Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

This novel follows a few people -- the peace-and-love hippies Star, Marco, and Ronnie, and a husband and wife that live in the Alaskan wilderness, Pamela and Sess -- through about a year in the late sixties when the hippies get kicked out of their California commune by the health department and choose to go live "off the land" in Alaska.

What struck me the most was how much I could relate to the hippies. I didn't expect that, and I certainly thought they were naive and ridiculous and disconnected with real life outside their drug-supported dreamland. Even so, they were idealistic and trying to connect with the beauty of human emotion and togetherness and the inner wonder that we have as children, and to be honest that is what art is about so I often have similar thoughts.

In the end, though, what is the use of the quicksilver moments of unity and happiness when their lives ultimately congeal in uselessness and in-fighting? The women especially found that they didn't like to be seen as sex machines, and felt used. Their connectedness broke down when the drugs wore off. The happiest that they ever were was when they were doing something actually useful and drug-free, like cooking dinner with the girls or running a trap line. I think their problem wasn't their ideals, but that most of them lacked the capacity for hard work, and they refused to use any good judgment in their come-one-come-all brotherly love.

The way they ended up in their rambling, drugged lives was all too easy to imagine: mostly they grew up happy but then felt lost in a world that chased after money, and they didn't know what to do about it, and then a stranger showed up and offered them a way out, a life that would accept them and that offered adventure.

Everyone in the novel was looking for one thing: happiness. They all found out that the reality of their choices was a bit different than their dreams, but the ones that managed to balance the reality and the dream (rather than chasing off after the next magic bullet) seemed to find life the most fulfilling. They all wondered "is this all life is?" at every step of the way, even though they had eschewed suburbian and city life for the wilderness challenges. More and more I think that no one has come up with a reason for living or a way of life that is "right", and that everyone has to build their own idea of paradise (and recognize that it comes with its share of mosquitoes, irritating people, and hardships).

I loved the way that Boyle wrote, as if you were right inside the heads of the characters. Each of his five characters had a different flavor to his or her thoughts, and I love peering into other people's lives and seeing the world through their eyes.

Family Matters

by Rohinton Mistry

While the characters in this book were charmingly drawn, the actual story was a scattering of small bright moments punctuating a very realistic, depressing cycle: parents dictating (or trying to dictate) their children's lives through the very narrow-minded rules of their religion, thus ruining not only that relationship but many more relationships in the fallout.

The rampant corruption in Bombay was shocking to me. It seemed like no one could succeed at anything honestly. If you were honest, you would never get ahead. I think of corruption as something that happens in dark corners and under-the-table, but this was all in the open and impossible to avoid. It makes me appreciate my world, my country a little more. America is by no means perfect, and I tend to dwell on all of its flaws, but every place has its problems. There is corruption, I'm sure, but not nearly as widespread. It is disapproved of and rooted out where possible, whereas in India it is a way of life. And no one here rents space in apartments in 8 or 12-hour shifts just so they can sleep. That I know of.

Whatever parts lay untouched by the corruption were polluted by the rigid and bigoted religious factions. The most poignant part of the book for me was at the very end when the now-15 Jal looks at how his father has gone from a robust, changeable man who brought sunshine with his jokes and laughter and stormy clouds with his anger, to a serene religious fanatic who seems detached from realy life. Perhaps he is hiding from the world that dealt him such a blow: he worked and worked and was honest but got nothing for it, so now he earns nothing and spends his days diving deeper into a world where reality is built on faith. Jal looks sadly at the father who used to be so strong and vibrant and close to him, and sees a stranger who is in the process of repeating the mistakes Nariman's parents made.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book quite a bit because of the characters, though I was disappointed in Nariman. He was so smart, wise, charming, indomitable in his old age, but he was a total pushover in his youth when his parents demanded that he leave the love of his life who was--gasp!-- a foreigner, a non-Parsi, and marry a "good Parsi woman". I guess I would have wished that he defied his family, who he obviously didn't like too much anyway, and leave Bombay for a place where he and his love could live together in peace. Instead he cause himself, his Parsi wife, the foreign woman he loved, and his step-kids a heck of a lot of misery.

Maybe it's realistic, it's life, it's complicated, but it makes me a bit depressed.

The Lambs of London

by Paul Ackroyd

The message of this novel was difficult to decipher. A young man, dissatisfied with how unnoticed he is by everyone, writes several things and attributes them to Shakespeare, and a few gullible people believe him until some others who possess actual functioning brains question the legitimacy of the documents. Since the story arc is so obvious (you know basically from the minute it starts that the documents are false and the young man made them up, although you aren't "told" until close to the end-- not sure if it was supposed to be so obvious or not but I can't imagine anyone missing the boat), the focus is more on the individual lives and thoughts of the characters. Unfortunately, I found the three main characters rather flat and hard to sympathize or empathize with. The woman in particular led such an empty life that it depressed me to read the book, and the man she fixated on neither understood her nor cared about her. A whole day could go by where she either stayed in bed or the highlight was fixing tea for her father. Her brother was clueless and also led a loveless, frustrated life.

So what were we supposed to glean from this? That it is always a bad idea to try to pass off your own work as that of another's? That the yearning for attention can wreck people's characters and cause them to be dishonest while being a normally good (if childlike and emotionally stunted) person? That the masses (all the people who so desperately wanted another Shakespeare work that they would believe whoever had the guts to produce one without proof) are easily led? That young women can and will go literally crazy if they fall in a river and/or have too much excitement in their lives? WHAT???

At any rate, I'm glad to be done with this one. I'm not really a fan of depressing fiction.