Excerpt from Drop City by T.C. Boyle, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was another morning. This one came in over the treetops with a glow that was purely natural because she hadn't been high for three days now because Ronnie was busy with Merry and the big tits woman, who was twenty-seven years old as it turned out and worked as a secretary for some shipping company. Her name was Lydia, and she'd found a welcoming mattress or two and decided to stay on and screw her job and the plastic world and her big straining flesh-cutting brassieres and the hair pins and makeup and all the rest. Star was indifferent. It wasn't as if she was in love with Ronnie or anything, she told herself. It was just that he was from back home and they'd been together on the road all that time, through the big bread pan of Iowa, yellow Nebraska, New Mexico in its shield of crumbling brown, brick-red Arizona, singing along to the Stones, Under My Thumb, Goin' Home, home, home, home. That was something. Sure it was. But as she maneuvered the bucket in under the first of the goats, she realized she was feeling good, clean and pure and good, without hangups or hassles, for the first time in as long as she could remember.

The moment was electric, and she could feel it through the soles of her bare feet, through her every pore: this was the life she'd envisioned when she left home, 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. She'd got her first inkling of what it could be like back at home with Ronnie, with some people he knew who'd rented a collection of stone cottages in deep woods no more than a mile off the main highway. She and Ronnie would go there most nights, even nights when she had to get up and work in the morning, because she was living at her parents' still and this was a place where you could kick out your legs, drop all pretense and just be yourself. People from the surrounding cottages would gather in the last one down the row - two sisters from Florida had the place, JoJo and Suzie - because it was the biggest and it had a stone fireplace Suzie's boyfriend kept stoked all the time.

JoJo was older, twenty-four or twenty-five, and she'd been part of a commune in Vermont for a while - a place called Further - and on the good nights, when everybody wasn't so stoned they just sank wordlessly into the pillows on the floor and let the heartbeat of the stereo take over for them, JoJo used to reminisce about it. She'd gone there just after high school, alone, with six dollars in her pocket and a copy of The Dharma Bums under one arm, hooked up with a cat, and stayed three years. Her eyes would draw into themselves as she talked, and the ash on her cigarette would go white. She'd sit at the kitchen table and tell Star about the way it was when you could live with a group of people who just lit you up day and night, your real appointed mystical brothers and sisters, selected out of all the world just for you, and about the simple joys of baking bread or collecting eggs or boiling down the thin, faintly sweet sap of the sugar maples till you had a syrup that was liquid gold, like nothing anybody ever bought in a store.

Ronnie would be out in the main room - he was into heroin then - nodding and scratching and talking in a graveyard voice about cars or stereos or bands, and JoJo would have a pot of something going on the stove just in case anybody got hungry, and they did, they would, practically every night. This wasn't a commune - it wasn't anything more than a bunch of young people, hip people, choosing to live next door to one another - but to Star it seemed absolute. You could show up there, in any one of those cottages, at any time of the day or night and there'd always be someone to talk to, share a new record with - or a poem or drugs or food. Star would settle into the old rug by the fireplace, shoulder-to-shoulder with Ronnie, and listen to music all night long while a pipe or a joint went round, and when she wanted to just gossip or show off a new pair of boots or jewelry, she had Suzie and JoJo and half a dozen other girls to relate to, and they were like sisters, like dormmates, only better.

Reprinted from Drop City by T. C. Boyle by permission of Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2003 T. C. Boyle, all rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.