Wright, Stephen 1946–

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WRIGHT, Stephen 1946–

PERSONAL: Born 1946. Education: Attended Ohio State University and University of Iowa.

ADDRESSES: Office—New School University, Creative Writing Program, 66 West 12th St., Room 507, New York, NY 10011.

CAREER: Novelist. New School University, New York, NY, faculty member. Taught at Princeton University, Brown University, and Goucher College. Military service: U.S. Army, 1969–70, intelligence officer in Vietnam.

AWARDS, HONORS: Maxwell Perkins Prize, 1983, for Meditations in Green; Guggenheim fellowship, 1989; Whiting Writers Award, 1990; Lannan Literary Award, 1994, for Going Native.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Meditations in Green, Charles Scribner's Sons (New York, NY), 1983.

M31: A Family Romance, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1988.

Going Native, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1994.

Contributor to periodicals, including Esquire, Ontario Review, and Antioch Review. Also contributor to Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, edited by Larry McCaffery, Black Ice Books (Boulder, CO), 1993.

SIDELIGHTS: Stephen Wright stepped onto the literary scene in 1983 with the publication of his debut novel, Meditations in Green, a work inspired by his harrowing experiences as a soldier during the Vietnam War. Frequently compared to Catch-22, Joseph Heller's classic antiwar satire, Meditations in Green was greeted by critics as the work of a promising new author. Wright grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University during the 1960s. However, when his grades slipped, he became eligible for the draft and was sent to Vietnam as an intelligence officer. After returning from service, Wright resumed his studies at Ohio State, majoring in English, but eventually left to attend the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he studied under John Cheever, John Irving, and Vance Bourjaily. Wright's first novel was the result of that two-year program.

Meditations in Green revolves around the experiences of Specialist Four James Griffin, a U.S. intelligence advisor in Vietnam who escapes the horror, tedium, and madness of the war through drug use. The novel's title alludes to the green of the jungle's dense foliage, including its many hallucinogenic plants, and the narrative structure alternates between Griffin's first-person reflections as a heroin-addicted veteran and vivid third-person accounts of combat and mayhem in Southeast Asia.

Though several reviewers regarded the book's shifting narrative presentation as a distraction, most praised Meditations in Green as one of the best fictional accounts of the Vietnam War to date. New York Times Book Review contributor Walter Kendrick described the work as a "brilliant, scarifying first novel," while Washington Post Book World critic William Boyd noted, "its portrayal of the U.S. military machine and mind at their most brutally callous and complacent is a terrifying indictment." Though praising Wright's "eyewitness testimony," Boyd wondered about the literary merit of war novels in general, suggesting that their documentary imperative inevitably overwhelms their artistic pretensions. As Kendrick observed, "[Wright's] novel is lurid, extravagant, rhapsodic and horrific by turns—sometimes all at once. Its structure is needlessly complicated, and its superheated prose often gets wearisome. Yet for all its self-conscious excesses, it has overwhelming impact—the impact of an experience so devastating that words can hardly contain it."

M31: A Family Romance is set in the American Midwest and involves an eccentric family at the center of a UFO cult. Living in an abandoned church whose centerpiece is a mock spacecraft, husband and wife Dash and Dot preside over a clan of damaged children—including an autistic daughter whom they believe is a conduit for alien transmissions—while proselytizing salvation in galaxy M31. Among their new-age followers is Gwen, an alien abductee who narrates much of the novel.

Praising M31 in the New York Times Book Review, Francine Prose attributed the novel's success to Wright's "beautifully written, sharply detailed" prose and "metaphoric imagination," which she found especially effective in satirizing contemporary American mass culture. People reviewer Jess Cagle, on the other hand, viewed Wright's prose as occasionally "self-indulgent," but noted that "more often it is haunting." New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani found much to appreciate in Wright's "electrically wired prose" and the novelist's depiction of Middle America's dark underside. "Wright has an instinct for reinventing some of the essential American myths," wrote Kakutani, "and his ease in combining the mundane and the extravagant, the domestic and the bizarre, lend this novel dense luminosity." Describing the book as a "funny, disturbing novel," Prose remarked, "M31 is not just a galley of grotesques but a visionary novel—a vision of American life turned incestuous and lethal."

Going Native, Wright's third novel, is a loosely linked series of stories that trace the cross-country trajectory of Wylie Jones, a married suburban father who unexpectedly abandons his banal existence by driving away in a stolen car. Wylie's journey is described obliquely through the perspectives of those with whom he comes into contact, including a crack-house couple, a solitary truck driver, a science-fiction-writing motel owner, representatives of the porn industry, Las Vegas lesbians, and Hollywood eco-tourists. New York Times reviewer Kakutani hailed Going Native as "an uncom-promising 1990's version of 'On the Road' that gives us an alarming picture of a country pitched on the edge of an emotional and social abyss." While praising Wright's "absolutely brilliant maximalist prose," a Publishers Weekly reviewer described Going Native as "the darkest of novels," remarking that the book's narrative structure is both "compelling and alienating." People reviewer Joseph Olshan noted that Going Native reveals "Wright's raw, poetic sensibility," adding that the novel has "the impact of an X-acto knife slitting open the belly of American life."

Over the years Wright's work has drawn comparison to that of Thomas Pynchon, a writer whom Wright has said he admires. Commenting on Wright's "grammatically complex, ironic, sarcastic" style in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Steven Moore compared Wright's fiction to "an issue of the National Enquirer as cowritten by [James] Joyce and Pynchon." According to Moore, Going Native is a "brilliant" novel that "should promote Wright to the ranks of America's finest novelists."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Christian Science Monitor, November 4, 1983, John A. Glusman, review of Meditations in Green, p. B10.

Contemporary Literature, summer, 1998, interview with Wright, pp. 156-179.

New Leader, November 28, 1983, Tom Graves, review of Meditations in Green, pp. 14-15.

New York Times, June 29, 1988, Michiko Kakutani, review of M31: A Family Romance, p. C25; January 7, 1994, Michiko Kakutani, "On the Road across the Alarming '90s Landscape," p. C31.

New York Times Book Review, November 6, 1983, Walter Kendrick, review of Meditations in Green, pp. 7, 24; July 17, 1988, Francine Prose, review of M31, p. 11.

People, October 24, 1988, Jess Cagle, review of M31, p. 40; May 2, 1994, Joseph Olshan, review of Going Native, p. 39.

Publishers Weekly, January 24, 1994, Michael Coffey, "Stephen Wright," pp. 35-36; October 25, 1998, review of Going Native, p. 43.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 1994, Steven Moore, review of Going Native, p. 202.

Wall Street Journal, October 13, 1983, Tom Carhart, review of Meditations in Green, p. 26.

Washington Post Book World, October 30, 1983, William Boyd, review of Meditations in Green, pp. 3, 11.