Boonville is a book that is funny and witty in places, but plodding and unfocused in others. Its most consistent flaw, however, is that the humor is too broad and cliched to be more than slightly amusing. Gun-toting rednecks who drive (while intoxicated, naturally) pick-up trucks and muscle cars, man-hating, cliche-spouting feminists, and pot-smoking hippies are such easy targets that to do these type of characters justice, you have to give them a little more nuance and depth than Anderson does here.

John Gibson is the protagonist and "straight man" of this novel, a young man who moves from Miami to his deceased grandmother's cabin in Boonville, California. As soon as he arrives in Boonville, the reader sees that this is going to be one of these places, common in books and indie movies, where almost every character is quirky and offbeat in one way or another. The residents of Boonville are so isolated from mainstream society that they have their own language. This is more distracting than amusing, as most of the time I couldn't figure out what the speakers of this dialect were supposed to be saying.

John has recently broken up with his girlfriend, and is tired of his job and family in Miami. He has conveniently inherited his eccentric grandmother's cabin. The grandmother had been considered weird even by Boonville's standards, and when John arrives he finds himself surrounded by bizarre squirrel sculptures. In typical novelistic timing, the first time John walks into a Boonville pub, he meets a beautiful young woman, Sarah McKay, who was raised on a local hippie commune. Sarah, unfortunately, has a crazy ex-husband who stalks John for the rest of the novel.

The commune were Sarah lives with a seemingly endless variety of hippie freaks, is another chance for Anderson to go completely over the top with the attempts at humor. It's hard to imagine such a community actually functioning, as most of the residents, as described here, are practically foaming at the mouth. Some, labeled as "future primitives," literally walk around on all fours and grunt like animals all day. Others are breeding mutant rodents for deviant sexual practices. Some of the humor in this book sounds like it was conceived when the author was seriously stoned. As is well known, such states can distort your sense of what is brilliant and meaningful.

Despite these criticisms, I can't say that Boonville is a bad novel. I found it compelling enough to finish it rather quickly, though I did skip over some passages. There is some good writing here, and the basic archetypal theme of someone traveling to a distant place to find himself makes for an interesting story.

I'm still not sure what picture of Boonville (an actual place) the reader is meant to leave this novel with. Sarah finds it to be a place she desperately needs to escape, and when you consider all of the dysfunctional misfits who inhabit it, this seems like a sound judgment. However, at the same time, John seems to feel at home here, for reasons that are less than obvious, aside from a feeling of connection with his grandmother.

Boonville is Anderson's first novel, and he definitely shows promise here. One reason I was a little disappointed with it is that it managed to garner so many great reviews on the back cover that I was expecting something extraordinary. It is mostly a good read and did make me laugh in places, and depending on your sense of humor you might love it, as some readers apparently do.

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