by Stephen Wright
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Product Description
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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Average Customer Review:
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 Green is the color of nightmare..., 2007-10-15
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.
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
Bitter and Shocking but Brilliant, 2000-11-11
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.
24 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
five star general, 2000-09-12
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.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Beautiful and sickening all at once, 1999-01-02
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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A truly pivotal work, 1998-11-19
A book like this comes all too infrequently. I picked it up a decade ago in a Bangkok bookstore, and when I put it down I felt like I had been struck between the eyes with a 2x4. The book revolves around the Vietnam War and its aftermath, but like "Catch-22", "Meditations" simply uses the war as a backdrop to focus on the modern human condition. Darkly humorous and insightful, I recommend it to every friend.
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