A brilliant and vividly rendered tale of ordinary people in the throes of idealism, passion, and sub-Arctic temperatures at a moment when our world changed forever.
T.C. Boyle has proven himself to be a master storyteller who can do just about anything. But even his most ardent admirers may be caught off guard by his ninth novel, for Boyle has delivered something completely unexpected: a serious and richly rewarding character study that is his most accomplished and deeply satisfying work to date.
It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune 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 homesteading in the wilderness and the brothers and sisters of Drop City, who, despite their devotion to peace, free love, and the simple life, find their commune riven by tensions. As these two communities collide, their alliances shift and 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.
Drop City is not a satire or a nostalgic look at the sixties, though its evocation of the period is presented with a truth and clarity that no book on that era has achieved. This is a surprising book, a rich, allusive, and nonsentimental look at the ideals of a generation and their impact on today's radically transformed world. Above all, it is a novel infused with the lyricism and take-no-prisoners storytelling for which T.C. Boyle is justly famous.
Book Magazine - James Schiff
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.
Boston Globe
Boyle may be the most entertaining writer in America.
The New York Times
On of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation.
Newsweek
America's most imaginative contemporary novelist.
Publishers Weekly
Even readers who were alienated by the didactic streak of novels like A Friend of the Earth will be won over by Boyle's latest, arguably his best since East Is East.
Booklist - Donna Seaman
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.
Library Journal
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.
Kirkus Reviews
Probably the fullest picture of the hippie culture of the late '60s since Marge Piercy's early fiction, and one of Boyle's best.
Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, and filled with the sights and sounds of New York - a narrative of the twentieth century written for the twenty-first.
Vernon L. Oliver, still a young man, is waiting for the death penalty. When his attorney suggests he write an autobiography to generate funds to cover legal fees incurred during the appeals process, Vernon sits down to pencil and paper and begins his narrative.
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Book Magazine - James Schiff
