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Pop!
When Mark Polanzak was seventeen, his father spontaneously combusted on the tennis court, vanishing forever.
It is also entirely possible that he died of a heart attack.
Either way, his father’s death is a story Polanzak spends much of his life trying to get right. POP! captures the absurdity and authenticity of the grieving process with grace and humor.
It is also entirely possible that he died of a heart attack.
Either way, his father’s death is a story Polanzak spends much of his life trying to get right. POP! captures the absurdity and authenticity of the grieving process with grace and humor.
Unknown Binding
First published March 22, 2016
262 people want to read
About the author
Mark Polanzak
10 books8 followersMark Polanzak is the author of the BOA Short Fiction Prize-Winning collection, The OK End of Funny Town, forthcoming May, 2020 from BOA Editions, and the hybrid fiction/memoir, POP! (Stillhouse, 2016). His stories have appeared in The Southern Review and The American Scholar, and anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process and a contributor to the podcast, The Fail Safe. A graduate of the University of Arizona's MFA program in fiction, Mark teaches writing and literature at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He lives in Salem, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 22, 2018
First off, in the interests of full disclosure: I am friends with several of the people who edited this book since I was classmates with them for a year in grad school. You may take that for what it's worth.
Pop! is maybe the most original book I've ever read. In one sense, it's a grief narrative about the author remembering his later father. In another sense, it's a memoir about a writer trying to figure out how to tell the story of his father's death. A good deal of it is clearly intended to be fictional, too. The through line takes place over a few days as Polanzak prepares to attend and speak at a meeting for people whose fathers have died. Along the way we get lots of flashbacks, meditations, philosophy and some visits to Polanzak's father's grave. Polanzak shows us old short stories of his, some of which are incomplete, most of which feature a young man whose father has exploded. The stories are, on the whole, not very good, reading like grad-school-workshop-apprentice-type stories, which is what they are. But Polanzak makes them work by acknowledging in the text that the stories don't really work. They serve to pull the story along the through line, because you hope that maybe in the next one Polanzak will get it right, that he'll finally be able to explain to us (and himself) how his father's death makes him feel. All of this adds up to a messy, freewheeling, charmingly unrestrained book. If I were scoring it off only its structure and conceit, I would give it five stars, hands down.
The feature holding me back from giving it a higher score is the prose style. The book contains a great deal of variety in terms of voice, but for much of it Polanzak prefers a clipped, choppy syntax, like this:
"We like geniuses in fiction. We like to think that it's all chance. We read a book, and declare: GENIUS! We think, lucky them. But also, lucky us for being at least smart enough to recognize genius. Dummies don't see this stuff right. We picture the eccentricity of the genius. We know that it's divine intervention on the page. This makes us happy. We can go on, because we're mediocre. Because it was all chance, and we were not selected. Phew."
It's certainly not bad. The prose is often insightful and inventive, and it reflects a great deal of care. And much of the book doesn't read like this. But I generally prefer a more languid voice, with greater variety in length between the clauses (I'm a great admirer of Michael Chabon's prose, for instance). I'm also very much prejudiced in favor of complete sentences with proper grammar, a byproduct of working as a writing tutor for as long as I have. If you like the way the above text reads, then you'll probably like the prose more than I did, but I find it difficult to fall in love with a book if I don't love the way the sentences sound.
In no way, though, am I suggesting that this makes Pop! a bad book. I'm grateful to have read it. I will be on the lookout for Polanzak's future work and hopeful that it's as inventive as this book is.
Pop! is maybe the most original book I've ever read. In one sense, it's a grief narrative about the author remembering his later father. In another sense, it's a memoir about a writer trying to figure out how to tell the story of his father's death. A good deal of it is clearly intended to be fictional, too. The through line takes place over a few days as Polanzak prepares to attend and speak at a meeting for people whose fathers have died. Along the way we get lots of flashbacks, meditations, philosophy and some visits to Polanzak's father's grave. Polanzak shows us old short stories of his, some of which are incomplete, most of which feature a young man whose father has exploded. The stories are, on the whole, not very good, reading like grad-school-workshop-apprentice-type stories, which is what they are. But Polanzak makes them work by acknowledging in the text that the stories don't really work. They serve to pull the story along the through line, because you hope that maybe in the next one Polanzak will get it right, that he'll finally be able to explain to us (and himself) how his father's death makes him feel. All of this adds up to a messy, freewheeling, charmingly unrestrained book. If I were scoring it off only its structure and conceit, I would give it five stars, hands down.
The feature holding me back from giving it a higher score is the prose style. The book contains a great deal of variety in terms of voice, but for much of it Polanzak prefers a clipped, choppy syntax, like this:
"We like geniuses in fiction. We like to think that it's all chance. We read a book, and declare: GENIUS! We think, lucky them. But also, lucky us for being at least smart enough to recognize genius. Dummies don't see this stuff right. We picture the eccentricity of the genius. We know that it's divine intervention on the page. This makes us happy. We can go on, because we're mediocre. Because it was all chance, and we were not selected. Phew."
It's certainly not bad. The prose is often insightful and inventive, and it reflects a great deal of care. And much of the book doesn't read like this. But I generally prefer a more languid voice, with greater variety in length between the clauses (I'm a great admirer of Michael Chabon's prose, for instance). I'm also very much prejudiced in favor of complete sentences with proper grammar, a byproduct of working as a writing tutor for as long as I have. If you like the way the above text reads, then you'll probably like the prose more than I did, but I find it difficult to fall in love with a book if I don't love the way the sentences sound.
In no way, though, am I suggesting that this makes Pop! a bad book. I'm grateful to have read it. I will be on the lookout for Polanzak's future work and hopeful that it's as inventive as this book is.
August 4, 2020
I almost quit on page three. I thought, oh great, another pithy, too clever by half jaunt into white dude world, but I decided to give it until page 30 to decide. By page seven, I was hooked. I love me a braided personal essay - and some would put this book-length labyrinth at the Speculative Nonfiction table. The author does a fantastic weave of memoir over the course of one week happening in the present (well, the present in which the majority of the book was written/compiled/edited), fictional takes on his father's death, and fictional/nonfictional pieces about being a writer, and other important characters he's accumulated along the way. And believe it or not, he ties it all off in the end and totally sticks the landing. Blown away.
February 10, 2024
I'm challenged to find words for this one. "Witty" is too shallow a word. "Original" doesn't have enough depth either. The raw emotions that seeped from every chapter made me feel like I knew the main characters personally. I felt compelled to underline passages that gave me nostalgia and ones that I will go back to for courage and inspiration during tough times .
I did have to stop myself from rushing through the pages because there is a good amount of build up and suspense. I didn't want the story to be over.
I did have to stop myself from rushing through the pages because there is a good amount of build up and suspense. I didn't want the story to be over.
December 17, 2024
Polanzak's POP! is a moving, joyful, witty, and at times wry portrayal of the emotion that humans universally grapple with: grief. His novel is somewhat like a tennis match in the way that he engages with grief itself, for the journey through life after the loss of a loved one is a life defined by its unpredictability. An individual, like a tennis ball, being struck and hit back and forth into the oscillating, often opposing emotional extremes that characterize the depths of grief.
My favorite part of his story was the fact that it was not one alone. That there were all of these different intersecting narratives, displaying the complexity of existence and just the sheer amount of ways that grief can announce itself in one's life. The most poignant image of grief, to me, stood out at the toilet on the front lawn, left behind by the father, expected to be moved one day. In a lot of aspects grief is like this toilet, odd and out of place, almost demanding to be noticed and dealt with. What Polanzak does with imagery subtly, but creatively, demands the attention of the reader and I dutifully hung onto every last word.
My favorite part of his story was the fact that it was not one alone. That there were all of these different intersecting narratives, displaying the complexity of existence and just the sheer amount of ways that grief can announce itself in one's life. The most poignant image of grief, to me, stood out at the toilet on the front lawn, left behind by the father, expected to be moved one day. In a lot of aspects grief is like this toilet, odd and out of place, almost demanding to be noticed and dealt with. What Polanzak does with imagery subtly, but creatively, demands the attention of the reader and I dutifully hung onto every last word.
February 3, 2017
Pop! sits somewhere between... well, like 30 different books. It's a wildly inventive piece of po-mo form deconstruction, incorporating memoir, personal documents, short story fragments, and meditative essays. It's heartbreaking and hilarious. It's sincere and yet constantly switching masks. It's laser-focused and as expansive as a city. I want to compare it to something people already realize is great, but that wouldn't be right--Polanzak has made something great on its own terms.
Maybe more helpful than a definition for it (as even the publisher, judging from the jacket copy, was unable to find the right terms for it) is that I've recommended it to writers as well as my mom.
I think it's particularly instructive to writers. The formal inventiveness alone would warrant this recommendation, but that it's married to an intimate investigation into a personal tragedy--well, a lot of younger writers (and more than a few older writers) should learn how to do this.
I think my mom--read: a general audience--would engage with this in an entirely different way. While parts of it might be a little on the sad side for a more general audience, the pathos is earned by the facts as well as the art. There's a heart to the story that many people will find totally compelling, enough to get them to initially tolerate (and then, I suspect, embrace) a mode of writing generally reserved for the literati.
Maybe more helpful than a definition for it (as even the publisher, judging from the jacket copy, was unable to find the right terms for it) is that I've recommended it to writers as well as my mom.
I think it's particularly instructive to writers. The formal inventiveness alone would warrant this recommendation, but that it's married to an intimate investigation into a personal tragedy--well, a lot of younger writers (and more than a few older writers) should learn how to do this.
I think my mom--read: a general audience--would engage with this in an entirely different way. While parts of it might be a little on the sad side for a more general audience, the pathos is earned by the facts as well as the art. There's a heart to the story that many people will find totally compelling, enough to get them to initially tolerate (and then, I suspect, embrace) a mode of writing generally reserved for the literati.
February 1, 2016
“An eccentric and profound book that evokes not only our desire to remember, but our need to transform memory into story."
- Greg Hrbek, award-winning author of Destroy All Monsters
“POP! brilliantly redefines what a ‘personal’ narrative can be. Risky, fantastical, and evocative—this is literary nonfiction at its best!”
- Timothy Denevi, author of Hyper
“Innovative, delightfully scrappy, and big-hearted, Mark Polanzak is here to stay.”
- Elizabeth Evans, As Good As Dead
“Through a collage of fiction, memory, and speculation, Mark Polanzak makes the grief narrative new again, ever shifting, ever potent. This is a beautiful, exhilarating book, one I won't soon forget."
- Lucas Mann, author of Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere
- Greg Hrbek, award-winning author of Destroy All Monsters
“POP! brilliantly redefines what a ‘personal’ narrative can be. Risky, fantastical, and evocative—this is literary nonfiction at its best!”
- Timothy Denevi, author of Hyper
“Innovative, delightfully scrappy, and big-hearted, Mark Polanzak is here to stay.”
- Elizabeth Evans, As Good As Dead
“Through a collage of fiction, memory, and speculation, Mark Polanzak makes the grief narrative new again, ever shifting, ever potent. This is a beautiful, exhilarating book, one I won't soon forget."
- Lucas Mann, author of Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere
February 5, 2017
This book was good. It's kind of like a new spin on the grief narrative, making it new again in some way.
*won as a GoodReads giveaway*
*won as a GoodReads giveaway*
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews