“POP: AN ILLUSTRATED NOVEL” by Robert Gipe (Ohio University Press, 346 pages, $29).
In 2015, Robert Gipe introduced Dawn Jewell in “Trampoline,” an illustrated coming-of-age story about a Kentucky teenager who fights against strip mining in the 1990s. The setting is fictional Canard County, Kentucky – picture Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha thrust upward onto an Appalachian peak – and the characters include Dawn’s extended mountain family. “Weedeater,” a 2018 sequel, takes place in 2004, a time when Dawn is the young married mother of a precocious 4-year-old and fighting an opioid epidemic destroying her community and family. In Gipe’s new “Pop,” which the publisher describes as the final installment of the trilogy, Dawn’s daughter Nicolette, now 17, becomes the novel’s primary narrator.
It’s 2016, and in advance of the looming presidential election, Dawn has begun to fray a bit at the edges. She spends most of her time online, eating junk food and drinking soda – regionally known as “pop,” as in the book’s title. After fighting endless battles against the pollution, drugs and poverty that plague Canard County, Dawn has become reluctant to engage with the world. Meanwhile, teenaged Nicolette spends much of her time away from home. Just as her mother did before her, she alternates between Dawn’s Uncle Hubert, a backwoods entrepreneur, and Aunt June, an English teacher in town. With a school friend named Pinky, Nicolette decides to manufacture pop infused with local flavors, just ahead of a Hollywood film crew coming to town to film a movie about hillbillies and alien monsters. The story shifts seamlessly between scenes narrated by Dawn, Hubert and Nicolette, the narration occasionally passing through – rather than around – Gipe’s Thurberesque drawings.
Although his work combines elements of the graphic novel with Southern fiction reminiscent of Harper Lee and Charles Portis, Gipe’s background is in theater. In 2011, four years before his first novel, he was profiled in The New York Times for a series of plays based on the coal town of Harlan, Kentucky. The article praised Gipe’s realistic dialog “drawn from real stories collected by Southeast Kentucky community students in a long-running oral history project.”
In “Pop,” as in Gipe’s previous novels, the dialog reads something like a theatrical script, with the name of the speaker generally preceding quotes and characters sometimes speaking back and forth across several pages. In one such exchange, Dawn complains to June about the ridiculous science-fiction plot to be filmed in their hills.