'Drop City': How Flower Power Went to Seed In his 1970 memoir, ''Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life'' -- the best, and surely the woolliest, book written about that era's communal living and back-to-the-land movements -- the journalist Ray Mungo contrasted Vermont, where he and his radical friends holed up for a year, with what he referred to as ''that other magnetic pole,'' California. ''Vermont is a place of strong white magick, a place friendly to adventurers of the mind and body,'' Mungo wrote. California, he felt, proved that ''magick'' can also be black. Like so many arguments of that period, Mungo's was nailed down with a musical analogy: ''Vermont belongs to the Band,'' he wrote, ''California to the Rolling Stones.'' There's not a lot of strong white magick to be found -- not at first, anyway -- in T. C. Boyle's immoderately entertaining new novel, ''Drop City.'' Boyle sets us down in a gone-to-seed Northern California commune in 1970, where a band of 60 or so peacenik wannabes is living a life that one of them pretty accurately describes as ''summer camp without the counselors, a party that never ends.'' They've got goats, a world-class record collection (Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish), zucchini in the garden, vegetarian mush on the stove, free love (cats in huaraches and chicks without bras), face paint, food stamps, a dog named Frodo and a star-spangled assortment of hallucinogens. What more do you need? Here, these shaggy pilgrims badly want to believe, is a life of ''love and meditation and faith in the ordinary, no pretense, no games, no plastic yearning after the almighty dollar.'' Far-out? Dream on. You don't have to note that we're not in Vermont here -- never mind that we're also post-Altamont and post-''Easy Rider'' -- to realize that Drop City, as this Sonoma-area commune is called, is not going to blossom into long-term hippie nirvana. In fact, we're only a chapter or two into this novel before Boyle begins to visit a string of mildly predictable bummers on his dropouts. A child drinks some LSD-spiked orange juice. A 15-year-old runaway girl is raped in a back cabin. There are fistfights, jealousies, a pot bust. The county sheriff wants to shut the place down as a health hazard; no one's coping with the sewage, and there's ''a coil of human waste behind every rock, tree and knee-high scrap of weed on the property.'' Worse, for the men anyway, the chicks are beginning to rethink this whole free love thing. As one of the women exasperatedly puts it, free love must have been the ''invention of some cat with pimples and terminally bad hair and maybe crossed eyes'' who couldn't get a woman to look at him twice ''any other way or under any other regime.'' No one who's kept up with Boyle's work over the past two decades will be surprised that he writes absurdly well about the full-on freak parade he lets loose in ''Drop City.'' Sentence by sentence, Boyle has always been a fiendishly talented writer, and there's little doubt he knows plenty about the countercultural currents upon which this book speeds along. (His 1984 novel, ''Budding Prospects,'' about a doomed pot-growing scheme, was dedicated to ''my horticultural friends.'') What is surprising is how soulful ''Drop City'' frequently is, and how much human complexity Boyle manages to smuggle in under the cover of his jittery, get-this-man-a-decaf prose. The rap against Boyle's work has long been that he's a sort of madcap predator drone, raining down hard nuggets of contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor on the poor men and women in his books while rarely giving us characters we're actually persuaded to feel anything about. This is partly a bum rap -- and I'd hate to knock contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor -- but there's enough truth in it that it's a joy to find, in ''Drop City,'' that Boyle gives us a lot more than simply a line of bong-addled innocents led to slaughter. In its own sly way, this may be his most affecting and emotionally complex novel since ''World's End'' (1987). We witness the events at Drop City largely from the perspective of two characters -- Star (nee Paulette Regina Starr), a middle-class girl from upstate New York who's hellbent on reinventing herself, and Marco, a young draft dodger from Connecticut. They're both new to the commune. Star has driven cross-country with her hometown friend Pan (Ronnie Sommers); it was an exhilarating trip that made them feel ''like Lewis and Clark, only brighter around the edges.'' On the road, things began to go sour for Star only when Pan pressured her into sleeping with a skanky guy in Arizona who offered them some peyote buds and his tepee for the night. By the time they reach California, Star is ready to latch onto the first non-cretinous guy she can find. When Marco calls down to her from his treehouse -- he's been watching her milk the goats -- invites her up and gets her stoned, the first of this novel's two unconventional love stories is off and running. Seventy or so pages into the Drop City story, the action shifts north, to Alaska, where a 31-year-old back-to-the-lander named Sess Harder is trying to make a go of it in the remote cabin he's built on the Thirtymile River. Sess is a trapper who's haunted (and embarrassed) by the defection, a few years earlier, of his girlfriend, Jill, who came down with cabin fever during a long winter. Jill fled into the snow one day and stamped out, in 10-foot letters, ''jill wants out.'' She was picked up and carried away by a bush pilot. Now Sess is trying to woo Pamela, a young woman from Anchorage who is playing her own version of the reality television show ''The Bachelorette'': she is spending a few days with a series of backcountry men, looking for the one she wants to marry. Society is in full-scale breakdown, Pamela believes, and she wants to lead a self-sufficient life, even if it might mean, as her friends see it, ''willingly putting herself in the hands of some grizzled, twisted, sex-starved fur trapper with suet-clogged arteries and guns decorating his walls.'' Compared with the other bush crazies Pamela dates, Sess is Steve McQueen and Jack London squirted into one flannel-shirted package. They're married within a chapter or two. The worlds of California and Alaska collide when, as the county bulldozers are preparing to raze the commune's shacks, Drop City's Jerry Garcia-like guru, Norm, decides to move the whole hippie circus north, to the abandoned cabin his uncle has left him just upriver from Sess' place. ''We'll start a revolution,'' one of the dippier members intones. ''Flower power on the tundra!'' They manage to glide across the Canadian border in their drug-laden 1963 school bus by convincing the wide-eyed guards that they're the Grateful Dead, on tour. To say much more about what happens in this novel -- some of it predictable, much more of it not -- would be to lay down, as Star or Marco might put it, a comprehensive buzz-kill. Boyle makes some mistakes. He gives us an Alaskan bad guy, a half-cocked former marine named Joe Bosky, who is so one-dimensional he might as well be named Sergeant Evil. And the novel's ending feels hurried, lopped off -- if anything, ''Drop City'' is 100 pages too short. But Boyle has more than enough room to provide one of the funniest, and at the same time most subtle, novels we've had about the hippie era's slow fade to black. He's sympathetic to his Drop City residents, helplessly adrift in Alaska with winter fast approaching, but he sees them for what they are: children, basically. Star entertains ''a brief fantasy of feeding them all by hand, then changing their diapers and putting them to bed one after the other.'' Boyle neatly contrasts the lives and beliefs of the Drop City crew with those of Sess and Pamela, unhip do-it-yourselfers who can't quite understand what ''working hard and taking what the land gives you'' has to do with ''face paint or LSD or bell-bottom pants.'' (''It's just hip, that's all,'' Star replies, knowing how pathetic she sounds as soon as the words leave her lips.) By the end, what's left of Drop City has more in common with Sess and Pamela than they'd ever have imagined. Back in California, the commune's open-society motto had been LATWIDNO, or Land Access to Which Is Denied No One. By the time winter hits in Alaska, as the group faces not just terminal boredom but actual starvation, that motto has become PYWOB -- Pull Your Weight or Bail. There's no strong white magick out here, and no black magick either, just a sense that peace, love and excellent pot aren't going to come close to cutting it anymore. |