The road to hippyville

“I resent the fact that rock ’n’ roll and movies and TV have put literature into the fourth category of entertainment. More and more in America, it’s just something that is an assignment in school. Everybody thinks that we need these theorists and critics to mediate between the artist and the great unwashed masses. It’s horseshit – it’s just like rock ’n’ roll or comedy or anything else. If it’s not entertainment at its root, it sucks!”

Give that man a stogie. Novelist TC Boyle is explaining why he embarks on lengthy reading tours that have more in common with Letterman monologues than constipated literati-fied affairs.

“I think a lot of writers are afraid, particularly in England and Germany, to express themselves in any other way but the accepted norm because the older critical establishment will not take them seriously,” he says. “See, I never really gave a shit. I have all the credentials anyway, I have my PhD, I’m a professor, I can do anything I want so I don’t have to pretend to be tweedy and talk in a sonorous voice and make literature this high holy temple. I’m interested in the 16 year old boy who’s never read a book or a story in his life and whose girlfriend dragged him to see me read ’cos she heard I was pretty good, just make him have fun, just blow him away.”

Boyle’s latest book Drop City – the 15th instalment in a body of work that has seen him become one of the finest literary novelists in America – is a satirical black comedy of manners set in a Californian hippy commune in the early 70s. But despite the relatively recent setting, it’s as much as period piece as his book The Road To Wellville, filmed by Alan Parker some years back.

“It’s the only one of my historical settings in which I actually lived through the period,” he says, “so I think that brought something to it. The hippies had a back-to-the-earth mentality: let’s drop out of society, throw the yoke of the machines and jobs and capitalism off of us and do something else. I just wanted to examine that again, because obviously it’s impossible. The more people there are, the less likely it is that you can survive in any other way than we survive now.”

In a nutshell, Drop City is Lord Of The Flies in a kibbutz with plenty of sex and drugs and a little rock ‘n’ roll. It reprises pet themes that have permeated all Boyle’s fiction right up to his brilliant recent short story collection After The Plague: Darwinian struggle and environmentalist idealism gone awry. But why set this book at the wilting end of flower power?

“1970 was the last year ever in the North American continent where you could homestead in Alaska, that is, you go out in the woods, you find a plot of land, a nice lake, and you claim it, file the papers: ‘This is mine’. For free. As of 1970 they had the native claims settlement act to divide the state up so they could do oil, and the native tribes got a third of it, the state got a third and the Feds got a third, there’s no land left in the entire state. Those are various reasons as to why I wanted to set it there and then.”

In Drop City, Boyle has great sport with the inherent hypocrisies and double standards of hippy etiquette, with freeloaders brazenly migrating from one brother’s drugs and booze stash to another, accusing hoarders of being bourgeois when they hold out and chicks of being uptight when they don’t put out.

“When you’re a kid,” Boyle says, “you don’t think of anything except, ‘Well gee, I hear that John had a hunk of hash over there, let’s go see him’ and then you smoke that and you think, ‘What about Roger – didn’t he have . . .’ Days and days go on just like that. (In the book) Alfredo says to Marco: ‘I’ve been on several communes man, and it doesn’t work out unless the chicks pull their weight’, meaning the ‘cats’ lie around and get stoned and the ‘chicks’ must cook the mush, feed the babies and clean the floor, and it’s utterly sexist, even though shortly thereafter was this radical feminist movement.”

Does he think that feminist movement was heralded by the fact that there was a so-called social revolution and it turned out to the same old Neanderthal bullshit?

“You could draw that conclusion from Drop City.”

That’s the sex; here’s the drugs. One point highlighted by the new novel is that the 60s kids didn’t differentiate between soft and hard drugs to the same degree we do now, when heroin is talked of in almost superstitious terms. Boyle himself had a nasty little smack habit for a while, although these days writing is his jones (as illustrated in his excellent essay ‘This Monkey, My Back’). All of which suggests a highly addictive personality.

“Well, both my parents died of alcoholism in their 50s,” he admits, “and I did a lot of drugs and drinking in my day and shot heroin for two years. We would laugh about it ’cos we had those health films in high school: if you smoke a joint you’re hooked. And we poo-pooed it, but it was true, because you always want to have some one-upmanship. Someone did some Lebanese hash or amyl nitrate or something and you’d say, ‘Yeah man, but I’m beyond all that, I’m just shootin’ dope, y’know?’ I was just so incredibly fucking stupid. And also I just didn’t care. To be a junkie you just have to have no hope. You just kinda drift along and that’s your life. But it was like the 9000th night in a row at the bar with some Deadheads and I just thought, ‘Y’know, maybe there’s something else. Maybe I’ll go home and read a book!’”

Drop City is published by Bloomsbury.