Going Native Book

First thing's, as usual, first: despite what his Goodreads author page indicates, Stephen Wright the novelist is not the same individual as Steven Wright the deadpan stand-up comedian. It would be almost inconceivably awesome if this were the case, but it is not. I have Goodreads librarianship so I guess technically I could fix this error, but I am a busy man*, and do not have time for such menial tasks. (*I am not a busy man.)

So. By way of forestalling my review of this great book, and to avoid making plain the fact that I don't really know what to say about it, I will begin by reviewing its blurbs. Yes, critics and authors of 1994 were evidently so blindsided by the twisted richness of Stephen Wright's hyper-stylized prose that they felt compelled to respond in kind, with some hilariously colorful attempts at describing the novel's disturbing, media-crazed perspective on life in the Gen-X fast lane. Let's look at a handful of these blurbs along with my evaluations of them.

First, novelist Robert Coover goes straight-up bonkers: A sensational prime-time novel...Imagine a pornographic twilight zone of beebee-eyed serial killers, drug-stunned pants-dropping road warriors and "marauding armies of mental vampires," a nightmarish country of unparalleled savagery, where there is no longer any membrane between screen and life and the monster image feed is inexhaustible and the good guys are the scariest ones of all. Whoa! Sounds fucking awesome, but then you read the book and realize there are two problems: (1) Coover rips off several phrases directly from Wright (not just the quoted one about vampires, but also "monster image feed" and the kicker about the good guys being the scariest ones of all) and (2) Coover is kind of overstating the violence and horror of the book (a recurring theme of these blurbs): there's one serial-killer who appears in only one chapter, the marauding-vampire bit is only a metaphor, and there are in fact a number of "good guys" who remain more or less good (though many of them are women). But hey, bonus points for how excited the guy got about this book. You can tell he was popping a huge literary boner.

Now let's visit your friend and mine Don DeLillo, who offers a more concise fragment: Strange, dark and funny, a slasher classic. The phrase "a slasher classic" is gorgeously sonorous, and the fact that it's coming from DeLillo makes this a very satisfying blurb. But it's also pretty deceptive -- the book really isn't a slasher anything. I mean, there's a fair share of crime, and one of the book's eight chapters concerns a serial killer, and most of the characters are operating under the influence of violent-media saturation, but c'mon, we're not talking about blood-soaked grindhouse gore, we're talking about a very brainy, multitudinous postmodern novel. Maybe I'm being stupidly literal here but I think the blurbist carries a certain responsibility and if you're going to induce people to read a book by saying words about that book then the words should probably make sense on a literal level. Still love you, Don!

The Village Voice chimes in: [Wright] broadcasts an English as electrically intoxicating as a mescaline slurpee...Wright doesn't supply easy answers, just dark and rapturous neon reflections of the society of spectacle in this hilariously mordant and discombobulating book. Mescaline Slurpee! If someone didn't name their band after this blurb they fucked up big time. Do you see what I mean about critics trying to match Wright's gonzo flavor with a little gonzo of their own? This one is pretty silly, really, "society of spectacle" and all that.

But this one's even sillier, from Spin magazine: A phantasmagoria of roadside attractions: drugs, truckers, flophouses, movie stars, amateur porn'the miasma that rises from a red, white, and blue-balled pop culture. This is just a list of items that appear in the novel followed by a faux-clever dirty joke, "red white and blue-balled," that means absolutely nothing in the context of the book. Dumb.

But look, what's that, it's Toni Morrison here to offer a sprinkling of praise that resists the hyperbolic urge: An astonishing novel. Hmm, a tease. You couldn't be a little more specific, Ms. Morrison? On the generic side, yes, but astonishment from Toni Morrison means more than astonishment from most people, so I'm coming down pro on this one.

It's no surprise that cyberpunk progenitor William Gibson dug this book: Sure-footed, loose-limbed, lyrical, perverse, and deeply, alarmingly funny, Going Native is just about as dead-on crazy as the American novel so desperately needs to be if the form intends to survive the century. Stephen Wright is a major talent. This is a strong blurb in that it avoids specific description while painting an accurate picture of the book's tone. Nice job, Mr. G.

I'll just do one more, from the San Francisco Chronicle, though I could keep going all day, there are so many of these: Daring...a disturbing look into the nether world of American culture....Many of Wright's sentences haunt the reader's mind and demand contemplation....The work of an accomplished writer who may soon be regarded among the top echelon of contemporary American novelists. This one's retrospectively poignant because Wright never really did become regarded among the top echelon of contemporary American novelists, at least not by major cultural gatekeepers. (In-the-know folks like Mike Reynolds know better, of course.) As for the "nether world of American culture" stuff, I mean, yeah, kind of, but there's gotta be a less annoying way to talk about that aspect of the book. I'll let you know if I think of one.

***

The impression given by this massive hype machine is that Going Native is something like a non-retarded version of Oliver Stone's dumber-than-rocks "satire" Natural Born Killers. And in a sense -- a narrow sense, maybe -- that's sort of what it is: scenes of American fringe-dwellers and their frightening behaviors and milieus, filtered through the ubiquity of mass-media violence, very loosely taking the form of a road trip. But there's plenty of content here that strays from the blurbs' promise of lurid, psychotic wackiness. In fact, those looking for a pure dose of lurid, psychotic wackiness will probably find this novel entirely too austere and cerebral. Wright is just as attuned to subtle, internal human intricacies as any self-respecting literary novelist, but he's not afraid to color outside the lines, on an outsized canvas, in blood. (Oh fuck, now I sound like one of those 1994 critics. A crazy ride into the diseased heart of modern American excess! A gunshot to the face of America's sleaziest fantasies! An orgasmic fistfight in the back alley of the American nightmare!)

The book's structure would probably land it on Joel's "stories-no-wait-a-novel-no-wait" shelf, an approach that I have complained about on this website before. But while I dissed the novel-in-stories format in my reviews of David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, I had no problem with its deployment here. Is this just a case of Whitmanesque self-contradiction (I do contain multitudes, thank you very much), or is Wright doing something different that won me over? Hmm. There is one character who pops up in each chapter, linking them all on a literal level; it's possible to view this book as a road novel told from every perspective except the protagonist's. Furthermore, the chapters are linked by style. As disparate as their characters and situations are, each chapter bears the auteurist stamp of Wright's singular voice. And while you never know quite what you're gonna get when you start a new chapter -- I don't want to get into plot specifics with this book, because part of the fun is the surprise factor of its self-replenishing conceits -- you do figure out at a certain point what kinds of stories you're being told, and the book proceeds as smoothly as a novel. There's surprisingly little of the between-chapters whiplash typical of story collections or story cycles; it really does feel like one unified work, without any overly contrived "connections," even though it lacks a continuous narrative. So I guess I no longer believe this format is inherently suck, but unless you're as great as Stephen Wright, you still probably shouldn't try it.

Wright's prose is stunning. This is the rare novel that's both highly demanding and absolutely pleasurable. Good luck spending less than four or five minutes per page; good luck trying not to immediately re-read certain passages, either because comprehension proved impossible on a first pass or simply to prolong the charged glow of a master's verbal manipulations. To anyone with even a basic appreciation for literary style -- particularly of the variety associated with postmodernism or maximalism -- Stephen Wright needs to be on your radar, yesterday. Though DeLillo is the most obvious point of comparison, Wright is more of an extremist; he often goes farther than his predecessor, embellishing ideas and pushing forward through narrative space where DeLillo would be content to offer up an elusive wisp of rhythmic aphorism. It's indescribably thrilling to be in the presence of such stylistic swagger.

After such effusion I feel obliged to provide an example. Tough to choose. Here's a full paragraph that gives you a sense of how knotty Wright's language is; most of this passage is an epic run-on sentence, followed by a startling button of relative brevity. Warm up your parsing muscles, this is a complex motherfucker:

The birth was an event of unspeakable proportions, a wild ride among significances memory couldn't recapture without damage: the cosmos was knotted in ligatures of pain; unravel the threads, liberate the stars whose blossoms promise ease from the agony of time; astounding the revelatory force of torment that carried her, teensy squeaking her, up and up, through ceiling and roof, out into space, out of space, to the cold chamber of the dark queen with the patchwork face of old nightmares who leaned from her throne to tell Jessie something she did not want to hear, and as the thin blue lips began to move, Jessie shrank back in horror, spinning down onto a point so dense the soul's implosion was averted only by a nova cry of life surfacing, and she opened her wondering eyes upon the holy puckered countenance of a new daughter, in whose glow the visions of her mad journey toward this sight began evaporating as cleanly as morning dew. Life is death's amnesia, she thought, and forgetfulness a grace to which we cling.

That's not necessarily representative -- it's probably the longest sentence in the book, and by necessity it's a bit ungainly -- but it shows you how far and how deep Wright's use of language goes to illustrate his themes. If I'm reading this section correctly, Wright is proposing that childbirth is a disease of horrifying memory-retrieval, the only cure for which is...childbirth. We create life to distract ourselves from the oppression of our own pasts and trajectories. See, those "mescaline slurpee" blurbs didn't exactly hint at this level of discourse, did they?

The book's reputation suggests that it's about conditions of strangeness. But Going Native is just as much about filtering everyday mundanity through the cracked lens of extreme, hyper-intellectualized consciousness -- the same lens that Wright uses also, yes, for stories about pornographers, junkies and knife-wielding hitchhikers. In this way, something as simple and familiar as a dinner party, a bookstore browse, or a lover's spat becomes an occasion for profound crises of the self and takes on the same frightening, massive-scaled dimensions as does an act of shocking violence. For Wright, there is no longer any meaningful difference between these theoretically disparate conditions. Wright's vision of life in the postmodern era is defined not by a ubiquity of larger-than-life incidents, but by the feverish application of a larger-than-life perspective to life-sized events. If everything is a mescaline slurpee, then nothing is.

***

I cannot comprehend why Wright remains so obscure, relatively speaking. Going Native has only 150 ratings on Goodreads. Even a second-rate DeLillo novel like Mao II has 2,300 ratings -- 15x as many as Wright's masterpiece. I'm not saying this guy should have achieved mainstream fame, but he deserves to be as well-known as other novelists in the postmodern canon. Maybe part of the problem is generational; born in 1946, Wright's too young to be part of the first wave of pomo torch-bearers (Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth/Barthelme, etc), but he's too old to hang with the Gen-X crew (DFW, Lethem, Whitehead, etc) -- two generations of postmodernists all of whom have gained wider and more enduring recognition than Wright has. Or maybe the answer has something to do with his sparsity of output. There are only four books to his name; I cannot wait to be challenged, creeped out, excited, flummoxed, turned on and word-intoxicated by the other three. And to re-read this one; though I basically never re-read books (already way more new-to-me stuff than one lifetime can accommodate), I'd be disappointed in myself if I never re-read this, both to gain a fuller picture of how its individual pieces fit together and to re-engage on a micro level with Wright's gloriously complex sentencework. Follow my lead, will you?

(FYI: Prominent/weirdo critic Larry McCaffery places Going Native all the way at #13 on his list of the top 100 fiction books of the 20th century. Check it out.)