Drop City - T. Coraghessan Boyle
Bookmunch
Bloomsbury 2003 , 464 pages, £16.99, HB

T Coraghessan Boyle is a man you can trust. You may not know what to expect in terms of subject matter (after all, Boyle protagonists have included samurais, rock stars, insane millionaires, explorers and marijuana farmers), but you know that you will not be disappointed. Like I said. He's a man you can trust. You know there will be writing to die for (and, by writing, I mean the - deceptively - simple arrangement of words on a page - I'll give you one example: "He didn't tell him about the solace of the Thirtymile, the clarity of the air, the eternal breathless silence of forty below and the snow spread like a strangler's hand across the throat of the river"), and characters to love (Boyle's characters emerge from the page like pop-up people - it isn't so much that Boyle writes characters with depth as Boyle appears to place living, breathing, kicking, screaming individuals fully formed on the couch beside where you read) and plot lines to hook and snare you (imagine swimming in the water below a couple hundred anglers, all of whom wish to reel you in and take you home as a trophy for over their fireplace). Boyle novels are always all these things and more. I say more because, while you can expect quality, you don't know quite how that quality will manifest itself. Starting a new book by T Coraghessan Boyle is akin to taking a magical mystery tour - you know not where. You don't know where you're going, you don't know where you'll end up - you just know it'll be one hell of a ride.

All of which applies in spades to Drop City.

Originally entitled Old Night after a line from Thoreaus's "Ktaadn" ("This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night") Drop City pitches itself as a great clash of cultures—a California hippy commune (the Drop City of the title) is forced to relocate in Boynton, Alaska, a place as different from California as can be imagined—but, as this is a T Coraghessan Boyle novel, the pitch both simplifies and complicates what you can expect here.

Drop City is no motley assemblage of cut-out hippies, for one thing. You don't get a bunch of cats and chicks lounging around saying peace and cool and groovy all the time. Or rather: you do but that is far from the whole story. You've got Norm, see. Norm is an older hippy. He's the cat that started Drop City and he's cool in a laid back Peter Fonda kind of way. Then you've got Star. She's a young chick who travelled across America with her boyfriend Ronnie, watching as Ronnie became Pan. He's around too. Pan. Ronnie. There's a whole bunch of other women too—Merry, Reba, Lydia. There's a few older uptight hippes like Alfredo. A few older laidback hippies like Mendocino Bill. And then you've got Marco. Marco appears on the scene roundabout the same time as Sky Dog and those other guys. Before you know it, Star is with Marco and Ronnie is pissed. Plus Sky Dog and those guys. They don't seem to share the Drop City agenda. Leastways as far as 14 year old girls is concerned.

Meanwhile, in Boynton, Alaska, rough and mountain tough Sess Harder is taking a wife (we've been here before - the jumping off point for the wife lottery Sess goes on to win first raised its head in "Termination Dust," a story from Boyle's After the Plague). Sess loves Pamela on sight and Pamela feels quite strongly too—but, as is the way with these things, happiness doesn't even carry them through the wedding day. It's Joe Bosky, you see. Sess and Joe have never seen eye to eye. For one thing, Sess earns his bread trapping animals and he caught Bosky stealing animals from his traps a wee while ago. For another, there was a fight. Sess and Pamela were on their first date and Bosky—well, Bosky couldn't leave them alone now could he? So there is no love lost when Bosky gatecrashes the wedding and it isn't long before dogs are shot, cars are stolen and bullets are being fired right, left and centre.

All it takes is a little interference from the Man to catapult one world in the direction of the other, but the great clash of cultures you'd expect doesn't actually occur. Instead we are treated to—well, an appraisal I suppose is the best way of putting it. We get to see what Star and Marco and Ronnie make of the locals. We get to see what Sess and Pamela make of Star and Marco and all of the others. But even that doesn't paint the whole picture. Boyle takes pains to fashion a terrific beauty in the slight, peripheral characters we see around—Iron Steve, for example, a taciturn drinking buddy of Sess' who takes a shine to Lydia, a lady who is—shall we say?—somewhat giving. But situations rarely develop as you would expect them to (and this is, in part I think, why The Bookseller has already favourably compared Drop City to The Corrections). Expectations are there to be refuted. In point of fact, Drop City is a novel that demands you chill out. Take a smoke, baby. Stop getting hung up on getting to the end. You don't need to hurry to see the overall pattern. Just lie back, man. Take it all in. Savour every second. Listen to Star:

"One more minute," she said, and she loved this, this place and this moment, more than she'd loved anything in her life."

Any Cop?: You drink this book the way you'd drink the last bottle of the finest vintage ever to grace this good, clean Earth— and it tastes every bit as good as you imagine it would.

-Stoop

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