Homage to Michiko Kakutani as a Reviewer

Michiko Kakutani was the head New York Times literary critic and book reviewer from 1983 - 2017.  She is famous for her scathing reviews of respected authors.  I have always enjoyed her book reviews and learned a great deal from them, although in some cases my evaluation of a book has differed tremendously.  Here's one where Michkio writes a glowing, positive review: 

Going Native By Stephen Wright 305 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.

Stephen Wright's impressive first novel, "Meditations in Green," published a decade ago, offered a hallucinatory vision of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of an intelligence adviser turned heroin addict. Mr. Wright's second novel, "M31: A Family Romance" (1988), effectively brought the war home, creating a frightening allegory of American life through its portrait of a ghoulish family cult.

The dark side of the American dream is Mr. Wright's subject once again in his latest book, "Going Native," an uncompromising 1990's version of "On the Road" that gives us an alarming picture of a country pitched on the edge of an emotional and social abyss, a country already familiar from tabloid headlines and confessional talk shows, a country in which too many people pack guns and too many people come to violent, unexpected ends.

Composed from a series of tenuously linked chapters, each of which reads like a short story, "Going Native" begins with a snapshot-bright portrait of a suburban couple caught up in "middling middleness": the Joneses have two young children and a house full of televisions. Rho has a susceptibility to "bad thoughts" and scary dreams, a sense of emotional claustrophobia. Her husband, Wylie, although he spends a lot of time watching "shoot/chase/crash" movies, seems like an "average" sort of guy; there is "nothing immediately distinctive" about him, Rho thinks, "no crags or crannies or funny clumps of hair for words to adhere to." He is "a guy who looked like any other guy."

One night, Rho and Wylie invite their friends Tom and Gerri Hanna over for a barbecue. After the nachos and daiquiris, after the steaks and potatoes, Wylie excuses himself from the table. He never returns. And never looks back.

Wylie, it seems, has stolen his neighbors' green Ford Galaxie, an "unwashed, unwaxed, decidedly unnew" car that will take him on a disorienting odyssey across America, into the dark, Don DeLillo territory of lost souls and disintegrating values, deep into the heart of darkness. Like the receding American frontier, the road, for Wylie, means freedom, independence, the chance to invent himself anew; it also means rootlessness, dislocation, the loss of family and self.

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As he makes his way westward to the coast, Wylie follows a path that intersects the lives of a motley group of outlaws, outcasts and outsiders. There's Randy Sawyers, a former medical student who abandoned his ambitions for the solitary pleasures of driving a truck hundreds of miles a week on the interstates. There's Jessie Horn, a dancing slave girl at a Las Vegas casino, who dumps her abusive husband, finds a female lover and takes a job at a mass-market wedding chapel. And there's Emory Chace, a small-town motel owner, who dreams of writing a hit movie about a woman who falls in love with an alien from outer space.

As far as these people are concerned, lyrics from heavy-metal rock songs, shootout sequences from movies and lurid scenes from pulp novels all bleed together into the violence they watch every night on the news and witness daily in their lives: the random drive-by shootings; the high-speed, highway crashes; the unforeseen acts of God and nature and man.

What's more, many of these people seem unable or unwilling to differentiate between dreams and reality, between the movies they have seen and the actual lives they lead. Freya, a former pornography star turned sex entrepreneur, makes a lot of money videotaping people's private fantasies. The Copelands, a wealthy Hollywood couple, journey to the farthest reaches of Borneo in pursuit of a vision of themselves as intrepid adventurers. And Mister CD and his girlfriend, Latitia, find their cocaine-fueled paranoia turning into real-life violence, as their lives career out of control.

None of these people have the slightest grip on who they are or what they truly believe. In fact, all of them seem caught in a perpetual state of metamorphosis, shedding old lives and shrugging on new ones with the ease of an actor changing costumes for a scene. A nurse becomes a drug addict; a Vegas entrepreneur becomes a preacher; a teen-age girl becomes a worshiper of Satan.

Wylie, Mr. Wright suggests, is perhaps the most extreme example of this protean personality: during his cross-country drive, he assumes and discards a host of aliases and identities, erasing his past and his responsibility for his actions as he goes. Change your name, he thinks, "and you change your reality."

"Events," he decides, "will begin falling into new, previously unthinkable patterns."

Using quick, expressionist prose, Mr. Wright narrates Wylie's adventures -- and their violent, shattering consequences -- with cool aplomb, as he plunges the reader into a nightmare world of sleazy motels and low-rent casinos, mind-altering drugs and orgies and murder. The writing is more controlled, more elliptical than in his earlier novels: not a single detail is wasted here, not a single scene is superfluous. The result is a chilling and often brilliant novel, a novel that radiates the dark, consuming energy of a black hole.