A realist depicts the groovy life

Who would have thought that T.C. Boyle would write a defining novel about the hippie side of the 1960s? Boyle’s prose, it’s true, has always shimmered with psychedelic colors, but, especially in early short stories such as “The Big Garage” and novels such as “Budding Prospects,” he gazed down at his characters from a hawk’s altitude, his eye sharp and beady and unsentimental. The hapless among his characters -- poseurs trying to pass as idealists, whiners with a hidden nasty streak -- were ground squirrels, food for the ruthless, as, in a Darwinian universe, they should be. Nothing mellow or groovy about that.

Yet in “Drop City,” Boyle has written a vastly entertaining tale that balances the exuberance and the excesses, the promise and the preposterousness of the counterculture perhaps better than any other work of American fiction. Not that American fiction has done much with the hippies since Tom Robbins’ “Another Roadside Attraction” (1971) caught that movement at its tie-dyed, love-beaded, magic-mushroom-eating peak. Most of the enduring writing about the ‘60s, especially its political side, has come from journalists determined, above all, not to be taken in.

Tom Wolfe rode in Ken Kesey’s bus but didn’t become a Merry Prankster himself. Joan Didion toured the Haight-Ashbury and, in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” marveled at the naivete rather than the courage of kids who presumed to reinvent society from scratch. In her 1970 essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” Didion concluded: “The heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization, but in man’s own blood.” Radical politics, then, was no cure. And neither, by inference, was dropping out, turning vegetarian, smoking pot and getting back to the land, because the hippie’s tainted self would always be dragged along.

Last year, historian Louis Menand in “American Studies” did worse than damn the counterculture. He dismissed it as a transient, heavily commercialized fad, “a lifestyle that could be practiced on weekends; it came into fashion when the media discovered it and went out of fashion when the media lost interest.” Its importance, Menand said, was overrated by devotees and detractors alike; the ‘60s “could use the attention of some people who really don’t care.”

Such people, however, are hard to find. Something about the ‘60s insists that those who lived through that magical, horrible decade, and many who didn’t, continue to care even now, on the dark side of the millennium. What that something is, Robbins captured perfectly. The heroes of “Another Roadside Attraction,” John Paul Ziller and his wife, Amanda, seemed to embody a whole new consciousness, a blend of sexuality and spirituality that promised not just to end prejudice and war but also to cancel original sin, correct the error in the blood. No later American generation has had that feeling, despite all the fads (“mass-culture events,” to use Menand’s term) that have engaged us since. In the ‘60s, significant numbers of young people felt not just that the times were a-changing but that they were making the changes. An illusion, perhaps, but a potent one.

In June 1970, when “Drop City” begins, the Summer of Love is three years gone. Though Amanda is still only a gleam in her creator’s eye, one of Boyle’s main characters, Star (formerly Paulette Regina Starr of Peekskill, N.Y.), has already grown a little cynical about the Earth-mother, sex-goddess part of the hippie ideal. She has hitchhiked to Drop City, a ramshackle commune on a farm in Sonoma County, Calif., with an ex-classmate, Pan (formerly Ronnie Sommers). Pan is an advocate of free love, which Star “is beginning to think

She’s tired of “free” (meaning subtly coerced) -- in fact, she’s getting tired of Pan -- but that doesn’t mean she’s tired of Drop City. She bestows a blissed-out “million-kilowatt smile” on its tents and shacks, lentil soup and sitar music, longhairs and acidheads, bikers and feminists, visiting sociologists and voyeurs, and thinks: “Grooving, right? Wasn’t that what this was all about? The California sun on your face, no games, no plastic society -- just freedom and like minds, brothers and sisters all?”

Star moves into a treehouse with Marco Connell, a drifter who at first seems hardly different from Pan, but Boyle is already making crucial distinctions. Deep down, Marco wants to be a builder: He built the treehouse, and he digs ditches for septic-tank leach lines in the hot sun when the commune’s toilets overflow. Pan, on the other hand, is lazy and petulant, a bit of a manipulator -- not the kind of character Boyle has ever let off easy.

Trouble soon comes to Drop City. A 14-year-old girl is gang-raped. Pan happens to be there, his role unclear, and some of the alleged rapists are African Americans, who cry racism when the commune tries to expel them. Norm Sender, the resident guru and owner of the farm, is hassled by county officials over sanitation and building-code violations, not to mention his followers’ drug use and lewdness. Norm has to close the place down. The only way for Drop City to survive is to relocate to the interior of Alaska, where Norm’s Uncle Roy, a retired trapper, has left him a cabin.

Meanwhile, Boyle has introduced newlyweds Sess and Pamela Harder, whose log home on the Yukon and Thirtymile rivers is a three-hour canoe trip from the end of the last dirt road west of Fairbanks. They hunt and fish and can garden produce, and in the dark, subzero winters, Sess and his team of sled dogs tend the trapline he inherited from Roy Sender. The Harders despise welfare, eschew drugs, believe in monogamy and are willing to shed blood when provoked, but their desire for the simple, untrammeled life rivals any hippie’s.

Sess already is feuding with Joe Bosky, a Vietnam veteran who slaughters wolves from the air for bounty money, sells liquor to Eskimos and leers at the hippie women when Drop City North’s population arrives in an old school bus. Joe shoots Sess’ dogs; Sess drives Joe’s car into the Yukon. Worse violence seems inevitable. And surely, we think, a wider conflict -- a culture war -- is on the way. Will the hippies corrupt their new neighbors? Will Sess and his friends drive them out? Or will the demands of survival in Alaska -- hard work and discipline -- simply prove too much for foolish people in face paint who cling to the laid-back life?

What happens instead is that Alaska reveals the true fault line to be character, not culture. The two groups fracture and cross-fertilize. The good people (Star and Pamela, for example) link up, and so do the not-so-good people. Some hippies stay; some split. The natives trade their common sense and expertise for what the newcomers have to offer: warmth, fun, an openness to ecstasy that, Boyle reminds us, pre-’60s America sorely lacked. Drop City’s painful adaptation to the land of permafrost and mosquitoes is much like the story of a hundred religious and utopian communities on the original frontier. It’s not a satire, though it’s often very funny; not a mere exercise in nostalgia, though every detail shines with what seems to be Boyle’s total recall. It’s realistic.T.C. Boyle a realist? He has done many things in fiction, antic and outrageous things; his career trajectory, from “East Is East” through “The Road to Wellville,” “The Tortilla Curtain,” “Riven Rock” and “A Friend of the Earth,” resembles the multiple, fizzing arcs of fireworks. But here he arrives at something solid. Not just because of the details -- though after reading “Drop City,” we almost feel we could build a log-and-sod hut, cook moose stew or camp out in the snow at 40 below ourselves -- not just because Boyle, instead of circling above his characters as before, comes down among them and sees their genuineness as clearly as their pretensions; but because we can finish this book and think: Yes, that’s probably how it really was. *