Stephen Wright is one of America’s finest novelists, however, at age 72, he has authored only four novels – most notably Meditations in Green, published in 1983, considered by many the best novel of the Vietnam War, and his masterpiece, Going Native, published in 1994, a road novel in the tradition of Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But with this dark and frequently disturbing work under review, the road traveled snakes though the underbelly of the underbelly of the American dream.
Considering the current Methland and OxyContin dopesick epidemics, the alarming increase in gun culture and mass shootings, the skyrocketing number of cases of sexual abuse and websites devoted to hardcore pornography, Going Native with all its guns and violence, drugs and degraded sex, is even more relevant today then when first published twenty-five years ago.
The opening chapter holds many keys to ongoing themes and motifs. We are in drab American suburbia, an engineered community of street after boring street of single family homes complete with front and back yard, enough room for an outdoor barbecue but close enough where all your neighbors can see into your kitchen and living room and, unless you're careful, even into your bedroom, a world were men and women like wife Rho grind it out raising kids and commuting to dreary office jobs where their nerves as kept on edge by odious bosses and noxious coworkers, a world where there’s a TV in every room and the radio blares out the latest round of perversion and violence, a world where you are continually fretting about the future (Rho is furiously pealing carrots for tonight’s dinner with snooty, wealthy friends) and brooding over the past (Rho is shackled with memories of her demonic mother, an old witch right out of Macbeth) - so much agonizing about the past and future, the fullness of the present moment is obliterated. In a word, middle class hell.
In the evening when Tommy and Gerri come over, Tommy a blabbering boor specializing in celebrity impersonations and Gerri, a real estate agent and co-owner of a catering service, an overly judgmental self-appointed gatekeeper of 1990s affluent society, Rho must apologize for Wylie’s tardiness. When her exhausted husband finally walks in, exchanges greetings, pours himself drinks and listens to Tommy-Gerri banter, no long thereafter Rho sends Wylie out to pick up charcoal for the grill. Tommy joins Wylie, never once giving his jabber a rest. Turns out, at the Feed ‘n’ Fuel, the cops just shot a thief – his scuffed Nikes sticking out from under a drop cloth. Damn! The boys have to drive over to the local 7-Eleven “where you don’t have to step over a corpse to pick up your charcoal.”
Following steak dinner, Rho orders Wylie to perform his fabulous De Niro impression. Then when Tommy and Rho go off to wiggle a funky dance next to the garage, Wylie asks Gerri, “Would you excuse me for a minute.” After some time Rho, Tommy and Gerri retreat inside to escape the mosquitoes. Where’s Wylie? They look all through the house; they cruse the neighborhood. “Like the present tense. Daddy was gone gone.”
Curiously, Rho always pictured Wylie as an average kind of guy - go to work, play with the kids, watch shoot, chase, crash movies on TV. Although Rho had to admit, as when after a shower, a naked, dripping wet Wylie chased her through the house snapping a towel, “he never knew when to stop!” Oh, dear wife and mother, truer words were never spoken.
Wylie doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even look back, not even once. The next seven chapters are separate short stories linked only by the appearance, usually popping up toward the end, of a stolen ‘69 Ford Galaxie and its driver, a heavyset indistinct figure with his pale gray eyes, a man starting out as Wylie Jones but assuming different names, including the name of that suburban house guest, Tommy Hanna.
And what stories – recall back there I said underbelly of the underbelly of the American dream. There’s Mister CD and his lover calling herself Latisha Charlemagne, two drug-happy cool cats forever getting high when they’re not watching violent movies and engaging in their own hopped up brand of nastiness and cruelty. By the way, Mister CD owned that Ford Galaxie Wylie made off with – serves him right, the woman-abusing sleazeball!
Subsequent stories feature shocking depictions of various slices of American society dropping off the cliff into a numbing void where there are too many guns, too much media saturation and way too much shallowness and mental imbalance. In order of their appearance: psychopathic hitchhiker wielding a knife; hotel owner obsessed with making his own combination horror and sci-fi movie; sexual pervert filming unsuspecting couples as his contribution to the flourishing XXX hardcore porno industry; two female sexual mystics dealing with the fantasies of Las Vegas brides and grooms (one of these gals provides a high point in the novel by her recognition that love from the heart is guaranteed indestructible); a husband and wife, two Hollywood actors, traveling upriver to Borneo’s heart of darkness only to return to LA to discover the deeper meaning of raw, senseless violence; and lastly, a much married beauty living the high life in her oceanfront L.A. mansion.
Fans of such well knowns as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace will enjoy Mr. Wright's creamy rich language and crisp, spot-on dialogue. By way of example, a quote from one of my favorite scenes in that chapter about actors Drake and Amanda traveling in Indonesia: “Mrs. Harrelson began shifting around in her chair. “Christianity is the chain saw of the spiritual world,” she remarked with some heat.
“Well, I’m not much of a believer myself,” offered Drake, “but-”
The woman went on. “It cuts the vitality right out of the soul. Then erects in the center of the wasteland it has made, the brutal sign of its triumph and occupation – a grotesque instrument of human torture, need I remind you?-and moves on like a horrid vampire in search of the warm life it requires to sustain its own deathlike existence.”
Going Native is a true overlooked classic - again, it can not be emphasized enough, a novel speaking to us with more force today than back when first published. Also, perhaps not so coincidentally, 1994 was the year of release for two box office smashes: Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers.
American novelist Stephen Wright, born 1946
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