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A review by peterongcook
American Pop by Snowden Wright
3.0
Wright is a talented writer. When you read American Pop, you easily find yourself interested in what’s going on in nice prose with a somewhat sophisticated vocabulary.
The story takes place through a series of time jumps. We start at a New Years party and meet all of the main characters, but then the story just starts transitioning from time frame to time frame anywhere over the span of about 120 years where tangents become plot points. I’m not opposed to this kind of writing, but I feel like it was done because it’s the author’s trademark device that he does well, and not because it serves the narrative.
There’s no cadence or pattern to the time jumps. There is a gradual release of narrative that I think is supposed to be linear in some aspect that isn’t temporal, but I don’t see why it couldn’t have been temporal or perhaps used a less frenetic method of time jumping.
Some of the transitions were okay, and kind of natural. There are some stretches though, where we get something like “so-and-so walked past a shop where so-and-so was eating. That guy did this thing that is related to this other thing. This other thing was playing on the radio when yet another person was driving down the street 50 years earlier. That person drove past the next person I’m going to talk about.” Not all time jump transitions are that egregious, but enough were that I felt it was kind of insulting. Other people may like this though.
Otherwise, this book is a fine chapter in its genre, which is a multi-generational rags-to-riches-and-downfall-of-a-dynasty book. We follow a family over 5 generations, from industrial London to post-civil war Mississippi to the 1980s. We get to see people get rich and be rich and have problems like us, or rich people problems. I enjoyed that part of the story. I kind of wished we could have spent more time with the 4th generation people, but I think they had to be obscured for one of the main plot tragedies.
I’d read another Snowden Wright book. This one was alright.
The story takes place through a series of time jumps. We start at a New Years party and meet all of the main characters, but then the story just starts transitioning from time frame to time frame anywhere over the span of about 120 years where tangents become plot points. I’m not opposed to this kind of writing, but I feel like it was done because it’s the author’s trademark device that he does well, and not because it serves the narrative.
There’s no cadence or pattern to the time jumps. There is a gradual release of narrative that I think is supposed to be linear in some aspect that isn’t temporal, but I don’t see why it couldn’t have been temporal or perhaps used a less frenetic method of time jumping.
Some of the transitions were okay, and kind of natural. There are some stretches though, where we get something like “so-and-so walked past a shop where so-and-so was eating. That guy did this thing that is related to this other thing. This other thing was playing on the radio when yet another person was driving down the street 50 years earlier. That person drove past the next person I’m going to talk about.” Not all time jump transitions are that egregious, but enough were that I felt it was kind of insulting. Other people may like this though.
Otherwise, this book is a fine chapter in its genre, which is a multi-generational rags-to-riches-and-downfall-of-a-dynasty book. We follow a family over 5 generations, from industrial London to post-civil war Mississippi to the 1980s. We get to see people get rich and be rich and have problems like us, or rich people problems. I enjoyed that part of the story. I kind of wished we could have spent more time with the 4th generation people, but I think they had to be obscured for one of the main plot tragedies.
I’d read another Snowden Wright book. This one was alright.