Poppa John by Larry Woiwode

Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition

First published: 1981

Type of work: Novel

The Work

When compared with the massive Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Poppa John is shockingly short and is more a finely wrought character study than a novel. Consequently, Woiwode relies on subtle symbolism and poignant imagery to convey the story’s essentially religious themes. The book takes its title from the character that aging actor Ned Daley has played for many years on a popular television soap opera. With his character’s immense personal popularity beginning to overshadow the show itself, he is eventually written out of the show in a dramatic “death.” Now close to seventy, outspoken, and Falstaffian in appearance and behavior, he seeks to recover his identity as “Ned,” which has been sublimated during his twelve years as the imperious Poppa John.

Poppa John’s compressed action takes place on two days in the Christmas season, a Friday and a Sunday—nakedly separated by a vacant and voiceless Saturday—and the novella is thus divided into two parts, decisively marked by the calendar: Friday, December 23, and Sunday, December 25. As in his other fiction, Woiwode is concerned that the reader discover the nature of his characters’ predicaments by “listening” to their own thoughts and memories as they recall them, rather than by intrusive exposition by an omniscient narrator. Progressively but achronologically, one learns the relevant facts of Ned’s past; recollection, in fact, dominates present action in the evolving narrative.

Therefore, in responding to the novella, it is important to recognize the character traits that Ned has sought to embody in Poppa John for twelve television seasons. Part King Lear, part Santa Claus, Poppa John evinces a kind a tragic benevolence, resolving contrived soap opera dilemmas with well-chosen biblical verses. Though easily spouting Scripture while in character, Ned rarely discerned its significance for himself, nor has the sage presence of Poppa John transferred any benefits to his own relationships. In this portrayal, Ned found inspiration in his own grandfather, a fiery evangelical preacher scandalized when his daughter, Ned’s mother, married a Catholic and converted to this alien faith. His father, a vaguely corrupt policeman, had died a violent death that Ned himself overheard taking place while hiding in a warehouse—a signal event that drove him into an adult acting career that has prevented him from becoming the unique individual he was born to be.

Consequently, Ned has a complex and paradoxical relationship to religious faith. It at once circumscribes his life and distances it from its reality. The “Scriptures,” Woiwode’s narrator opines, “had given him slivered glimpses into the realm of time, from the vantage of his years, where a central pureness . . . held the continual revolving of days into weeks—into months, into ages—in balance with the compiled weight of the ages revolving beneath the particular minute of each day.” When Poppa John dies, Ned’s own life begins to unravel, and he is increasingly forced to face his own inconsistencies, his doubts, and even his sins.

The novel opens as Ned and his devout and devoted wife, Celia, dress for a day of Christmas Eve shopping. Ned has been out of work for more than a year, and the couple must withdraw money from savings to fund any gift buying for each other. “Ned” only to his wife (he is “Poppa John” to everyone else), he is lost in the malevolent nostalgia of growing old without a true self or true self-respect. Ned is tentative about this trip uptown; he has been in analysis, seeking to exorcise the ghost of Poppa John from his psyche. He no longer knows how to “be himself.”

As he strolls the streets of New York, he moves intermittently in and out of his Poppa John identity, conversing amiably with strangers who recognize him, all the while employing the gestures and intonations his adoring fans have come to expect. He is simultaneously a captive of the public who gave him his livelihood and the victim of a medium that rewards popularity by “killing” its source.

The more his casual acquaintances offer their condolences for his fictional death, the more self-pitying he becomes. After he and his wife agree to split up so each can shop for the other, Ned succumbs to an old temptation, alcohol. In a neighborhood bar, he allows himself to be “picked up” by an admiring fan and would-be dancer who takes him to her apartment. When her roommate returns to find the drunken and blubbering old man, she persuades the dancer to return him to the bar whence they came, and eventually they send him on his way in a cab. Exiting at the next block, Ned wanders the streets and eventually collapses in a street mission, which he mistakes for the homely Catholic cathedral of his youth. The next face he sees, now on Christmas morning, is that of his wife. Confined to a hospital psychiatric ward, Ned is “coming to himself,” realizing that he, after all these years, does believe in God and therefore can come to believe in himself.

In minimizing the action of the novella and compressing it into only two days, Woiwode places special weight on two different and compelling Christian images he seeks to juxtapose: the joyful incarnation of the baby Jesus, foregrounded in the Christmastime setting; and Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, a dark Friday and a buoyant Easter Sunday separated by a bleak, lost Saturday. As Christ is in the grave, his fate unknown, Ned/Poppa John is also buried and left for “dead” in his drunken stupor. When he awakens to receive his wife’s Christmas gift of a briefcase bearing his initials N. E. D., his life as Ned Daley is restored, and he is thereby enabled to embrace a future he despaired of finding again. What Woiwode offers in Poppa John is a modern parable of life, death, and rebirth.

Bibliography

Connaughton, Michael E. “Larry Woiwode.” In American Novelists Since World War II, edited by James E. Kibler, Jr. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980.

Dickson, Morris. “Flight into Symbolism.” The New Republic 160 (May 3, 1969): 28.

Gardner, John. Review of Beyond the Bedroom Wall, by Larry Woiwode. The New York Times Book Review 125 (September 28, 1975): 1-2.

Gasque, W. Ward. Review of Acts, by Larry Woiwode. Christianity Today, March 7, 1994, 38.

Marx, Paul. “Larry (Alfred) Woiwode.” In Contemporary Novelists, edited by James Vinson. 3d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

O’Hara, Barbara. Review of What I Think I Did, by Larry Woiwode. Library Journal, June 1, 2000, 128.

Pesetsky, Bette. Review of Born Brothers, by Larry Woiwode. The New York Times Book Review 93 (August 4, 1988): 13-14.

Prescott, Peter S. “Home Truths.” Newsweek 86 (September 29, 1975): 85-86.

Woiwode, Larry. “An Interview with Larry Woiwode.” Christianity and Literature 29 (1979): 11-18.

Woiwode, Larry. “An Interview with Larry Woiwode.” Interview by Ed Block, Jr. Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 44, no. 1 (Fall, 1991): 17-30.

Woiwode, Larry. “Interview with Woiwode.” Interview by Shirley Nelson. The Christian Century, January 25, 1995, 82.

Woiwode, Larry. “Where the Buffalo Roam: An Interview with Larry Woiwode.” Interview by Rick Watson. North Dakota Quarterly 63, no. 4 (Fall, 1996): 154-166.