Drop City

By: T. C. Boyle

Narrated by: Richard Poe

The best-selling, PEN-Faulkner award-winning author of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle is hailed as "America's most imaginative contemporary novelist" ( Newsweek). In 1970, a California commune pulls up stakes and moves to the harsh interior of Alaska. The members establish Drop City, a back-to-the-land town, on a foundation of peace and free love. But their idealism cannot prevent tension from rippling through the group. The results are anything but predictable in this honest, surprising evocation of a time period and its enduring beliefs.©2003 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2003 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"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." (Publishers Weekly
"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." (Library Journal)
"An accomplished, versatile storyteller and discerning social observer, Boyle writes with enthralling momentum and seductive detail." (Booklist)
"Boyle may be the most entertaining writer in America." (Boston Globe)
"One of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation." (The New York Times)

Best T.C. Boyle

This is the best T.C. Boyle on Audible. How can you beat a story about a 1970s commune and some trappers in Alaska?

For the listener who likes realistic fiction, I strongly recommend it.

Dig this...

Boyle's vision has typically been too uncomfortably honest for me. Drop City, although excruciatingly embarrassing to a survivor of the days of peace and love, didn't evoke the usual feelings of hopelessness and the lack of any possible redemption and allowed for real insights. I recommend highly this funny and original book.

Masterful, but –

I didn’t find much to value or admire in any of the characters. There was a lot of exploration of the meanness and pettiness of human beings.

A good listen

An interesting story that did a good job with portraying the spirit of the time while developing the characters. Great narration.

Great Story and Great Reader

A story about the "lost" part of the Love Generation. Great writing, amazing language, and fantasic reader makes for a wonderful experience.

Utopia Meets the Arctic

I read the book ten or more years ago, but in audio form it takes on refreshed life.

The year is 1970 or so, and a Northern California hippie commune is in danger of eviction by a local government that doesn’t care for a constant diet of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. What do they do? Head for Alaska, of course. Their rattletrap caravan takes them north, where their tragicomic story merges with that of a harsh frontier town that will test their greenhorn innocence in the bitter Arctic winter. It is a place where barnstorming bush pilots don’t paint their airplanes, because paint would add a few pounds better suited to hauling cargo at usurious prices.

T. C. Boyle is an unpredictable virtuoso of historical fiction, and this is among his best. Richard Poe doesn’t really do voices much, but he’s an expressive reader who reminds me of my father, reading Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” to my brothers and me when we were small. Together, author and narrator team up for a laugh-out-loud yet harrowing account, when a cult of peace and love comes up against the bleak reality of racism, jealousy and betrayal—not to mention survival—in the long northern darkness.

One of my favorite TC Boyle books

I enjoy TC Boyle's writing and this is the beginning of what I consider a certain era of his work when he began exploring two of his best themes; historic settings, and when opposing communities or ideals collide.
The story it amusing and all the more so because of the narration. I can still hear the narrator in my head describing Ronnie, or Pan and just delivering his inner voice so damned well.

Peace and Love?

This is the first T.C. Boyle title I have listened to and I enjoyed it enough to want to listen to more from this author.

Like many of the other reviewers here, I too was a young person during the 60’s and 70’s. Like looking at an old photo album of ourselves, I was personally embarrassed to be shown just how clueless many of our ‘enlightened’ generation really were. Boyle not only captures much of the lingo used, but many of the misdirected values and attitudes of that time. And so it went with the ‘brothers and sisters’ of Drop City, an agglomeration of individuals proclaiming peace and love, while really wanting not much more than plenty of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

This book is really two stories of two different worlds, that end up strangely colliding and, somehow, coexisting. The hippie commune in sunny California is evicted by their fed-up neighbors and relocates to wild, forbidding and frigid Alaska. They yearned to get back to nature and live in the bounty of Mother Earth. They soon learn that the nature in Alaska is about as maternal as the savage wolverines who there reside. And winters with temperatures of sixty below zero where sunlight is no more than a rumor, might send even the most alienated peacenik scrambling back to the bosom of the plastic establishment and the creature-comforts of civilization.

This book is a story of the individuals from opposite environments and contradicting values living in very uncomfortable conditions. I got the very clear message that condition of being human is really the overwhelming common denominator.

Good story!

Characters to Care about

I loved this book, my second TC Boyle read! Two stories develop simultaneously, each with oddball yet interesting characters doing things on the edge. When they merge about half way through, I was surprised that these seemingly disparate characters not only mesh well together, but actually bring out some of the best (and worst) in each other. As with "The Tortilla Curtain," the ending might leave some readers feeling like they just dropped of the edge of a cliff--there is more to know, more that I want to know about these characters. And the hopeful note it ends on, also like the previous book, kepts me licking my lips for another taste of their lives.

Magnificent, compelling: A masterpiece

TC Boyle has long been the American master of the short story. His novels, however, are oddly long, windy, wordy and boring...except Drop City. The book is thrilling, the narrator a perfect match. The characters are true, the plot a deeply felt adventure among man, woman and the earth. The beginning is a story of the '70's, set near Guerneville, California. A bunch of dropouts land there, living off the "fat of the land," i.e. the money that one of them has inherited from his uncle. They posture, get stoned and stay that way, make lame fun of the society that has produced them, eat organic everything and remain smugly absorbed in their world view, until Sonoma County discovers the filth they live in. When the bulldozers arrive, they repair to Alaska, naively led by Norm, the guy with the bread. The book grows in scope and ambition as they arrive, so ill-equipped to survive yet so proud of themselves that they fairly burst. Richard Poe tells the story with passion and empathy for these lost children, who could simply be "figures of fun," an expression Boyle has used about other characters in his work. In Alaska they find their fate, which in many instances is not pretty. They also find a couple, Sess and Pamela, who are living out the dream with bravery, courage, smarts and determination to spare. There are true villains and several true heroes. At the end, which you sincerely never want to come, you are so deeply moved by the talent of both Boyle and Poe that you immediately return to Audible looking for a sequel, something that Boyle has never done in his entire career, to my knowledge. Tortilla Curtain is his only other successful novel, I feel, and I hope Audible can get these two guys together again for that. For now, I am reverberating with the book's end, thinking about what will happen to Sess, Pamela, Marco and "Star." This work is up there among my four or five favorite audiobooks, and I will come back to it again and again. It gives me hope for the human condition.