I read this sparkling review by Catherine Bush in the New York Times
back in 1994. I immediately picked up a copy and read the novel. As a
dedicated book reviewer, I reread and wrote a review a few years ago,
sending a copy of my review to Catherine Bush, thanking her for her
penetrating analysis of the novel. She wrote back and told me she
enjoyed my review. Anyway, here's her review:
GOING NATIVE By Stephen Wright.305 pp. New York:Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
IN the middle of a barbecue, a man named Wylie Jones walks through his house and vanishes into the thin air of suburbia, into a landscape ricocheting with heavy metal music, where crack addicts live three blocks away and a dead body lies on the pavement after a hold-up at the local Feed 'n' Fuel. Welcome to the America of "Going Native," Stephen Wright's dark, delirious journey down the highway of the contemporary soul.
In his two previous novels, Mr. Wright honed his roiling, metaphorically rich vision -- first in his fractured Vietnam War novel, "Meditations in Green" (1983); then in "M31: A Family Romance" (1988), which blew apart the conventions of the family story with its nightmarish portrayal of a couple who believe they're descended from aliens and their warped offspring. Now he has produced a road novel that similarly explodes the conventions of the genre.
We see the highway only fitfully, although "Going Native" moves progressively west toward California, the ultimate destination for those who dream of transforming themselves. Instead, each chapter is a nearly self-contained episode, like a series of worlds glimpsed through a channel-surfer's remote control unit (although Mr. Wright never skims but plunges deeply into each milieu before abandoning it).
We enter the crack-induced haze of Latisha Charlemagne and Mister CD. Amid their usual domestic pandemonium, Mister CD goes to the door one night, thinking he sees the shadow of a man behind a tree. Moments later, he realizes that his car, a '69 Ford Galaxie, is gone. A predatory hitchhiker living out his own real-life horror flick accepts a ride from a man in an ancient green Ford Galaxie, only to be completely unnerved when the man claims to be a murderer and admits that he is driving a stolen car.
The man whom we first met at the barbecue as Wylie Jones reappears in each chapter as a shadowy, peripheral figure. He "was weird, obviously," according to a girl named Aeryl, who steals away with her Satan-worshiping boyfriend in the back of Wylie's car, "a dubious presence fading in and out as if broadcast from a TV station at the limits of its reception area. But in a world of breakaway certainties, such transparent elusiveness was an attraction, erotic in appeal, the tease of a puzzle stripping itself bare. She didn't believe a word he said."
This man, who started out as Wylie, now calls himself Tom Hanna (even though that was the name of another man at the ill-fated barbecue). At each encounter he has developed ever more disturbingly, and yet certain features reappear like clues. The man always wears Wylie's characteristic navy blue polo shirt and khakis and has Wylie's unusually pale gray eyes. The rest of his appearance may be innocuous, but his eyes continually attract attention. Rho, the wife he abandons, describes them as "those affecting moons of powdery gray." Aeryl sees them as "almost white, like those of a beautiful snow leopard she had admired once in a zoo." They're "monstrous and icy gray" to a man who finds himself on the wrong end of Wylie's gun.
"Going Native" is less a portrait of a potential psychopath than a panoramic dive into a world in which the protagonist blurs to become just one more figure in the landscape. Stephen Wright's America is a paranoiac's, and a satirist's, dream come true. All his characters feel their identities grow shaky, or else they try desperately to escape and reinvent themselves. Aeryl's father, Emory, runs a roadside motel outside Denver -- a family operation seething with discontent -- but has spent every spare moment for the last five years lost in a screenplay he is writing, "Syn-Man," his "refuge from the madness of me."
IN the middle of a barbecue, a man named Wylie Jones walks through his house and vanishes into the thin air of suburbia, into a landscape ricocheting with heavy metal music, where crack addicts live three blocks away and a dead body lies on the pavement after a hold-up at the local Feed 'n' Fuel. Welcome to the America of "Going Native," Stephen Wright's dark, delirious journey down the highway of the contemporary soul.
In his two previous novels, Mr. Wright honed his roiling, metaphorically rich vision -- first in his fractured Vietnam War novel, "Meditations in Green" (1983); then in "M31: A Family Romance" (1988), which blew apart the conventions of the family story with its nightmarish portrayal of a couple who believe they're descended from aliens and their warped offspring. Now he has produced a road novel that similarly explodes the conventions of the genre.
We see the highway only fitfully, although "Going Native" moves progressively west toward California, the ultimate destination for those who dream of transforming themselves. Instead, each chapter is a nearly self-contained episode, like a series of worlds glimpsed through a channel-surfer's remote control unit (although Mr. Wright never skims but plunges deeply into each milieu before abandoning it).
We enter the crack-induced haze of Latisha Charlemagne and Mister CD. Amid their usual domestic pandemonium, Mister CD goes to the door one night, thinking he sees the shadow of a man behind a tree. Moments later, he realizes that his car, a '69 Ford Galaxie, is gone. A predatory hitchhiker living out his own real-life horror flick accepts a ride from a man in an ancient green Ford Galaxie, only to be completely unnerved when the man claims to be a murderer and admits that he is driving a stolen car.
The man whom we first met at the barbecue as Wylie Jones reappears in each chapter as a shadowy, peripheral figure. He "was weird, obviously," according to a girl named Aeryl, who steals away with her Satan-worshiping boyfriend in the back of Wylie's car, "a dubious presence fading in and out as if broadcast from a TV station at the limits of its reception area. But in a world of breakaway certainties, such transparent elusiveness was an attraction, erotic in appeal, the tease of a puzzle stripping itself bare. She didn't believe a word he said."
This man, who started out as Wylie, now calls himself Tom Hanna (even though that was the name of another man at the ill-fated barbecue). At each encounter he has developed ever more disturbingly, and yet certain features reappear like clues. The man always wears Wylie's characteristic navy blue polo shirt and khakis and has Wylie's unusually pale gray eyes. The rest of his appearance may be innocuous, but his eyes continually attract attention. Rho, the wife he abandons, describes them as "those affecting moons of powdery gray." Aeryl sees them as "almost white, like those of a beautiful snow leopard she had admired once in a zoo." They're "monstrous and icy gray" to a man who finds himself on the wrong end of Wylie's gun.
"Going Native" is less a portrait of a potential psychopath than a panoramic dive into a world in which the protagonist blurs to become just one more figure in the landscape. Stephen Wright's America is a paranoiac's, and a satirist's, dream come true. All his characters feel their identities grow shaky, or else they try desperately to escape and reinvent themselves. Aeryl's father, Emory, runs a roadside motel outside Denver -- a family operation seething with discontent -- but has spent every spare moment for the last five years lost in a screenplay he is writing, "Syn-Man," his "refuge from the madness of me."
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