Going Native - by Stephen Wright (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in hardcover in 1994 by Farrar Straus and Giroux.

Book Synopsis

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 rollercoaster of sex and violence probes the nihilistic and savage core of the American identity.

Review Quotes

Praise for Processed Cheese

"Processed Cheese does for consumerism what Catch-22 did for war."--Stephen King, bestselling author of IT and The Shining

PRAISE FOR GOING NATIVE

"An astonishing novel." --Toni Morrison

PRAISE FOR STEPHEN WRIGHT

Meditations in Green (1983)

"Precisely that brutal hallucination we desperately wanted to end." --Don DeLillo

"The best that any fiction about this war has offered." --Newsweek

M31: A Family Romance (1988)

"Beautiful and terrifying. . . . M31 offers a big, bold look at the American family. It takes us far away and very close to home. . . . Stephen Wright is a . . . bright star in the literary sky." --San Francisco Chronicle

"M31 is a devastatingly forceful accomplishment and reestablishes its author as a star of the first magnitude." --The Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Wright's sentences buzz like high-tension wires. I enjoyed reading every word of M31, literally." --Russell Banks

The Amalgamation Polka (2007)

"An extravagantly talented novelist. . . . For Wright, America, past and present, is Wonderland, a place of marvels and horrors from which not even the fortunate escape with their heads. " --Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review

"This dark and lyrical tale of madness and prophecy speaks uncannily from within its period, in the tradition of heartbroken humor, which America's lapses of faith in its own promise have always evoked in the finest of our storytellers, among whom Stephen Wright here honorably takes his place." --Thomas Pynchon

"Quite simply an astonishing novel, brilliantly executed and beautifully written. Stephen Wright deserves to be famous and feted for it."
--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"In novel after unsparing novel-each one gorgeous, too, and full of awe- Stephen Wright has emerged as a kind of modern-day Socrates hectoring a complacent citizenry to have a good hard look at its collective delusions. With Processed Cheese, he's written a novel so outrageous and diagnostic of our current ills, it will prove much stronger than hemlock. If you hope to keep up your venality, America, your cruelties, and your death wish, better string this court jester up by his toes."--Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party

About the Author

Stephen Wright is a Vietnam veteran, MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the author of four previous novels. He has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and has taught writing and literature at Iowa, Princeton, Brown, and The New School. He was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, and lives in New York City.