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Title: Drop City by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Boyle T C. ISBN: 0-670-03172-0 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 24 February, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.26 (54 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: It Could Have Been Wonderful--But It's Not
Comment: T.C. Boyle is one of the most technically gifted writers in America, as the present volume bears witness to. His descriptions, characterizations, and flights of lyricism are almost without peer.
But Drop City is a quickly tedious and predictable book that's been written many times--by Denis Johnson (*Already Dead*), for instance. Boyle seems self-consciously smug in his own brazen mediocrity at times, going for adolescent gross-outs and tired narrative scenerios.
Drop City is, most of all, a book about the waste and decay and lassitude of a certain segment of the author's generation. If that "does it" for you, read my 2 stars as 5. But the arrested emotional development of the novel's characters, so clearly described, seems to be the end in itself here--more than any other American author I've read, Boyle seems to take a perverse glee in demonstrating his virtuosity and then not going any further. I used to think he just wasn't writing up to his potential. But maybe he is.
Rating: 5
Summary: NOSTALGIC AND SATISFYING
Comment: I was not familiar with T.C. Boyle, and therefore had never ready anything he had written. I chose this book because I was a young woman during the 70's, and was very much a part of the hippie movement in California. I hoped this book would be a bit of a walk down memory lane. How delighted I was to find it was so much more. In the first part of the book, the members of the "California" Drop City so accurately represented people I knew. Idealism overrode reality, fueled by a drug-induced sense of invincibility. But the real impact of this book hits when the Drop City members move to Alaska, with their naive belief that living in the untamed Alaskan wilds would be the ultimate adventure. But they found that the "free love" and "living off the fat of the land" philosophy did not work in the harsh Alaskan winter. Contrasted with this loopy group of people are Seth and Pamela, Alaskan natives, who represent the salt of the earth folks, who's contact with the Drop City inhabitants clearly demonstrates the clash of cultures between good intentioned idealism and harsh reality. All the characters in this book are finely etched. The transition from carefree love children to frightened, unprepared hostages of the Alaskan wilds, is at once predictable and heartbreaking. Several of the Drop City members defect: the original founder takes his allegedly sick girlfriend and bails; Pan becomes a victim of his own materialism and suffers the ultimate consequence. The juxtaposition of the Drop City inhabitants and the lives of native Alaskans Seth and Pamela, is what makes this book so incredibly moving. I found Mr. Boyle's understanding of the 70's insightful and realistic. The plot and characters are not the only strength of this book. Mr. Boyle's writing is both crisp and poetic, interlaced with a biting and acerbic sense of humor. Yes, I definitely recommend this book to anyone, but most specifically those of us who either were, or knew those who were, members of the 70's, and understood how quickly the sense of love and peace could be transformed by reality. The move to Alaska in this book is, is my mind, an allegory of how the harsh realities of life ultimately transformed the idealism of the 70's. The book is well worth reading, no matter where or who you were during that pivotal time.
Rating: 3
Summary: The Virtue of Lifestyles?
Comment: I'm very much in agreement with "vitaminj's" review from earlier this year. I'm appreciative of Boyle's talent and the deft drawing of his characters. I simply wasn't overly impressed with this particular story.
I do appreciate, however, the restraint Boyle used in keeping easy moral judgments at bay and his ability to resist a certain tidiness. Early in the novel, he alternately featured the hippies of Drop City with Sess Harder and the folk of the Alaskan frontier. I imagined a predictable outcome of this contrast in which the two groups would square off in a battle of lifestyle wills. Instead, the melding and merging that occured emphasized commonalities that made it seem as though the two camps were so different, they were virtually the same.
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Title: The Fortress of Solitude : A Novel by JONATHAN LETHEM ISBN: 0385500696 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Known World by Edward P. Jones ISBN: 0060557540 Publisher: Amistad Press Pub. Date: 14 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Brick Lane: A Novel by Monica Ali ISBN: 0743243307 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Great Fire: A Novel by Shirley Hazzard ISBN: 0374166447 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: After the Plague: And Other Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle ISBN: B00013AX6W Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: September, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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