Meditations in Green (Vintage Contemporaries (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: Bitter and Shocking but Brilliant
Review: James Griffin uses drugs, not to forget the Vietnam War, but to remember. Home, in the United States, James finds life rife with loneliness and alienation. The Vietnam War, he tells us, really didn't mean anything; all of the fighting was, and will become, fruitless.

James' girlfriend, Huey, is a painter of sorts who paints graffiti on walls, graffiti she calls "soulographs." These soulographs are huge abstractions of the war. James' wall is covered with them, so he whitewashes all of his walls and asks Huey to paint something new. But while she is in the process, the old soulographs begin to bleed through, causing James to experience a flashback to his Vietnam years where he imagines himself in the middle of battle with flashes and flares and rifles all around.

In a surrealistic and utterly brilliant and original manner, Wright manages to show us all the similarities of the Vietnam War and life as we lead it on a day-to-day basis. His protagonist, James, realizes these connections and begins to meditate, to escape these similarities, to escape the absurdity of life, both then and now.

Meditations in Green is a highly symbolic and surreal book. Wright, one of the most brilliant and original writers of the twentieth century, writes this novel in a very elusive manner, using very elusive narrative strategies and structural principles, organizing the book in interesting, overlapping, spiraling circles, which often echo, duplicate and bleed through one another much in the way Huey's soulographs do.

By attempting to devolve himself down to a plant form, James hopes to purge himself of his memories and antipathy towards nature and its eternal cycle of birth and death and rebirth. He is, like all of Wright's characters, very flawed, but these very flaws are what make him so human and let us identify with him and his sufferings.

Stephen Wright is a brilliant writer, but one whose extremism has caused him to be sadly undervalued by the general public. For some reason, I don't believe Wright care much about this. We should care, however, for Wright is brilliant, original, creative and absurd. His books are surrealism, black comedy, absurdism and postmodern literature of the very highest order. Wright is a writer not to be missed by anyone even remotely interested in great literature, postmodern or otherwise.

Rating:
Summary: Bitter and Shocking but Brilliant
Review: The fact that this book is receiving so little attention encourages me to start a ten-page rant, but as that will never be reproduced, let me just say that it's an absolute travesty that this author is being essentially neglected.

Any comparison to Mailer or Vonnegut or O'Brien is absolutely superfluous. This is a unique American voice, a John the Babtist crying in the wilderness and feeding on locusts, but the blind will never hear. This is an Artist in the strictest sense who moves and shapes print in ways that others cannnot hope to emulate. I have no reservations in raising his standard in whatever rung of hell we find ourselves in at present. This is the real deal, people. Put away your childish things and read the message of a true modern prophet, crying from the confines of Hades, urging us to at least look closely at ourselves, even if it drives us mad.

Rating:
Summary: five star general
Review: The fact that this book is receiving so little attention encourages me to start a ten-page rant, but as that will never be reproduced, let me just say that it's an absolute travesty that this author is being essentially neglected.

Any comparison to Mailer or Vonnegut or O'Brien is absolutely superfluous. This is a unique American voice, a John the Babtist crying in the wilderness and feeding on locusts, but the blind will never hear. This is an Artist in the strictest sense who moves and shapes print in ways that others cannnot hope to emulate. I have no reservations in raising his standard in whatever rung of hell we find ourselves in at present. This is the real deal, people. Put away your childish things and read the message of a true modern prophet, crying from the confines of Hades, urging us to at least look closely at ourselves, even if it drives us mad.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and sickening all at once
Review: Wright has shown himself to be a writer of the first order with MEDITATIONS IN GREEN. You follow a path of unsteady characters and numerous potholes to a profoundly sombre conclusion: we are all broken people.