August '11 Reading: Drop City by T.C. Boyle

[Scheherazade]

In August we will be reading Drop City by T.C. Boyle.

Please post your comments and questions in this thread.

[Sancho]

I read part one (Drop City South) last night. It’s set in a hippy commune in California around about 1970 or so, and is a sort-of unsentimental look at the day-to-day life of those people, at that time and that place.

But mostly, I think, Part One functions as an introduction to several of the main characters. Boyle uses a limited third-person narrative from the point of view, in turn, of three of the hippies: Star, Pan, and Marco. I liked the technique. I thought it gave the reader an intimate view of how those three people viewed their world, and how others viewed them. I think he’s using a free indirect style, but what the heck do I know – I just read the stuff, I don’t really study it.

Anyway, I’m thinking that third person omniscient is pretty-much dead with modern writers. Anybody have any thoughts?

[Sancho]

Part 2 takes us to the end of the road in the interior of Alaska to a small village of Boynton, which lies on the banks of the Yukon River. The Thirtymile refers to a tributary of the Yukon that runs around thirty miles in length and on which Sess Harder has a trapline cabin. (Side note: just about every place in the state of Alaska is fixed or referred to by its mile-marker: Mile-marker 235, Steese HWY; or Haul Road, mile-marker 56. In fact, still the favorite guide book for way up North is the Milepost.)

Anyway, Mr. Boyle is a fine story teller and the plot moves right along on the Thirtymile, but I won’t go into it because I don’t want to spoil the story for anybody else reading along…

*cricket***cricket***cricket*

At any rate, as with most real Alaskan towns, Boynton’s citizenry has an odd cast of characters and Part 2 begs a comparision between the people of Boynton and the people of Drop City. No doubt there are huge differences, but there are also similarities. Both groups have rejected the main-stream American life-style, either by choice or genetic predisposition.

So, turn on, tune in, and drop out
--Norm Sender (Drop City Dropout-in-Chief)

[Sancho]

So, Sancho, what’d’ya think so far?

Pretty good, Sancho, I’m about three-quarters done and I really like it.

Me too, Sancho, what’d’ya like the most?

Well, Sancho, I like the style.

Gimme a for instance, Sancho.

Okay, well, here’s a simple yet artful description of the bartender of the Nougat. As you know, Sancho, there are two roadhouses in the town of Boynton, The Nougat and The Three Pup Roadhouse. The bartender at the Nougat is the son of the owner of The Three Pup.

Yes, I know that, Sancho.

Well, this description, I think, is in that free indirect style that we talked about, and it’s coming to us from the perspective of Sess Harder.

Solly Setzler was twenty-four years old, with his father’s ski-slope shoulders, milky eyes and colorless eyebrows, and nobody really thought it odd that he worked for the competition because it was a kind of miracle that anybody at all would want to stand behind the bar of a roadhouse this time of year. His hair was a miracle in itself, the exact color of fiberglass insulation, and his eyes lacked a human sheen. He’d been home-schooled, and he was as misinformed, brooding and ignorant as anybody Sess had ever met, especially anybody that young.

Ha! Yeah, I liked that part too, Sancho. Hey, did you get the bit about the spelling error in the name of The Nougat?

Yeah, the owner, “had meant to call it ‘The Nugget,’ but orthography wasn’t his strong suit.”

You know, Sancho, I think Mr. Boyle may have been paying homage to the real-world town of Chicken, Alaska.

Do you mean the gold-rush town, Sancho?

Yeah, when it came time to name the town, everybody wanted to name it Ptarmigan after the game bird, but nobody was sure how to spell it, so they just named the town Chicken instead.

Ha! Good one, Sancho.

[Paulclem]

I'm sorry Sancho - I had to drop out of the reading for a while and never got round to the August one.

[Sancho]

Wait – What!? Who is it? Who’s there?
Hey man, close the door. Close da door. Clo-de-doe!
I was just…hmm. I was just…errr. I was just washing my…ummm.
Oh what the hey. I couldn’t find anybody to play with, so I was playing with myself.

Anyway, I know all of you in the British Isles are out enjoying the last gasp of summer, but here in the southeastern United States, we call it the dog-days of summer and we’re all indoors enjoying the A/C – and reading our books.

So then, back to the book; here are a couple of Mr. Boyle’s sentences that I really enjoyed. But first, the setup: Back at Drop City tensions have boiled over and a few of the hippies have gotten into a fistfight in a partially dug-out septic field. They’d been digging the drainage field because, “-the toilets in the main house were overflowing and there was a coil of human waste behind every rock, tree and knee-high scrap of weed on the property…” Meanwhile, a couple of weekend hippies (a UC Berkley professor and his poet-wife) were visiting. Something happened:

What happened was this: they were out for a stroll, professor and poet, grooving on the heat, the dust, the fence lizards puffing up their tiny reptilian chests in the blissed-out aura of peace and love and communal synergy, when suddenly she – the poet – let out a scream. And this was no ordinary scream – it wasn’t the kind of semi-titillated pro forma shriek you might expect from a female poet announcing a fistfight among hippies in a half-dug ditch in a blistering field above the Russian River; no, this was meant to convey shock, real shock, a savage tug at the cord strung taut between two poles of existence. The poet’s scream rose above the heat, airless and impacted, and everything stopped right there.

[Sancho]

And I have to say, I enjoyed it. I’ve been reading a stack of books written in the 19th century so it was a real pleasure to read a contemporary novel. As I mentioned in the nomination thread, I’ve read and enjoyed T.C. Boyle’s short stories for years, but this is the first novel. I’m afraid I don’t know much about the man except for what I read on the dust jacket. In reading the book though, I did get the sense that he is a friend of Mother Earth and an animal lover. I think he showed his authorial hand in this quote, which is from the POV of Sess Harder as he lies in bed with his new wife in their trapline cabin trying to come to grips with his lifestyle choice:

He gave her the smile back, reached out for her hand and closed it in his own. He didn’t want to talk anymore, all that fuel was gone from him now, didn’t want to tell her how it felt the first time he walked the trapline and found a wolf like a big dog caught by one half-gnawed foot in a double-spring Newhouse trap intended for fox and how it just sat there staring at him out of its yellow eyes as if it couldn’t comprehend the way the country had turned on it in this cold evil unnatural way and how he’d felt when he shot it and missed killing it and shot it again and again till the pelt was ruined and a hundred and ten pounds of raw wilderness lay spouting arterial blood at his feet, or how Roy Sender had taught him to rap a trapped fisher or ermine across the snout with a stick and then jerk at its heart-strings till the heart came loose from its moorings and the animal went limp without spoiling the fur. He didn’t tell her he was just one more predator, one more killer, as useless as the wind through the trees, taking life to feed his own. He didn’t tell her any of that.

I also sense that Mr. Boyle is an astute observer of human nature. In this book his character development is fabulous and if there is a pervasive theme or motif to Drop City, it is: regardless of your culture or world view – folks is folks, human nature doesn’t change. So within a community of hippies or sourdoughs (or for that matter, autoworkers or university professors) there are heroes and cowards, there are leaders and followers, there are those who are blinded by ambition, and there are those who just want to live a good a life while being good to others.

***Spoiler Alert***

Speaking of blindly ambitious, cowardly A-holes - the bad guys get it in the end in this book. Hah-hah. It didn’t bother me a bit. The method was interesting, though. When I lived up there, I’d always heard the story of the hunter up on the Brooks Range who’d set a bottle of rye whiskey outside of his cabin on a cold-cold day while he was out hunting. When he returned from his hunt, he felt he deserved a reward, so he took a slug of the super-cooled whiskey straight from the bottle and promptly frost bit his esophagus so badly that he wound up suffocating as his throat swelled shut. I don’t know if that’s an urban legend or not, but it seems plausible. That kind of stuff can sneak up on you at forty or fifty below. One day after work I was messing around, getting my car ready to go. It was one of those minus-forty days, but I was toasty warm because I was all bundled up and had on a pair of heavy mittens. But my hands were full – I had a pile of books under one arm and my car keys in the other. Well, mittens don’t lend themselves to dexterity and consequently I was having trouble getting the key into the door lock, so unthinkingly, I put my keys in my mouth, pulled off my mitten with the assistance of my opposite armpit and then, with my bare hand, went to grab the keys out of my mouth. You know what happened next: a sort of kid-with-his-tongue-stuck-to-the-flag-pole incident in miniature. My coworkers were all quite pleased and amused when I walked back into the building to thaw - with my keys hanging from my lip.