Poppa John

by Larry Woiwode

A "dead" soap-opera star in his seventies is compelled to deal with the inconsistencies of his life and to free himself from the powers that have used, and then forsaken, him

Genres: Novels, Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Larry Woiwode was designated Poet Laureate of North Dakota by the Legislative Assembly in 1995. He served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973-74; and from 1983-88 was a tenured professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and director of its Creative Writing Program.

Larry Woiwode’s fiction has appeared in Antaeus, Antioch Review, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Harpers, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and many other publications; his poetry has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Poetry North, Tar River Poetry, Transatlantic Review, Works in Progress, and other publications and venues, including broadsides and anthologies.

His novels and his memoirs are widely acclaimed and his writings have been translated into a dozen languages and earned him international recognition: he is the recipient of the William Faulkner Foundation Award, 1969; has been a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971-72; a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, 1975; chosen by the American Association of Publishers for a novel to present to the White House Library, 1976; is recipient of an Award in Literature from the National Institute and American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1980; of the John Dos Passos Prize (for a diverse body of work), 1991; and of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2001. He has also received North Dakota’s highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, conferred by Governor Sinner, in 1992; and in 2011 received the Emeritus Award from the High Plains Awards Committee, for “A Body of Work as Vast as the West.” His recent publications include Words Made Fresh, and The Invention of Lefse, published in 2011 by Crossway Books. His new novel Blackburn Bay is nearly ready to be viewed by agents and publishers, and in 2010 he completed a new book of short stories

Reviews

[Brad Wilber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Larry Woiwode (d. 2022) was a friend of my late writing teacher John Leax (d. 2024). They were members of the Chrysostom Society together in its first decade. I'm a big fan of LW's van Eenanam novels and Beyond the Bedroom Wall, but this one misfired for me. The prose screams "talent" and yet sentence after sentence was overwritten so that many paragraphs gummy and occluded; only sometimes did the words really flow and breathe in service of the story. The action unfolds (mostly) over the course of a single day (Dec 23) and proceeds fairly predictably -- an elderly actor, whose soap opera character enjoys pervasive public recognition, is written off the show. His wallet is feeling the pinch at Christmas, so he defers shopping in favor of a bar crawl and yes, face-to-face entreaties with his rather callous young agent. Dour flashbacks to his Irish-Catholic childhood. Scriptural and spiritual elements seemed to lack lucid integration ... although it may have been precisely the point that these were as muddled as the rest. I'm happy enough to have read it but it's not the author's best.

[Eric Wyatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm so close to giving this book 4 stars, but I just can't. There is much to learn from the narrative. I'll probably read it again. But there were enough annoyances that broke me away from the story world and made me think, too often & during the reading, about technique and structure.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous prose.