Critique de Pop. 1280 par Josh

Wow. Pop. 1280 knocked me plum on my ass, as the narrator might put it.

Pop. 1280 is literature dressed up to look like pulp fiction (specifically crime fiction). I went into it expecting something in the general vein of Chandler, Christie, or Hammett with perhaps a bit more humor and silly hijinx mixed in (I'd read the description on the back cover and knew it wasn't a regular whodunit). As you get into the book though it becomes clear that reading Pop. 1280 is much more than "mere" genre fiction.

It's not news that "genre" novels can also be literature. Cormac McCarthy (among others) successfully forced fancy-pants literary types to acknowledge the "western" novels can also be literature. Sci-fi is a genre that's been explored by so many great writers that it has (almost) managed to become respectable.

McCarthy's easy enough to recognize as a writer for literary types. His dialogue for some character is written in the vernacular but Blood Meridian had me running to the dictionary to look stuff up way more often than anything by David Foster Wallace. Pop. 1280 isn't like that. The narrator sounds like an uneducated Southern Sheriff from the early 20th century (or an exaggerated parody thereof).

So what makes this literature? I reckon it's the same stuff that makes anything literature. Namely that the author deals with serious topics: good and evil, religion, race, prejudice, etc. in an insightful and thoughtful way. Of course, if you want to read it as an amusing slapstick story about a goofball sheriff who engages in a mess of Br'er Rabbitesque trickery you can do that. I probably would have thought this book was hilarious when I was in 5th grade, but I think I also would have missed a lot of stuff and failed to appreciate how the layers of insight beneath much of the slapstick humor.

I'm not going to try to include quotes in this review because they're impossible to appreciate without context. A lot of the language is also not appropriate for what's sometimes called "polite company" so if you're looking for something that'll go over well in a 19th-century literary salon this ain't it. It's coarse, vulgar, contains racism (though the book itself isn’t racist it contains and parodies, racist characters).

This is the first thing I've read by Thompson but it won't be the last. My main worry is that having set the bar so high his other books will be a letdown, but it's a risk I'll have to take.

So umm, yeah, I enjoyed the book. Five stars.

p.s. According to Wikipedia Yorgos Lanthimos, the Director behind the equally weird and brilliant The Favourite, The Lobster, and Dogtooth is developing a film adaptation of Pop. 1280. I couldn't imagine a better director for the project. It's going to be weird and probably amazing and will (hopefully) also help get more people to read the novel.