American Pop
“Southerners are only as good as their ability to tell a story,” writes Snowden Wright. His terrific novel American Pop proves Wright to be a good Southerner, indeed. This dark, rollicking saga breaks the rules by mixing non-fiction, fiction, and meta-fiction in a non-linear, rags-to-riches-to-rags-again tale of the Forster family, the Mississippi dynasty ruling over the fictional Panola Cola kingdom, and does it so breezily and assuredly that one almost wonders why those silly rules ever existed in the first place. And yet: among the entitled Forsters, it’s difficult to find a character worth caring about. Points of view and timelines shift frequently and unpredictably, dropping plot threads—and what do they matter, anyway, when Wright has laced his book with spoilers revealing everyone’s fate in advance?
Readers who prefer the traditional narrative arc may feel disappointed and even annoyed enough to abandon American Pop. Abandon, instead, your preconceived notions of what a novel should be and do, and you may find yourself, as I did, turning the pages eagerly to read Wright’s next story, and then the next, timeline and tension be damned. Along the way, you’ll learn curious and unflattering truths about upper-class white Southern culture (finally, an explanation for why so many Southern men have two last names!), get a smattering of quotes from real-life historians and biographers, and read vivid, inventive, intelligent writing that only sometimes feels self-indulgent, and even then ebulliently so. Your reward, at the end: a wonderful, “aha” ending and, if you’re like me, an almost irresistible desire to read the book again.
