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.