Meditations in Green
by Stephen Wright
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen WrightEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08-12
ISBN: 0375712933
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Meditations in Green
Book Review: Green is the color of nightmare...
Summary: 5 Stars
I've now read all of the Stephen Wright novels that I know to exist--except his latest as of this writing *The Amalgamation Polka* --and the sad thing is that there aren't more of them to discover. A writer like Wright ((yes, how appropriate the name)) is the reason the English language was invented beyond the grunts and whistles necessary to have someone at the end of the table pass you the salt. There are hardly more than a handful of authors writing today--or any day--who can make words burn incandescent and illuminate our consciousness the way Wright does. Don DeLillo is another such writer, and the two share many similarities, but Wright is the more poetic; his prose glows at every turn of phrase with revelatory images, like matches in the dark on a journey that begins anew with virtually every sentence and ends in a place you've never been before. His *Going Native,* which I read before I started writing Amazon reviews, is a brilliant, shocking, and disturbing novel, hands-down one of the best contemporary novels and my favorite of Wright's work--possibly up to now. *Meditations in Green* is every bit it's equal, if not its superior. Here's why.
As a war novel, *Meditations in Green" stands with the great ones--the true classics: *The Naked and the Dead,* *All Quiet on the Western Front,* *The Thin Red Line,* *The Red Badge of Courage,* *Catch 22,* as well as any and every novel that has heretofore staked a claim as *the* novel of Vietnam. For my money, *this* is the novel to read about Vietnam--the one I think will be read in the future.
James Griffin is a soldier assigned to a branch of military intelligence located on the ground in Vietnam. His job is to study reconnaissance photos of the surrounding terrain in order to locate enemy positions in the dense jungles that are systematically being bombed and subsequently poisoned by Agent Orange. The novel switches back and forth between Griffin's time in-country and after his discharge, where he lives a marginal and fractured post-war existence in a rundown apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side. *Meditations in Green* also shifts its focus on the kaleidoscopic cast of characters with whom Griffin serves--a positively staggering number of viewpoints that seem to encompass virtually the entire war experience. It's difficult to keep track of all these characters and I don't think you're really meant to do so--Vietnam was a fracturing and incoherent ordeal and to convey that disorienting "center does not hold" experience is a good part of Wright's intent at every turn. Soldiers come, they go, they come back again, they die, they go crazy, they go "native," they spiral away into alcoholism, drug abuse, suicidal recklessness--they try to get to the end of their time in Vietnam any way the can. You can't blame them.
War is mind-numbing boredom interrupted by occasional orgies of horrifying violence--add a few ingredients particular to the Vietnam recipe, including the relentless heat, smothering humidity, and oppressive omnipresence of the jungle, the ghostly elusive VC, and the liberal use of narcotics to escape it all and you have a nightmare from which there is no escape--even after the war is officially long over. For the war in the mind never ends in peace. Wright does as good a job as anyone writing "under the influence" of pharmaceuticals--by which, I mean, mimicking the hallucinatory state of drugged consciousness in fiction. Each object in the world literally becomes a metaphor for something else, nothing is only what it seems, everything is everything. In fact, the drugged state is a good metaphor for the war itself.
*Meditations in Green* is an anti-war novel but anti-war in a way elevated above mere politics and rant. Wright allows war to make the best argument against itself--the violence, the absurdity, the cruelty, the inhumanity, the senseless tragedy of war as an assault on the human being is what we're shown in plain detail. Here is the green hell we've made ourselves on earth, the anti-Eden not even Agent Orange can subdue, the inferno that collectively as a nation we build wherever mankind wages war. And here, described in Dantean detail, are the tortures of the innocent damned of those we throw into this hell to fight for their lives...and for the sins of our way of life.
*Meditations in Green* is a beautiful novel, a horrific novel, an epic novel--a testament brought back from the wilderness by a wild-eyed prophet whose seen whatever lies at the end of the long dark night of the soul. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I cannot give it too many stars. The last forty pages are as harrowing and as moving as anything you'll ever read. The contemporary American `literary' scene is virtually nonexistent, and where it does exist, it's littered with a gaggle of much celebrated pseudo talents and outright no-talent hacks who can't scribble close enough to the center of the road or try hard enough to say what's already been said, which is just another way to say nothing at all. Stephen Wright is--as the line in the recruitment ad says--an "army of one." He's fighting an undeclared war against stupidity and complacency and easy answers to questions that have no answers. It's a losing battle, but he's got the courage of his convictions. I salute him.
Summary of Meditations in Green
Sardonic, searing, seductive and surreal, the award-winning Meditations in Green is regarded by many as the best novel of the Vietnam War. It is a kaleidoscopic collage that whirls about an indelible array of images and characters: perverted Winky, who opted for the army to stay off of welfare; eccentric Payne, who?s obsessed with the film he?s making of the war; bucolic Claypool, who?s irrevocably doomed to a fate worse than death. Just to mention a few.And floating at the center of this psychedelic spin is Spec. 4 James Griffin. In country, Griffin studies the jungle of carpet bomb photos as he fights desperately to keep his grip on reality. And battling addiction stateside after his tour, he studies the green of household plants as he struggles mightily to get his sanity back. With mesmerizing action and Joycean interior monologues, Stephen Wright has created a book that is as much an homage to the darkness of war as it is a testament to the transcendence of art.
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