Tune In, Turn On, and Drop Out with T. C. Boyle
C. P. Farley, Powells.com
T. C. Boyle is a storytelling machine. He's not only prolific—he's produced a book every other year for the past quarter century—he's also one of the most  imaginative and entertaining voices in the country. Throughout his career, Boyle has brought his tremendous energy and razor-sharp insight—not to mention his legendary wit—to bear on an astonishing variety of subjects: enterprising health nuts, modern-day samurai, schizophrenic millionaires, destitute Mexicans, and more than a few monkeys. For his efforts he's been called "one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation" (New York Times) and "America's most imaginative contemporary novelist." (Newsweek)
And now, T. C. Boyle has turned his sights on a hippie commune in Northern California called Drop City. It's 1970, so for anyone under thirty, sex, drugs, and rock and roll are still the order of the day. Unfortunately, not everyone is hip to the scene. The residents of Drop City soon realized that, unless they clean up their act—yeah, right—the local squares are going to shut the commune down. So they go them one better and skip town.
Following their leader Norm's vision of what a truly free life would look like, they pack everyone up into a school bus and head for Alaska, where Norm has inherited a piece of property. Things don't work out quite as planned, though. The Alaskan wilderness isn't as forgiving as the Northern Californian countryside. Fortunately, they get a little help from some of the locals, who truly understand what it takes to live off the land.
Drop City is a brilliant evocation of an era, celebrating its high-minded ideals and laying bare its fatal delusions. And because it's from T. C. Boyle, it's also a great pleasure to read.
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"Boyle writes with enthralling momentum and seductive detail, avidly describing everything from California sunshine to the northern lights, psychedelically 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." Donna Seaman, Booklist
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"Boyle's imagination and zeal for storytelling are in top form here, making this collection a smash." Publishers Weekly
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"The hippie kingdom has been succeeded by...hard times, and T. Coraghessan Boyle has written a shrewd and funny novel about the rites of historical passage." Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
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"Funny and touching, antic and affecting....[W]hile Boyle's humor is as black as ever, he demonstrates that satire can coexist with psychological realism, comedy with compassion." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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"This is a splendid book, a noble achievement, a work of art." Peter Kurth, Salon
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"What Boyle does, and does well, is lay on the line our national cult of hypocrisy. Comically and painfully he details the smug wastefulness of the haves and the vile misery of the have-nots....Red-blooded Americans of every stripe will find themselves rooting for Candido and America, right up to the rip-roaring deus ex machina ending that screams out that we are all in this together." Barbara Kingsolver
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"Move over, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth. And make room for T. Coraghessan Boyle, the latest and perhaps the best young black-humorist to come cavorting down the pike." Los Angeles Herald Examiner
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"Such a life may not be possible again. So it is good that a writer of Mr. Hainses's rare vision and poetic eloquence lived this life, and good that he has shared it." New York Times Book Review
Farley: In the sixties, there was a real commune called Drop
City in Colorado, and I'm curious if there was any relationship between the
historical Drop City and your fictional Drop City in California?
Boyle: Well, I've never been to a commune. I've never known
anyone who's lived on a commune. I did period research for this book, and yes,
there was a Drop City. I was in Colorado night before last, in fact, and I met
a former denizen of Drop City, on my book tour of course, now that it's too
late. My characters, as you know, adduce the original Drop City and say that
they've named their commune after it. All the communes had great names, like
Olum Poly and Morning Star and things like that. I chose Drop City because it's
the best name, because of what it indicates: you drop out of society; you drop
into Drop City.
Farley: I actually read an interesting story about how the
original Drop City got its name. It had something to do with dropping things
out of windows to create art.
Boyle: Really. What a great thing. I wish I'd known that.
But, you can't know everything. And if you do know everything, it changes the
way the book goes. It's like writing a term paper. You do a lot of research,
and at some point you've got to forget what that research was. You have a
general impression of it, and you can never find your notes when you want them,
so you let it fly. It's never what you think it will be when you envision it at
first. It's always better. Well, at least it's concrete. Whatever you
envisioned becomes concrete eventually through the process of day-by-day
accretion.
Farley: So there was no historical precedence of a
hippie commune going to Alaska?
Boyle: Not that I'm aware of, but I'm sure it happened.
Everybody in Alaska, as far as I can see, is a hippie: old, young, and in
between. That's the style that they adopted. And it was a great style. It was
the back-to-the-earth style. And that's the back-to-the-earth state. As far as
I could tell, that's the spirit that prevails up there.
Farley: Do you think many of the people you met in Alaska
actually moved there in the sixties and seventies during the Back to Earth
Movement?
Boyle: It's hard to gauge how old they are. But I found
myself in a bar in Talkeetna one night. And of course it's light all nightlong,
and a beautiful rainstorm is happening. We were having some drinks with the
locals, and some tourists, too. And pretty soon the band started to play and
everybody was dancing, and, you know, guys with beards down to here, and hair
out to here, and giant knives strapped to their waist are dancing around. You
don't find that in LA.
Farley: So what were you doing in the sixties?
Boyle: I was sort of like Ronnie and Star. Of course, I was protesting the war. But I wasn't
part of any organized movements. I've always been, as any reader of my work knows,
very distrustful of authority, or of being co-opted into something. I was like
Ronnie—not nearly as bad as Ronnie, of course—but just kind of drifting
into the scene for its own sake without having much deep philosophy involved in
it.
There's a scene later in the book in which Star and Pamela
(Pamela the native Alaskan and Star the starry-eyed hippie ) really become
friends and realize they have common ground. They want the same things: to go
back to the earth, live simply, reject consumer society, etc., etc. And Pamela
says, Well, I understand all that about
you people, but what does that have to do with LSD, and face paint, and bell
bottom trousers and the rest of it? And Star just shrugs and says, Well, it's hip, I guess. That's about as
deep as my philosophy went in those days.
Farley: I've noticed that reviewers of this book have called
you everything from conservative to
Victorian for your rather satiric handling of the hippies on your commune. I'm
curious if you had any reaction to all of this?
Boyle: Well, you know I haven't read the reviews, so I can't
really speak for what the reviewers say or what they think. It has nothing to
do with me. But I don't think that this is a satiric portrait. My intention
here was to write a book that was non-comic, certainly. You can view the drama
of what happens between these people as you will. I didn't intend for anything
that was nostalgic or particularly satiric or condemnatory. It just happens.
Each story and novel suggests itself to you in a different
mode. And I've never wanted to repeat myself or always be in the same mode. All
of my comic novels have a different mode of comedy, from a very grim,
stick-in-your-guts kind of comedy in something like Tortilla Curtain or Riven
Rock, to, you know, laugh-out-loud Budding
Prospects or Water Music. So I
think sometimes a casual reader or reviewer won't really grasp the fact that
each story—and I've published probably 150 stories as well as the nine
novels—has its own mode. And, sometimes, that mode is non-comic.
If you look at the stories in After the Plague, you'll see that several of the stories are in a
non-comic mode. I've never done that at novel length before. I wanted to do it,
in this case. And furthermore, everything written in the sixties and about the
sixties was written in a single style, a kind of hyperbolic, over-the-top,
black humor, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe sort of style. That had been done. I
didn't really care about the period that much because we hear about it ad
nauseam. In fact, I made fun of it in A Friend of the Earth. In 2025, one of
the accouterments of our society, even though everything has turned to shit, is
that you still hear the hits of the sixties playing through the speakers
inescapably.
So, you know, my intentions were very different. And the
reason I feel that authors aren't supposed to explain what they're doing is
because it then eliminates everybody else's perception. And that is wrong. So
if certain critics feel this way, that's fine. Let them feel that way.
Farley: It also seems to me that because you've written so
many books, readers bring their expectations from whatever else of yours
they've read to any new work you write. So if they think of you as a satiric writer,
then they'll define your new novel as satiric.
Boyle: I like to defeat their expectations. That's what I'm
about. I don't want you to know what I'm going to do. From my point of view
what an artist is supposed to do is challenge him or herself and to grow. And
when you open my book you're supposed to be surprised, and not know where
you're going to go. Early on, before I even started writing, I was very
enamored with a particular very funny black humor writer. I loved him and read
his books avidly. I read four or five of them as they came out. And then I
realized that, essentially, he was writing the same book over and over, that it
was one note only. That was all he could do. And that was okay, but that wasn't
what I wanted.
Farley: About Riven Rock,
which was a historical novel set at the turn of the century, you said that you
wanted to "create a world that reflects who we are now." Is that what you
wanted to do with this novel, as well?
Boyle: Of course. This is a historical novel as well. I mean
it sounds ridiculous to say that, because I lived through the period, but it
is. And in looking back on it—no one has really written about this in some
time, as far as I know—it seems like ancient history now. So it was ripe for
exploration for me.
And again it was an outgrowth of A Friend of the Earth, which takes us 25 years into the future to
examine environmental destruction. Now we go back a given period, in this case
30 years, to a time when there was a Back to the Earth Movement.
Farley: Where's the Back to the Earth Movement today?
Boyle: Good question. I think we are doomed as a species,
imminently. I was utterly depressed by the research I did for A Friend of the Earth. There is no hope
whatsoever. It's over. Forget it. Kiss it goodbye, folks. It's done. On the
other hand, what came from that period that is relevant today is a sense of
that, at least: a sense of impending doom; a sense that the world is a very
small place that is very densely overpopulated; a sense that we need to preserve resources,
our current president notwithstanding.
So we do recycle, for instance. We are perhaps a little more
aware than we used to be of using up energy, etc. I think it's too little too
late, but at least it exists. I certainly wouldn't want to discourage people in
a book like A Friend of the Earth or
this one from pursuing a greener world.
One of the problems, I think, when I was exploring the idea
of living off the land in the way that people did in Alaska in this era, is
that we are a major predator. And in order to live off the land in that way, as
Seth does in this book, you need a huge range, just as a grizzly bear or a
mountain lion needs a huge range in order to have enough prey. Biologists will
tell you there's a whole pyramid of prey animals all the way up to the
predators on top. So it seems unlikely and impractical that human beings would
be able to live like that ever again on this planet unless our population is
vastly reduced.
But still, I wanted to go back and explore it, because it's
fascinating to me. One of the key books that informed a lot of what I know
about trapping and so on and life in the bush is John Haines's beautiful book
of essays, The Star, the Snow, the Fire. He went up to the area around
Fairbanks after World War II to live by himself in nature. He had a mentor, an
old man who was no longer able to trap—two old men in fact—who helped him
and told him what to do, and then he grew into it. And he wrote a book of
essays about it that is utterly fascinating stuff. That's where I learned many
of the details that I use in this book.
Farley: One of the central themes of the novel is the desire
on the part of the hippies to remain children, to remain innocent. Do you
think this desire for innocence was something that was peculiar to the hippie
subculture, or is it something that is peculiar to American culture?
Boyle: I think the innocence was cultivated, and the times,
which were prosperous, enabled a generation to cultivate that innocence, and to
postpone adulthood as long as possible. One could say that's irresponsible. One
could say that's great. You know, that's for you to decide.
We've always searched for utopias. This country was founded
by utopians who came here from England: the Pilgrims, for instance, and small
communities very much like the one I'm discussing. That's how the country
began.
But I think we all want to draw down this great society that
is so confusing and overwhelming to a small microcosm. I've written in many of
my books about small communities and the dramas within them. In a way I suppose
it's a kind of nostalgia for something I never knew. You know, a kind of small
town life that I'm sure has its limitations, that I'm sure can be very
oppressive in many ways. But, on the other hand, it also maybe makes it seem as
if society is more under control, or more reasonable, or more knowable.
Farley: On your website, your description of Drop City ends with the following two
sentences: "What is at stake is freedom. That and survival." The idea of
freedom was right at the heart of the hippie phenomenon. But today, the
rhetoric about freedom is just as prominent as it was in the sixties, although
it's coming from a very different segment of society, and it's being talked
about in a very different way.
Boyle: Are you talking about militaristic movements, people
who are justifying their aggression in terms of freedom, or freeing people? Are
you talking about our president and the war that he's pushing us into? Or do
you mean denying us our freedoms, or the fact that we're coming into a fascist
era in America, or as close to it as we ever have been? Is that what you're
referring to?
Farley: Well, that's not what you're hearing on talk radio.
Boyle: But this is all just propaganda, of course. We have
someone extremely irresponsible at the helm of this country now. This is the
most dangerous time we've ever seen in this country, bar none. You know,
McCarthy, Nixon, nothing approaches what we're seeing now.
Farley: Even worse than J. Edgar Hoover or...
Boyle: This propaganda and this regime are just staggering
to me. I really see very little difference in the awe campaign and the
blitzkrieg or Il Duce wanting regime change in Ethiopia and in Albania and then
bombarding his people with two months of propaganda to justify it beforehand.
Or Hitler justifying going into the Sudetenland because the Germans were
suffering. It's the same sort of thing. So obviously this term freedom is being
used in a very cynical way.
I finished this book twenty months ago. I could not have
foreseen what was going to happen now. I think one of the reasons why it is so
hugely popular is that people want to escape this barrage of propaganda and
what we're doing, which is so absolutely morally wrong and against everything
America has ever stood for. And I think not only does the story take them out
of that, but it also speaks to a time when there was war protest, although this
is not a political novel. And when people did question consumer society. I
think in the nineties there was no question that to be rich, to get
richer, and to put all of your marbles into the basket of acquiring goods and so
on was ever questioned. It was just an absolute good.
Farley: It was hip.
Boyle: Right, it was hip to be rich. And the commercials on
TV—I guess they're still on but—they would all promote products like a Palm
Pilot. And a business man who had this Palm Pilot would of course do more
business than a guy who didn't. And I think maybe one of the reasons for Drop
City's popularity—besides the fact that it's a terrific story, of course
[laughs]—is that it seems to tap into the zeitgeist right now.
The women's movement, sexual politics, the family, religion,
all of these things are an outgrowth of the sixties. Maybe this religious right
and all of that is a kind of response to the unbridled freedom of that period.
I'm meeting a lot of people on this tour who are children of hippies, who grew
up on communes. And their experiences are not necessarily happy. To tear down
all the barriers is one thing, but what do you erect in their place? I think
we're still struggling with that. And into the breach rushes the right wing.
But I don't mean for this to be a political statement in any
way. Politics and novels do not mix. All of my books evolve from the story
itself. I don't know what I'm going to say or what I mean or what my themes are
even. I just explore a topic and let it fly. So you can interpret it how you
will. Certainly I know how I feel and what the book says, but I don't think
it's my place to state that. If I can state that, then I should just write an
essay.
Farley: You've long had a fascination in your books with
monkeys, which are the most human of animals. And also the nature guy, who is
the most animal of humans.
Boyle: From the beginning of my work I've been obsessed with
our animal nature versus our spiritual nature. And again, I wonder if this is
for me to say. I think this is more for interpreters to say, but at any rate I
think there is just this constant dialectic in my work between these two poles.
As you say, I've always been fascinated by animals and animal life and humans
as animals, and specifically monkeys and apes, which appear in a lot of my
work. Obviously the rugged individualist, like Seth or Ty Tierwater or anyone
who goes back to nature and tries to live in nature, or Ty and Andrea in A Friend of the Earth doing that stunt
where they go naked into the woods for a month, is trying to touch the essence
of what we are if you remove all of our buildings and all of our machines and
all the rest of it. And that's very seductive for me.
I wonder about people who have never experienced nature, who
have always lived in an apartment, for instance, in a big city, whose nature is
very peripheral, where nature might consist of a pigeon or a rat or a bud on a
tree. I mean, that's wonderful. But my experience with nature is much more
direct. I spent a lot of time in the Sequoia national forest by myself just
walking in the woods. There's a kind of mind... I was going to say mindset; it's
not a mindset it's a kind of lulling of the mind, so that you're not conscious
so much. You're just walking around as you do when you're a child before you
know the names of things, you know? We know the names of things. We know how
things work. We know where the weather is coming from. We know what the clouds
portend. We know the names of trees and birds. We know their habits. But when
you're a child, you don't know any of that. You experience things absolutely
directly. You experience the whole. And I think I have the ability to do a lot
of that when I'm by myself out in nature. And to feel some other kind of
connection to the roots of our life and our lives as animals.
Farley: I'm curious why you waited so long into your career
to write about this era?
Boyle: I think a long period had to go by so that I could
view it as a historical novel. And view it with a cold eye. I certainly didn't
want to do something nostalgic. That doesn't mean that I'm not nostalgic. I am nostalgic. In fact basically what I
do for a living is go to places where I used to live and reminisce. But, again,
that seems too usual. That's been done so many times before. This period has
been talked about so many times before, and I didn't want to repeat what
other's had done.
Farley: Did you worry about repeating...
Boyle: No no no no no. I have utter confidence in what I'm
doing. I'm just following my own path. If I have readers, that's great. And I
do try to get them. I mean, I go out on the road and perform each night and do
shows and interviews and everything else. I enjoy that. I love having a
readership. But I'm going to do what I do regardless. I have no agenda. I don't
think, Well this subject will be
interesting to the public so I'll sell lots of books. It doesn't work that
way. I do what I do because I'm trying to figure out what my existence is all
about. And I make it into art so that I can communicate that to other people.
So no, I have no worries of that kind at all.
But, artistically, I don't want to do something that's been
done before. I want to break new ground—if I can. Maybe I don't all the time.
But I try to. Which is not to say that all literature is not an assimilative
process. I'm a wide reader and everything goes in and I absorb it. But I think
if you're an original artist you have your own voice and your own vision.
My fellow writers would agree with what I'm saying. They
have their own vision too. And a given subject fascinates me because I'm me.
People often come to me and say, Wow I've
got a great idea for you, and, boy, I wish you could write it. But I have
to tell them, they have to write it themselves. That is what fascinates them. I am only interested in what
fascinates me. And I can make these comments
about themes I see in my work only in retrospect. I only know that because I've
written fifteen books now. And I'm pleased that I do have an oeuvre, that the
books do fit together and graduate students will have a lot of fun tracing
things through the books. That's great. I was a graduate student, too. I'm happy
to do them a service. But I write for my own purposes. For my own sanity,
really.
Speaking to this era, I was never the sort of hippie who
would sit around in a spiritual haze and seek nirvana. I was more like Ronnie.
I was just interested in getting laid and doing drugs and hearing music and
doing music. Once some guy gave me this whole long mystical rap about
meditation and so on, and he said, You know man, you should really meditate. And
I thought for a second and I said, You
know, I hate to tell you, but I do meditate about four or five hours every day.
It's called writing.
T. C. Boyle visited Powell's City of Books on March, 26th, 2003.
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