In T.C. Boyle’s Trippy New Novel, Characters Turn On, Tune In and Drop Lots of Acid

With a soft spot for the crackpot, Boyle
has, over many years and novels, made hay with American iconoclasts and
ideologues, myopic seers who strive against the currents of convention.
We are an experimental nation — a nation of spectacular hypotheses and
failures — and Boyle has been drawn repeatedly to doomed schemes and
communities (the biosphere, the hippie commune, the wellness cure,
etc.). He writes with a youthful and sustained energy that parallels the
zeal of his dreamers, and that ultimately attenuates their failures.
There are few writers who seem more American.