The master of show, don't tell

My first T.C. Boyle experience: Drop City, first published in 2003.

Very quickly: this book is about a hippie commune that gets run out of the SF Bay Area and tries to live off the land in Alaska.

Not so quickly: Something started happening to me after the first 100 pages or so of this book. I began to feel like I had read it before, like I had walked through the original Drop City house in Sonoma County, smoked cigarettes with Star and Merry and rode in their Merry Pranksters-like bus. Some of it could have been flashbacks to my Phish-following, camp-counseling college days, but mostly it was just this unbelievable familiarity Boyle created that brought this on. (Aside: I have since watched a bit of that movie The Beach that came out in 2000 with Leonardo DiCaprio after the book of the same name and the similarities are a little unsettling.)

Anyway, I don't know much about Boyle, but a quick scan of reviews and the criticism was heavy. He is both praised as one of the great novelists of the last few decades and accused of foregoing any real substance for a quick laugh. Sounds smart enough. And I totally get it. For the most part, Drop City and residents are thrown under that Merry Pranksters bus at the end, a big easy-way-out no-no according to one of my creative writing teachers.

Overall, this ended up being a hurried read. I rushed through it, and I'm not sure why. It wasn't exactly to find out what would happen as the characters depth gave way to hypocrisy and vulnerability. They went from people I was getting to know to people I did not want to know.

But one thing is for sure: Boyle is the master of showing, not telling. That's harder than it sounds. During my days as a reporter, when deadlines would allow, I would go through my articles sentence by sentence turning each one from a crappy, "The board voted 5-0 ..." to a "Children will no longer be able to check books out of the library because of a unanimous vote." Again, the deadlines. Sometimes they don't allow this. And neither does 11:15 p.m.

Someday, I hope this comes more naturally. Until then, I will give the T.C. Boyle catalog another try. Any suggestions?



Boyle, did he slip?