| Review: T.C. Boyle DROPCITY |
| There are some things that just feel right—a
certain shirt manufacturer who cuts a shoulder that’s a perfect
fit…a particular song that makes you remember a feeling you
didn’t know you’d ever even had…a Picasso that starts
your brain synapses humming in a way that’s better than any
drug. It’s the way I feel about T.C. Boyle. His writing hits
me in just the right spot. And his novel DropCity
has left a particularly satisfying ping. DropCity is not a novel of grand ideas and themes. It’s a particularly focused novel, character-driven, dependent on moments of interaction and banal behavior reflecting a moment in history that formed and faded in the snap of two decades, alongside the age-old human impulse to exist simply, harmoniously, and, above all, freely. The story, the DropCity part, takes you back to a time some of us experienced and most of us at least knew of, so in a sense it’s a nostalgic trip, but it’s more than that. It’s a recreation of something we know in two ways because we were there during its creation and are here still, knowing that it went the way of all well-intentioned initiatives. And we know why it failed. What existed in DropCity, California—the lack of self-control, the chaos and disorder, the self-gratification, the cocoon of warm air, warm sun, warm earth, the brother and sisterhood of communal life and spirit had, has, an alter-ego in Nome, Alaska—a life-style, if life is to be sustained, that’s defined by self-discipline, preparedness, hardship, self-reliance, isolation, a cruelly indifferent environment. Yet both, one the epitome of hedonism and inertia, the other the epitome of dogged vigilance share an underlying complexity—a desire for autonomy, a hunger for contact, the hierarchical nature that brings human beings to both order and violence. With DropCity, Boyle manages to evoke all the things we’re after when we crack open the first chapter of a book. Immersion. Trust. Interest. Belief. You’ll hate to see the end coming, but when it does, you’ll have experienced a piece of life that’s so real, you’ve been there. And because you’ve been there, the experience will stay with you, and the people you’ve met will live in your mind as though they once lived just next door.
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