T. C. Boyle's "Drop City"

I like T. C. Boyle's writing. He's got a solid story teller's art, he loves words, he's got a knack for descriptive narrative. Drop City attracted me as a boomer to "re-live" my past. I lived through the era, but did not participate meaningfully in the iconic events of the era and certainly didn't get involved in the more manic elements of "the times".


This novel paints the tale of the outrageous fringe elements. Actually it is two tales woven together and brought together to close off the tale. As is typical with modern novels there is no closure, but the lead characters come together and there is a bit of an accounting that gives you a sense that the book can be closed on the tale.

There are a few anachronisms that caught my attention. But I recognize how hard it is to describe the past given our lexicon of the present. Mine is a minor complaint. I loved the recreation of the past. He's got the emotional details right. His colourful vocabulary paints the right kind of picture. And the story is solid. Not a classic tale that will be studied centuries from now, but be honest, 99% of the current writers are forgetable. So Boyle is in the top 10%. He will linger a while. But with the filtering of time he will disappear. We all disappear. But he gets our attention for now.

He uses the tricks of the trade a number of times to pull me into the tale and uses plot twists and turns to turbo-charge my emotions. OK, I'm a sucker for that. I love novels as an escape. But I especially appreciate novels with historical detail because they let me "be there" even if I wasn't there. Here you get to ride the wave of idealism of 1970 (at the tag end of the hippie "boom" just as it was going bust) to see the bitter end of the "back to the land" era of hippiedom. And this novel takes that tale to dead serious end. It takes you from halcyon California to the bitter realities of frigid Alaska. Living at the fringes of the frozen north, I can appreciate all too well the life-and-death struggle against the cold. This is a tale of flower children who come up against the grim reality of a "struggle for existence".

This isn't the glitzy over-the-top ride that Tom Wolfe's non-fiction essays gave you of the 1960's culture: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Pump House Gang, or The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. But Wolfe's observations were of the disintegration during the early 1960s while Boyle's book deals with the aftermath of the smash-up with the people who were the loose-ends of the hippie crash. They were crazy times full of hope, but like Drop City, gravity takes over and the dreams come crashing to earth. Reality has a nasty way of pulling you back to earth.

So... mark this up as yet another fine bit of writing by T. C. Boyle.

Over the years I'm slowly working my way through his body of work. I can't complain about anything he has written it is all quite good. And the historically based works "The Inner Circle" and "Drop City" are an excellent way to be a fly on the wall of a past historical era. (To prove I'm not a sycophant, I must admit that I found the novel "Talk, Talk" to be a bit below standard, but I finished it and didn't begrudge the time spent, but looking back it wasn't as much fun as other things he has written.)