Mr. Wright’s imagined history of the rise and fall of the sugary drink empire is so robust and recognizable that you might feel nostalgic for the taste of a soda you’ve never had ... Mr. Wright loads his account with feuds, shifting alliances and skeletons in the closet ... The dizzying structure places the emphasis on spectacular incidents rather than sustained drama, so, perhaps fittingly, the short chapters go down like snack food.
Succeeds almost in spite of itself, risking the generally ill-advised gambit of a first-person plural narrator ... Though too untethered to a timeline and too peppered with sobering spoilers to comprise a traditional rise-and-fall story, American Pop delivers a wondrously mosaic-like, multigenerational chronicle ... It’s almost as if Wright’s aim is to interpret rather than tell a story that exists only in his telling ... what makes Houghton Forster’s family quintessential is profound and unerringly relatable personal dissolution and pain, invariably made more burdensome by the family’s prominence ... It’s not always entirely clear when Wright is weaving references to real or imaginary historians into the book, but that’s half the fun ... it’s hard to fault a book suffused with so many delightful and rewarding surprises for confounding expectations one more time.
The effervescent opening scene of Snowden Wright’s second novel never goes flat—and the same goes for the rest of the novel ... In the vein of To Kill A Mockingbird and more recent classics like The Twelve-Mile Straight and Miss Jane, American Pop explores the South’s dark side. A probing cultural history, the book is also a literary innovation: The time and place shift from paragraph to paragraph, and its main characters are all antiheros, cathartic and prophetic more than admirable, while the outliers, the family’s dark-skinned 'help,' become heroes ... In its fluid sense of setting and unorthodox cast, the novel rebuffs nostalgia with a fresh perspective. A bubbling satire, American Pop explodes into more than a family portrait; it is our continuing American saga.
Wonderfully written, with fascinating, deeply memorable characters, American Pop is a vivid reminder of the power of a family to build an empire and move a nation.
... American Pop is memorably, noticeably good ... The story... is, in Wright’s hands, a massively complicated and consistently absorbing chronicle of human weakness in all its forms ... This prodigality of detail, this lavishing of backstory on every single walk-on character, is something of a narrative reflex throughout the book. Wright lodges the stories of his fictional family in a larger meta-chronicle, usually with a very smooth effectiveness ... mightily entertaining...
Sweeping yet intimate ... Wright’s nonchronological zipping between characters creates a complex, engaging mosaic leavened with wry humor. Real and imagined scholarly citations provide context, and a subplot about the soda’s secret ingredient offers intrigue. This smart and tragic exploration of American history will make a splash among fans of family sagas.
The plot’s discontinuity is aggravated by an insouciant disregard for chronology. An arch, omniscient authorial voice dips into multiple psyches, and here Wright almost succeeds in holding our interest ... Flashbacks and flash-forwards abound, and often, on the verge of a crucial revelation, the action digresses along some anecdotal path, never to return ... Too much exposition is not the problem here—it's too little relevant information.
