Going Native - Hardcover

Wright, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374164908 ISBN 13: 9780374164904

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994

Synopsis

Wylie Jones leaves his wife in the suburban Midwest and steals across America, in an indictment of the heart of darkness at the center of American life

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Wright teaches at Princeton University.

Reviews

This is a story in which the progression of the narrative is sacrificed for the sake of deeper portraiture of the American spiritual landscape. Each chapter introduces new characters in new locales, and tells their singularly bizarre tales with an almost hallucinatory rapture: there are Wylie and Rho and Tom and Gerri, two suburban couples having a banal barbecue, only to have Wylie disappear at the end; there is a crack-house couple a few doors away, lost in an endless high, and also missing their car; there is a souvenir shop-owner in the southwest who polishes a screenplay about aliens, and whose daughter gets picked up hitchhiking by a man who might be Wylie. The other chapters--about lesbian workers in a Vegas chapel, a porn film magnate, a Hollywood couple tripping in Borneo, a California woman who runs a tree nursery--are just as oblique in their relation to a succession of events hinted at, but never told, which seems to involve Wylie's journey across the country in a green Ford Galaxy. Wylie (perhaps) makes an appearance in every chapter, sometimes in cameo, sometimes in disguise, and often in violence. The effect of this manner of storytelling is at once compelling and alienating; the author refuses to ponder the psychology of his vagabond Wylie, while leaving no nuance unexplored among those whose paths he crosses. In the end, this is the darkest of novels, both in its subject matter and it execution, although readers may find themselves joyously careening through Wright's ( Meditations in Green ) absolutely brilliant maximalist prose in pursuit of a story that, in the end, remains an unsettling mystery. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

America is a bad trip. Hit the road at your peril. Stay home and the TV/VCR will mess up your mind. Hollywood is the nexus. These sentiments percolate through Wright's slippery third novel (Meditations in Green, l983; M31: A Family Romance, 1988) that emphasizes randomness at the expense of plotting and character development. In an upscale Chicago suburb, Rho Jones, mother of two, has entered daiquiri heaven after giving a successful dinner-party- -during which husband Wylie has vanished. A few houses away storeowner Mister CD and his girlfriend Latisha, crackheads both, are sharing a pipe when Mister CD realizes his old Ford Galaxie 500 has gone. Wylie, an average man without attributes, has crossed the line ``into a quickening night of absolute freedom'' that will begin with auto theft and continue with murder. We won't meet those suburbanites again, and we won't see much of Wylie either; driver and car will reappear briefly, like an artist's signature, in a variety of other slice-of-life episodes. The more memorable of these feature a hitchhiker (another highway killer); the habitu‚ of a Denver SRO; and a Hollywood couple seeking an authentic jungle experience in Indonesian Borneo. Wylie murders the filmmaker and executes the Hollywood pair (celebrating their return from Borneo) before acquiring another wife and a Pacific view. But this is not a novel about a serial killer; Wright is assembling a portrait of a culture irredeemably passive, tacky and corrupt, whose influence has girdled the world. The former headhunters of Borneo watch their treasured Batman video as intently as do the crackheads back in Chicago. Wright's novel packs no narrative punch (only in Borneo does the story roll); it aims to resonate through a pattern of recurring images, but while always alert and intelligent, it never quite becomes the powerful indictment Wright may have hoped for. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Each of Wright's previous novels, including M31: A Family Romance (1988), drew his readers into the churn of madness, and his newest work follows suit, immersing us in the often-frightening psyches of various distressed characters. The first belongs to an unhappy Chicago-area suburbanite whose husband, Wylie, an average-looking guy with an enigmatic and elusive temperament, disappears one evening while they're entertaining their friends Gerri and Tom Hanna. End of first chapter. Next, Wright thrusts us into the manic realm of Wylie's slovenly crack-head neighbors, who alternate bouts of rough sex with chaotic outings in a beat-up Ford Galaxy. This car reappears in the following chapter when its driver picks up a hitchhiker, who, incidentally, has just stabbed a trucker to death. When the driver introduces himself as Tom Hanna, we realize we've picked up Wylie's trail. He's heading West, and his trip is a grim one. Wright keeps us off balance by introducing increasingly stranger locations and characters, and by having Wylie's identity continue to mutate. In each setting, whether it's a porno playhouse in Colorado, a marriage chapel in Las Vegas, or the jungles of Borneo, we watch people take the concepts of "going native," or "when in Rome . . . ," to the ultimate extremes. This is, indeed, a nihilistic and chilling tale, told with tremendous artistry and intensity. Donna Seaman

On a beautiful Friday in suburban Wakefield Estates, a June Cleaverish housewife is preparing for a nice barbecue. Hubby has had a hard day at the office, so no one is surprised when he excuses himself. But he never returns. Instead, he steals a car, assumes another identity, and embarks on a cross-country journey through the most surrealistic American landscape this side of William Burroughs. Wright, the author of M31: A Family Romance ( LJ 8/88), here portrays crackheads, hitchhiking psychos, heavy metal Satanists, and porn stars in brutal detail. Images of the Fifties and Sixties abound, contrasting sharply with today's dysfunctional era. The novel plays out like a 1990s version of On the Road , but Kerouac's life-affirming rebels have been replaced by characters who express an angry hunger for something that no longer seems to exist. Highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart.
- Dan Bogey, Clearfield Cty. P.L. Federation, Curwensville, Pa.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374164908
• ISBN 13: 9780374164904
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 305