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Drop City
by T.C. Boyle Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Acidic The talented T.C. Boyle writes some
sentences that I reread three times. His latest offering, Drop City,
provided expected pleasure in that area. Boyle captures the dialog and characters of the 1960s, assembles
a communal cast, puts them on a bus to Alaska, and lets nature and the locals
behave as expected. The drugs help. Here’s an excerpt (pp. 168-9): Yes.
That was what he'd said: Alaska. He repeated it for her, the whole long
strung-together Normed-out sentence that ended with the noun that hit her
like a body blow, the name of that alien, icebound afterthought of a place
that had no deeper association for anyone in the room than Sergeant
Preston of the Yukon, and the Yukon wasn't even in
Alaska, was it? No matter. Norm had the stage, Norm was their leader and guru
and though he'd never led them before, he was leading them now, his feet
dancing and his arms beating time to the silken swoosh of the suede fringe,
and he was selling Alaska as if he owned it. "No rules," he
shouted, "no zoning laws, no taxes, no county dicks and ordinances. You
want to build, you build. You want to take down some trees and put up a cabin
by the most righteous far-out turned-on little lake in the world, you go
right ahead and do it and you don't have to go groveling for anybody's
permission because there's no-fucking-body there—do you hear me, people?
Nobody. You can live like Daniel Boone, live like the original hippies, like
our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers—off the land, man, doing your
own thing, no apologies. Do you dig what I'm telling you?" Silence, stunned silence. Everybody was seeing sled dogs and tracts of rippled snow. They were seeing—what?—king crab, bears, Eskimos, Mount McKinley rising up out of a wall calendar like a white planet tearing loose from its moorings. He was joking. He had to be. "Are you fucking crazy?" Star turned her
head and Mendocino Bill was right there beside her, tottering on his swollen
white feet, his beard draining the color from his face. "Are you out of
your fucking mind? Alaska? It's like sixty below up there. What are we going
to do, make igloos like Nanook? Eat snow and icicles and what, seal
blubber?" "Longest day, man," Norm said. "The
sun won't set up there tonight. I've seen it. For three years I saw it. And
you know what that means? That means strawberries the size of apples, that
means tomatoes like watermelons and zucchini you could hollow out and live
in. And this"—he reached into his jacket pocket and produced another
communal joint, gaudily rolled in red-white-and blue-striped
papers—"this shit grows like giant redwoods up there, like sequoias, I
mean, get me to the lumber mill, man. "My uncle Roy—and I don't know how many of you
know this, I mean, you do, Alfredo, and probably you, Verbie—he's got a place
up there, just outside of Boynton, on the Yukon River, farthest place you can
drive to in the continental U.S., the last place, I'm telling you, the last
frontier, and what's the whole town built out of? Logs. You know what I'm
saying? Logs! I lived there three years after I dropped out of high
school in my junior year because I couldn't take the plastic bourgeois
capitalist fucking bullshit brain-washing anymore, and I know what I'm
talking about." He flipped off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve and
clapped them back on again, and then he was shaking out a folded piece of
lined yellow paper and holding it up to the light. "You see this, people? See it? This is a letter
from my uncle. From Uncle Roy himself, dated two months ago, and I've been
carrying it around ever since. You know what it says?" He paused to look
out over the room. "It says he's in Seattle, living with my other uncle,
Uncle Norm—my namesake—because he's seventy-two fucking years old and he's
got arthritis so bad he can hardly wrap his fingers around the pen. He's not
going back, not ever, and you know what that means? That means the cabin is
ours, people, fully stocked and ready to go, traps, guns, snowshoes, six
cords of wood stacked up outside the door, pots and pans and homemade
furniture and all the rest, and it's going to be an adventure, it is. We're
going to take down some trees, because that's the way you do it—lumber
is free up there, can you dig that, free—and we're going to build four
more cabins and a meeting house and we're going to build right on down to the
river because the salmon are running up that river even as we speak and
they're running in the millions. You dig smoked salmon? Anybody here
dig smoked salmon? And the blueberries. The cranberries. You never saw
anything like it. You want to know what we're going to eat? We're going to eat
the land because it's one big smorgasbord. And there's nobody—I
mean nobody—to stop us." I haven’t read the word “dig” in this
context that often in thirty years. Drop City
is a flashback to a time and set in places that Boyle captures perfectly. Steve Hopkins, July 25, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the August 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Drop
City.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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