Who would have thought that T.C. Boyle would write a defining novel about the hippie side of the 1960s? Yet in "Drop City," Boyle has written a vastly entertaining tale that balances the exuberance and the excesses, the promise and the preposterousness of the counterculture perhaps better than any other work of American fiction. It's not a satire, though it's often very funny; not a mere exercise in nostalgia, though every detail shines with what seems to be Boyle's total recall. It's realistic.T.C. Boyle a realist? He has done many things in fiction, antic and outrageous things; his career trajectory, from "East Is East" through "The Road to Wellville," "The Tortilla Curtain," "Riven Rock" and "A Friend of the Earth," resembles the multiple, fizzing arcs of fireworks. But here he arrives at something solid. Not just because of the details -- though after reading "Drop City," we almost feel we could build a log-and-sod hut, cook moose stew or camp out in the snow at 40 below ourselves -- not just because Boyle, instead of circling above his characters as before, comes down among them and sees their genuineness as clearly as their pretensions; but because we can finish this book and think: Yes, that's probably how it really was.

-- Michael Harris

*

Dumb Luck, A Novel; Vu Trong Phung; Translated from the Vietnamese by Peter Zinoman and Nguyen Nguyet Cam; University of Michigan Press: 190 pp., $19.95

The Western world knows little of the fine tradition of Vietnamese literature, although a few works have made their way abroad in recent years since Vietnam's doi moi reforms and the encouraging of fuller cultural expression. Now, for the first time, a novel by Vu Trong Phung, a brilliant and prolific satirist who has been compared to Balzac and lauded as arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of this rich literary period, has been published in English. Banned by the North Vietnamese authorities until 1986, his works later became required reading in schools and are now as integral to Vietnam's educational system as "The Catcher in the Rye" or "The Grapes of Wrath" are to our own.

Before dying in 1939 of the combined effects of tuberculosis and opium addiction one week shy of his 27th birthday, Phung had written eight novels, seven plays, several dozen short stories, five book-length works of nonfiction reportage and hundreds of reviews, essays and articles. His best-known work, "Dumb Luck," which first appeared in serialized form in a Hanoi newspaper in 1936, has now been translated into English by a husband and wife team of academics from UC Berkeley, Peter Zinoman and Nguyen Nguyet Cam.