Tune in, drop out

The antiwar movement may be sprouting up again, but there's no climate for flower power this time around. The hippies who led America's last great protests against military intervention have been effectively co-opted by Old Navy, their radical message fermented in the stills of Madison Avenue down to an intoxicating syrup of consumerism. If that weren't enough to shoo the merrymakers off, a couple of major literary authors have recently turned the water cannons on them, blasting away their puka beads with a torrent of bitter satire.

The first was A.S. Byatt's "Whistling Woman" (reviewed Dec. 19), which ended in a conflagration sparked by radical antiuniversity students. And now comes T.C. Boyle's "Drop City," a rebuke of hippie culture that would make Abbie Hoffman put on a tie and write a humble apology on Crane's stationary. There seems little need for concern that the Age of Aquarius will assert itself on anything besides teen fashion, but these authors have assembled a phalanx of commentary to repulse any resurgence of naive optimism.

Boyle has long produced political novels that make you hanker for a good book club. In "Drop City," which portrays a raucous West Coast commune in the 1960s, he shows the same elaborate command of historical detail and social milieu that he demonstrated so effectively in "Tortilla Curtain," which dealt with Mexican immigration into California in the 1980s, and "Friend of the Earth," which parodied radical environmentalists. But "Drop City" may be his most sophisticated work to date because here he seems more willing than ever to let the colorful characters he creates follow their own paths. The social studies final exam questions that risked taking over his previous novels - à la Sinclair Lewis - here recede into subtler and more unresolvable themes.

The story follows the aimless experience of a young woman named Star, who's escaped her stultifying suburban parents in the Midwest to join 60 cool "chicks" and "cats" in Drop City, a free-love commune in California. Their leader, a mildly charismatic trust-fund liberal named Norm Spender, enforces a policy he calls "LATWIDNO" (Land Access to Which Is Denied No One), which reminds one of another two-letter acronym that we can't print in the Monitor.

At first, "this was the life Star had envisioned," Boyle writes, "a life of peace and tranquility, of love and meditation and faith in the ordinary, no pretense, no games, no plastic yearning after the almighty dollar." But when we meet her after three weeks of "grooving" - eating, smoking, and sleeping in one big happy privacy-free family - "she was thinking she'd had enough."

The Drop City commune would be paradise if only it didn't contain any people. Three weeks of flatulent bean stew, drug-numbed headaches, and coerced sex dressed up in the lingerie of free love are enough to soil Star's Edenic dream.

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