Going native: a novel

{ May 2021 - Verified ebook for complete book description, cover, table of contents, separation of book (front/ back matter, parts, and chapters), and epub format error checking. } Paperback, 320 pages Published 1994 McCaffery 100 Greatest Fiction Going Native is Stephen Wright’s darkly comic take on the road novel, in which one man’s headlong escape from the American Dream becomes everybody’s worst nightmare. Wylie Jones is set: lovely wife, beautiful kids, barbecues in the backyard of his tastefully decorated suburban Chicago house with good friends. Set, but not satisfied. So one night he just walks out, gets behind the wheel of a neighbor’s emerald-green Galaxy 500, and drives off into some other life, his name changed, his personality malleable. In Wright’s inimitable narrative, we’re taken on a joy ride to hell, a rollercoaster of sex and violence and the peculiar mix of the two that is our society today.

Going Native is Stephen Wright’s darkly comic take on the road novel, in which one man’s headlong escape from the American Dream becomes everybody’s worst nightmare. Wylie Jones is set: lovely wife, beautiful kids, barbecues in the backyard of his tastefully decorated suburban Chicago house with good friends. Set, but not satisfied. So one night he just walks out, gets behind the wheel of a neighbor’s emerald-green Galaxy 500, and drives off into some other life, his name changed, his personality malleable. In Wright’s inimitable narrative, we’re taken on a joy ride to hell, a rollercoaster of sex and violence and the peculiar mix of the two that is our society today.

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. (Jan.)

A dutiful husband and father walks out of his life and into a road trip from hell in a novel Toni Morrison calls "astonishing" and Don Delillo proclaims "a slasher classic...strange, dark, and funny." Wylie Jones has a happy marriage, beautiful children, and backyard barbecues in his tastefully decorated suburban house. One night, he follows a sudden impulse, leaves his wife in bed, and commandeers his neighbor's emerald-green Ford Galaxy 500, driving away without a second look. He sheds all traces of his old life in favor of a new name and a new life and drives from town to town, following his deepest impulses where they lead. By turns scathing and hilarious, Stephen Wright's outrageous roller-coaster of sex and violence probes the nihilistic and savage core of the American identity.