." Truly American in spirit, Drop City is a strong novel of freedom and those in pursuit of lives of liberty. --Michael Ferch

About the Author:

T.C. Boyle is the author of eight novels and six short story collections, all in print from Penguin. His 1987 novel, World's End, was the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Tortilla Curtain won the Prix Medici Etranger for best novel published in France by a foreign writer in 1997. In 1999, he received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in short fiction. His short stories appear regularly in magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, and Playboy. He teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670031720
• ISBN 13: 9780670031726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464