Going Native [Hardcover]

Stephen Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1994

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. By the author of Meditations in Green. 20,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

So many hyperbolic statements have been made about this novel--from Don DeLillo calling it a "slasher classic," to The Village Voice calling it a "mescaline Slurpee," to The New Yorker comparing it to Orson Welles's "deliciously sleazy" Touch of Evil--that it can be hard to sort out the truth from the hype. The bottom line is that this is a postmodern road novel about mass media, with multiple allusions to horror movies. As the rave review in the premiere horror critique rag, Necrofile, puts it, Going Native is about the "round-the-clock bombardment of inanity and violence that has so thoroughly invaded mundane existence as to render it cartoon-like." If you care about how horror imagery affects modern culture, and you want to have a great time thinking about it, then read this book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 305 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux; 1st edition (January 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374164908
• ISBN-13: 978-0374164904
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,105,331 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Postmodern Satire, October 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Going Native (Hardcover)

Stephen's Wright's third novel, Going Native, is written as a postmodern modular satire. Robert Coover very correctly described Going Native as "a sensational prime time novel...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."

Going Native is composed of a seemingly unconnected series of vignettes of life along the road whose sole connecting factor lies in the presence of Wylie, a middle-class husband and father, and resident of Wakefield Estates. After stealing a green Fold Galaxie, Wylie transforms himself from everyday businessman into mass murderer. His chance encounters with a sequence of characters includes a suburban couple into drugs and kinky sex, a murderous hitchhiker, the runaway daughter of a desert motel owner, a voyeuristic porno moviemaker, a woman who sells jewelry and serves as a witness in Las Vegas wedding chapels and a California film industry couple who have just returned from a trek through the jungles of Borneo.

The only thing serving to connect these disparate narrative modules is Wylie, who, while on the road, operates under the name of Tom Hanna. Fate, chance or pure bad luck brings the life of each of the above characters (whose background has been filled in for the reader) into contact with the bizarre figure of Wylie. He thus becomes the one connective nomadic signifier that serves to link these disjointed stories as well as a metaphor for a fragmented and disjointed American reality.

The modular format of Going Native enables Wright to satirize various aspects of modern American life while bringing together, within a single narrative the contradictions of postmodern identity. Although the characters Wylie encounters randomly along the road may at first appear mutable, fragmented and even freakish, we come to realize in them a tiresome, almost cliched sameness and uniformity.

Going Native is a compelling indictment of the American postmodern culture. Wylie, himself, brings chaos, disillusion and death to all whom he encounters. In doing so, he comes to represent a form of estrangement that Wright so thoroughly critiques. He burrows into our images, forcing each of his victims to confront their status as temporal constructs and acknowledge their own mortality.

The point Wright seem to want to make is that we can't escape our own historicity, our own "hauntology," our own mortality; they are embedded in the makeup of our very lives. That Wright is able to portray this complex contradiction in disparate narratives disrupted and connected only by the figure of Wylie is testament to Wright's tremendous satiric talent. With Going Native, Stephen Wright joins that group of postmodern satirists (Pynchon, Gaddis, Acker, Elkin, Coover) who choose to diagnose a highly symptomatic postmodern culture and in so doing uncover the sheer radicality and absurdity of its connections.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Completely renewed my faith in current American fiction, October 21, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Las Vegas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Going Native (Hardcover)

I truly loved this novel, so much so that I have read it now completely through three times. The structure, presented as a series of fully self-sufficient short stories each interlinked by the presence of Wylie (or whatever his name may really have been), at first only peripherally, and then increasingly more emphatic, until at last we are completely inside his head (without much extra room, at that), is not only brilliantly conceived, but also spectacularly realised. The way Wright uses language is maximal, to say the very least; his leisurely pacing and complex sentence structure are almost reminiscent of Faulkner (as is the book's unrelenting darkness), but his hip appropriation of popular iconography is unique. His characters are every stripe of crackpot and schemer, and the way he contrasts the lives and thoughts of each, stretched out in thickets of languorously-phrased prose, with the brutal and abrupt way each is touched by Wylie's increasingly deadly actions forms, for me, the greatest appeal of the novel. The section on Borneo, in which the filmmaker and his wife "go native", is perhaps the most extraordinary of the pieces, although the entire book is stunningly written and as fine and unforgettable as anything I've read in years. It inspired a renewed interest in me in reading modern short stories, and I read both of Wright's other novels as well, although clearly this is his best to date. As David Lynch once described Eraserhead, it is a dream of dark and disturbing things. It's certainly well worth the effort.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Diabolic Picaresque, A Pilgrim's Progress, A Dance of Death, May 13, 2006

By 

prisrob "pris," (New England USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Going Native (Paperback)

"So I think that under this kind of vast superstructure of civilization is all this other stuff. And I suppose looking at it biologically there is that reptilian brain that the whole cortex sits on top of. It's just there. And it's part of our heritage and its inescapable and the fact that it is inescapable leads to some disturbing conclusions about what it is we're made of. I think that question is what the book's about. In that sense I think that Going Native means having these more primal desires and impulses just rise up and seize hold of you." so says Stephen Wright..

Stephen Wright believes that everyone is capable of murder. He doesn't have any doubt about it. Everybody. He guesses people don't want to be told this. He truly believes this, and as we start this magnificent novel; we learn early on that this is his truth. We are introduced to Wylie, who is unable to digest the killing he has seen, and who moves on; and who appears in every chapter in one form or another- the dark eyes, the gun, the glint, and/or the suggestion. The inverted structure form of storytelling introduces us to the people who are touched by these impulses of violence. The real consequences, it lessens the voyeuristic view, and we learn what really matters from the people intimately involved.

In a dark green '69 Ford Galaxie, Wylie Jones drives across America and into the heart of darkness. We meet Wylie, and his wife Rho, and their children and two friends who come for dinner. The All-American family until Wylie goes missing.
Mr. CD and Latisha , the burned out, doped up couple living from one fix to the next. The hitchhiker and the various and sundry people who pick him up. The dangerous and the deranged. Emory Chace, the motel owner and his crazed family, all of them unhinged just a little, and is that Wylie who has absconded with the daughter? Perry Foyle who resides in a "Fuck House", and videotapes the smut for sale. He sideswiped a dark green Ford as he tried to force his way into his parking place, a BIG mistake. Nikki and Jessie who work in an all -night wedding chapel in Las Vegas. The chapel somehow keeps losing some of their for-sale wedding bands. Amanda and Drake, my favorite couple, who go on a search for truth and reality in Borneo. Amanda, who, above everyone else, has the ability to reach redemption and to understand the truth. And then to the Babylon Gardens, the nursery to the stars, and to the woman who owns the business and the man who lives with her.

Finally, to the last scene, where we really don't see anything. It is all in our head. It is all dialogue, no action and simple prose. It is all our impression, and really isn't that what the road to life is,BK?

Stephen Wright is a magician with his pen. As he says "I think, when your sense of self becomes more and more fragile and more and more tenuated and there's less control then. What lies in the wake is a life of just sheer impulse and living for the moment, etcetera. This is where a lot of people going up to prison live. That's why they have problems. They don't know how to channel all this or even how to successfully repress it. This is what learning to be civilized is all about, learning how to deal with your anger, your rage that everyone has." And Stephen Wright has the right idea, we are all but a moment away from our next impulse. Scares the Hell out of you, doesn't it?

Highly, Highly recommended. Terrific book. prisrob 5-13-06