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


From Publishers Weekly
Boyle has a wonderful eye for the comedy of imposture when the self-deceived themselves practice deception. His ninth novel, which centers on the travails of a hippie commune, Drop City, in the early '70s, gives him plenty of poseurs to work with. Drop City, in Sonoma County, Calif., is run, in a manner of speaking, by a gold-toothed purveyor of Aquarian notions, Norm Sender. The Drop City family includes Pan (aka Ronnie) and his high school pal Star (aka Paulette Regina Starr), who have fled from the East Coast together; two rather predatory black dudes; and a variegated crew of longhaired "cats" and flower-child "chicks." Star, sweet but often naive, is the opposite of Pan, beneath whose free love patter lurks an unnerving rapacity. Star soon hooks up with Marco, whose solid virtues are concealed beneath his veil of hair. When "The Man," in the person of the Sonoma County sheriff's department, condemns the property, Norm, who has inherited other property far away in Boynton, Alaska, proposes a tribal migration north. Meanwhile, the news in Boynton is that local trapper Cecil "Sess" Harder is marrying Pamela McCoon, after an eccentric courtship ritual. Sess's major problem lately has been a violent feud with Joe Bosky, the local bush pilot. When the Drop City hippie bus rolls into Boynton, a comic clash of civilizations ensues. Building utopia upriver from the Harders, Drop City's denizens discover that polar climes demand rather drastic behavioral adaptations. Boyle understands the multitudinous, sneaky ways innocence insulates itself from ambiguity-but in this novel he leavens that cynical insight with genuine sweetness. While the Day-Glo of the hippie era has long since faded, this novel brings it all back home-and helps us see how much in the American grain it all really was.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Hippie communes might seem like ancient history, but Boyle (Riven Rock) portrays them convincingly in his new work. After riding cross-country together, Star and Ronnie join Norm Sender's California commune and quickly move in different directions. Ronnie attempts to take as many drugs and make it with as many women as possible, while Star gets involved with the draft-dodging Marco. Meanwhile, Norm finds out that the board of health is going to condemn the buildings and, in a classic evocation of 1960s romanticism and naivete, informs the group that they are moving to his uncle's cabin in Alaska. There, Pamela has decided to wed trapper Sess Harder, who has an ongoing feud with Joe Bodsky. When the hippies pull into town, the locals have mixed reactions, and as the long Alaskan winter descends, a variety of friendships and enmities develop along the Harder-Bodsky feud line. Boyle captures the drop-out-and-get-back-to-the-land spirit of the era, as well as the chill and isolation of the Alaska winter, with a clarity that has earned him a reputation as one of our best writers. Highly recommended.--Josh Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The hippie manifesto, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," inspired Norm to open his Sonoma County ranch up to anyone who found their stoned way there, thus creating Drop City, the hedonistic commune Boyle so dynamically conjures in his compulsively readable ninth novel. The roiling community of acid-dropping, rock-and-rolling, sexually promiscuous seekers includes a few good men and lots of louts, and fun-loving, tough women, including Star, who escaped a small, smothering New York town with her erstwhile boyfriend, Ronnie, in pursuit of enlightenment. Their breakup is one of many conflicts that erupt in the wishful land of free love, where there is, in fact, no love at all for rowdy Drop City among its disgusted, litigious neighbors. So resourceful Norm takes the entire party on the road and heads to Alaska. Meanwhile, deep in the pristine Alaskan wilderness, stout-hearted Sess Harder, a master in the art of living well off the land, has won himself a wife, the impressive Pamela. Just as the newlyweds start setting up their private paradise, the hippie circus arrives, and both little Boynton, Alaska, and its new denizens are forever changed. An accomplished, versatile storyteller and discerning social observer, Boyle writes with enthralling momentum and seductive detail, avidly describing everything from California sunshine to the northern lights, psychedelicly altered states to the cramped interior of an Alaskan cabin. But for all its glorious physicality and riveting action, this is a frank and penetrating critique of a naive but courageous time, a stinging indictment of machismo and a paean to womanhood, and an unabashed celebration of true love and liberty. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ANNOTATION

Finalist for the 2003 National Book Award, Fiction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier - the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska - in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. The novel opposes two groups of characters: Sess Harder, his wife, Pamela, and other young Alaskans who are already successfully homesteading in the wilderness, and the brothers and sisters of "Drop City," led by Norm Sander and three idealistic emigres from the east coast, Star, her boyfriend, Marco, and Ronnie. As these two communities collide, unexpected friendships and dangerous enmities are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment and a roof over one's head.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michael Harris

Boyle has written a vastly entertaining tale that balances the exuberance and the excesses, the promise and the preposterousness of the counterculture perhaps better than any other work of American fiction.—Michael Harris

The Boston Globe

splendid—Katherine A. Powers

The New York Times

The cranky, passionate attachments of these couples spread warmth through the book; Boyle's joy in sharing the music of the age gives it a nostalgic tone; and his delight in evoking the effects of a rainbow of narcotics endows it with authority -- he's obviously no amateur.

Book Magazine - James Schiff

It's 1970, and the hippies at Drop City, a California commune, are grooving on acid, pot, free love and music by Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. A thousand miles north in the Alaskan wilderness, a very different community of bourgeois "dropouts" exists: isolated trappers and homesteaders, such as Sess Harder and his new wife, Pamela, who live in a remote cabin and struggle against the brutally cold winter. For nearly half of Boyle's engaging novel, which depicts the sometimes tragic American desire for reinvention, the two communities remain separate, but when sanitary and legal troubles threaten Drop City, the hippies pile into their school bus and head north to Alaska, "the last truly free place on this whole continent." Through border crossings and Jack London￯﾿ﾽlike treks in the cold, Boyle masterfully builds narrative suspense in anticipation of the collision of these two communities. Though some may find the blend of realism and naturalism too conventional for a novel about free love and communes, Boyle, always a skilled and generous storyteller, offers a stream of adventures, surprises and rewards.

Publishers Weekly