Long hair; lots of colors; far out; promiscuous sex; “give peace a chance.”

That’s generally the beginning and end of the story on hippies today. Small children can recognize them in pictures and conservatives sling the word as an insult to anyone an inch to the left of moderate. But it’s been a while since anyone has taken a close look at hippies. And no, that cheesy ’60s miniseries doesn’t count.

T.C. Boyle’s “Drop City” is a welcome return to the subject of hippie culture. The novel follows an idealistic commune from its original home in California to sparsely-populated Alaska.

Boyle is a fabulous storyteller, as his richly-imagined community, Drop City, proves. Readers will quickly be drawn into the day-to-day lives of a group of people who run away from the confines of family and jobs, relishing in the pipe-dream of living off the land. Eventually, the inevitable frailty of this system becomes clear.

To survive in the barren Alaskan wilderness – where dark skies and 40-below temperatures strand residents in their cabins for months at a time – one must be smart, stealthy and most of all, prepared.

It’s not difficult to imagine the logistical nightmare of moving a campful of naïve, sun-kissed dreamers to an abandoned plot of land three hours from any kind of civilization. But that’s exactly what happens when Drop City, fondly called the Land Access To Which Is Denied No One, is demolished by city officials because it doesn’t have a proper sanitation system.

The group’s journey is paralleled by the surprisingly intriguing story of their nearest Alaskan neighbors, Pamela and Sess Harding.

Pamela is a city girl, scared by the war-crazed society she thinks is about to collapse. If everyone sat around and did drugs all day, she reasons, no one would grow food. “They’d eat your food, and when they were done with that, they’d eat you, just like in that science fiction book where all the dead and dying were made into potted meat,” she says at one point.

So she resolves to find herself the toughest, most reliable Alaskan bushman she can – Sess – and marry him. And what’s left is to watch the whole drama unfold: a busload of hippies trying to build houses and collect food before winter sets in and Pamela and Sess adapting to life together in an impossibly small cabin.

Of course, the truest characters in the book are the ones who break the stereotypes. There is Star, who thinks she can find someone willing to commit to her alone in a free-love hippie commune; Marco, whose lustful desire to kill a moose doesn’t mesh with the other characters’ vegetarian palates. Ronnie, who eventually grows delusional with memories of easy chairs and microwaveable dinners.

But the hippies the establishment has always loved to make fun of are there in full force, too – the peaceniks who resist arrest and the children to whom nobody pays any attention until one of them drinks some juice laced with acid.

Not surprisingly, Boyle’s Drop City community isn’t the utopia those wearing rose-colored glasses like to paint. The biggest assumption, quickly blown out of the water by Boyle, is that living in a hippie commune is just one threesome after another with no second thoughts or regrets.

The truth is much more complicated than that. Both the women and men try to pretend it doesn’t bother them when the person they just had sex with runs off and sleeps with someone else, but time after time, feelings are crushed.

Though each resident proclaims the virtues of free love, they are eventually pitted against each other in a very funny scene where a case of crabs becomes the scarlet letter of promiscuity as it spreads across the commune, clearly labeling those who are committed and those who are less so.

The book is a bit too long, coming in at 444 pages. Several of the subplots, including those of a small group of men who gang-rape a young girl and a bitter enemy of Sess who is hell-bent on destroying his life, are left undeveloped and could have been eliminated.

But the length isn’t too much of an impediment to how well the novel reads. It’s a fascinating story, and anyone growing weary of a life of 9-5 jobs and suburban living should read it and take solace. In the end, Drop City is a story about how it’s much easier to run away from society’s conventions than to actually survive without them. It takes 20 hippies and one newlywed couple a long, hard winter to learn that lesson.

This book was provided for review by Barnes & Noble Booksellers at the Lennox Town Center.