Come to 'City' for cynicism, stay for subtlety
By Jackie Pray
special for USA TODAY, March 04, 2003

The publisher of T.C. Boyle's ninth novel, Drop City, calls it "the book Boyle was probably put on the planet to write." Maybe it is, and not just because it deals with a dysfunctional hippie commune that moves to Alaska.

Certainly, that plotline has Boyle's strange fingerprints all over it. But it's also because Drop City successfully merges the outrageously ordinary with an accessible plot. And Boyle's notorious cynicism gives way to subtlety. The effect is dynamite.

Set in 1970, the story is an eccentric mix of The Bachelorette and Survivor: The Yukon. A beautiful teacher from Fairbanks chooses her mate from a field of three strapping Alaskan outdoorsmen. The winner takes his bride to a remote cabin, where they nestle in bearskin blankets and she scrapes flesh and flies from newly bagged hides.

Meanwhile, in California, local officials force members of a hippie commune off their farm. It seems they can't get their feces together: Human, dog and goat excrement puddles their landscape. Solution? Move the whole spaced-out busload to Alaska — just a short canoe paddle from the newlyweds.

The absorbing plot is just a starting point. The questions "Who survives?" and "How?" make way for exquisitely drawn characters. Bit by idiosyncratic bit, Boyle molds characters so real that the smell of them rises from the page.

One passage: "Ronnie at the stove in his underwear with the pistol he'd worn strapped to his thigh all summer extended now in the quaking grip of his light-shattering hand with its rings glinting and fingers curled. 'Don't push me,' Ronnie repeated, and without knowing what he was doing, he let his other hand descend to the crotch of his thermals and he began to scratch himself, his fingers working in deep, digging hard, moving unconsciously to another imperative all together."

Boyle's book is timely. As pop culture rocks in a nostalgic haze of '70s fashion, music and reworked ideals, Boyle remembers that dropout flower children lived on food stamps supplied by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. He recalls that free love and exploitation slept together.

An original storyteller who writes rich, surprising prose, Boyle has won multiple literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner and O. Henry. He describes himself as an "enduring wise guy," and in past work he has cast characters with narrow-eyed cynicism and sardonic wit. In Drop City, cynicism melts into subtlety; distance gives way to intimacy.

Drop City is not just a cultural genealogy. Placing a pack of hippies in the Alaskan wilderness as Boyle does prompt the question: Were America's frontier settlers flakes too? Misfits who had no idea what they were getting into?

Drop City may be Boyle's take on the quintessential American experience.