T.C. Boyle, whose plot-hungry novels frequently deal with illusory utopias, is taking on the hippies, writes Donald Clarke
'Literature saved my life," says T. Coraghessan Boyle, his face closing round a smile. I'm not sure if he is serious or if he is ironically adopting the tone of the talk show hosts we have just been discussing who regard literature as a therapeutic aid. "It's crazy, but it's true," he says.
The notion of literature - or anything else - remaking the young T. C. Boyle is particularly puzzling given this is a writer whose fat, plot-hungry novels have frequently dealt with illusory utopias, with the false comfort that comes from believing that one big idea can transform a life. The Road to Wellville told the story of the eccentric dietician Dr Kellogg; Riven Rock touched on the birth of modern psychiatry; A Friend of the Earth concerned itself with the future of the ecology movement and now his ninth novel, Drop City, gets to grips with the hippie culture of the early 1970s.
"Of course you can make a direct correlation between The Road to Wellville and all the charlatans running around today, offering cures for everything," he says, by way of explanation. "When, of course, what ails us is mortality. But I am very distrustful of leaders. Growing up in the hippie era we were trained to know no gods or masters. And what horrifies me is how susceptible people are, how afraid they are of their own individuality, how open they are to people who say: 'Follow me'."
With his long hair, beard and black jeans, you might argue that there is still a scent of the Age of Aquarius hanging about T. C. Boyle. But he is a tidy man. The hair is neat and the beard is trimmed. Imagine a Confederate general dressed by The Ramones and you will get some sense of the impression the writer creates.
He has weathered his 54 years well, only a slight stringiness round the neck revealing the truth to those who might take him for 10 years younger. A workaholic, who has managed to produce a novel a year while teaching creative writing at the University of Southern California, Boyle obviously relishes the life of the saved.
His has been a classic American story of resistance against malevolent fate. Raised in Peekskill, New York, he lost both parents at an early age to alcohol abuse. I assume it was a pretty awful childhood.
"No, not at all. I never saw it that way," he says. "My parents always had a job. My father was the eldest of eight Irish Catholic children and his father was a drunk, so he was raised in an orphanage.
"Then later, just when he was doing well for himself, the war came along; he was in the Normandy landings. Before the war my mother said he was just like me - funny, full of life. But he was very morose during the whole time I knew him. He gave up on life and drank himself to death at 54. His death could really be considered a suicide." His mother remarried to another boozer and died shortly thereafter "trying to be 16 and drunk all the time".
Traditionally people with this sort of background are wary of alcohol, but Boyle seems able to drink socially without ending up in the same dark places as his parents. (Indeed, when I meet him the following day, he is nursing a hangover that he hatched with the assistance of Roddy Doyle.) Is he never concerned that he might have a genetic disposition towards alcoholism?
"Oh I have every possible fear," he laughs. "But I was talking to my Aunt Millie - my father's sister - recently and I said to her that I was worried about this, and she said, 'Oh, if it was going to happen, it would have happened a long time ago'. After all, I was able to give up heroin." Not even somebody with as potent a gift for narrative as Boyle himself possesses could invent his early life.
"It was quite Dickensian," he says. "I barely graduated from college, and if I hadn't, I'd have been drafted and, quite possibly, executed. I was hanging around New York in the early Seventies and doing various bad things. After about two years I realised that if you're a junkie or an alcoholic you must want to be."
Boyle was rescued from drugs and apathy by the writing workshop at the University of Iowa. Having written a few stories, he secured a place on the prestigious course where he was taught by luminaries such as John Irving and John Cheever. Since then he has barely rested. If he is not writing, he is teaching; if he's not teaching, he is on a publicity tour. He has also found time to stay married for 30 years and raise three children.
An amateur psychologist might suggest that he works so hard to avoid dwelling on his troubled past. Is he frightened of being idle?
"Maybe, yeah," he says. "I look at the welfare state and the ghettos it created, particularly in the African-American communities. Put anybody in a room with no job and they will become addicted to something. I would be."
In the years since he left Iowa, Boyle has honed a vigorously utilitarian prose style and a gift for producing wide, busy narratives. Eschewing the post-modern hucksterism of the McSweeney's set and the interior focus of the Updike tendency, Boyle has dedicated himself to story.
"Yes, absolutely," he says. "Story is the most important thing. When I began to write in the 1970s, my heroes were Gabriel García Márquez, John Barth, Robert Coover, writers who were in control of the larger canvass. But as that period came into decline, many of them became fussy, pompous and difficult without any reward. They lost sight of the fact that literature - all art, in fact - is entertainment at root. That is not to demean it; that's what it is for."
Drop City satisfies that criterion pretty nicely. Bringing together the worlds of Richard Brautigan and Jack London into an unlikely coalition, the novel tells the story of a Californian hippie commune that relocates itself to Alaska in late 1970. Once there, the flower children rub up against the hardy locals whose own anti-authoritarianism is combined with a robust practicality that the hippies, to their cost, lack.
The main contrast is between Pamela, a focused woman, who moves to a remote cabin with the husband she found through an advertisement, and Star, an airy hippie, who encapsulates both the movement's optimism and its naïveté.
"Yes, Pamela is infected by the same paranoia that you see in America today among many right-wing groups who think that society is going to collapse around them. They retreat to the hills and stockpile their weapons. And, yes, she and the hippies have the same intentions. But she doesn't want to build a wider, communal Utopia; she wants a one-on-one utopia."
Of course, the communal idyll does not last. Petty jealousies emerge, power struggles develop and Drop City becomes as riddled with hypocrisy as the suburbs its inhabitants have fled.
"There was a real non-conformist conformity," Boyle explains. This is demonstrated by a good running joke that sees Star having to constantly remind herself to call the guys "cats". "All of this we're aware of now. But we weren't at the time. At the time I was just like Star, just doing things without knowing why."
The book is also ruthless in revealing the movement's unreconstructed views of race and gender. Even in this bright new dawn, the women were expected to stay in the kitchen.
"I discovered it all in retrospect," he says, slightly guiltily. "For the first time, I actually had to do research for a historical novel set in a period in which I had lived. Two years after the novel takes place, the feminist movement kicked into its radical phase. That might have been one of the reasons why. But, at the time, I just didn't question it, just like you didn't question what you were doing with drugs."
This novel could not have been set in 1972 or 1973. By that time, the hippies were no longer a force in (or, more pertinently, outside of) society. What happened?
"If you espouse an openness, much as you do when you are three years old, there will always be somebody who is a bit more sophisticated who will hurt you, who will take advantage of you. And that's what happened. The hippies bred Charlie Manson, for example. There was only a limited time that people could go dizzily around before some predator arrived. It's like life on earth."
Manson? Once again, Boyle is discussing malign gurus. I suspect he has such mistrust of Utopian messiahs because he managed to extricate himself from a wretched place without any help from anybody. But, ironically, he admits that many readers do look to him for guidance and support.
"I'll leave you with this one thought," he says. "Recently a girl - she was 17 or 18 - came up to me at a reading and said that, in this time of war, there were two artists helping her through it: me and Britney Spears."
Well, that's nice. But doesn't he object to his books being used as self-help manuals?
"I never dwell too deeply on that," he laughs. "'Your book changed my life', they say. Thank you. Goodbye. I don't want to know how or why?"
Drop City by T. C. Boyle is published by Bloomsbury. £16.99