On the Road...Now With Murder!

Going Native by Stephen Wright
320 pages
published by Delta


Click on Stephen Wright and Goodreads.com has a nice bio on the dry comic, Steven Wright. This is not the same Stephen Wright. At first, I was like, "Wait, the dry ironic comic Stephen Wright wrote several works of post-modernish fiction?" Well, no, he didn't, and he spells his name "Steven" not "Stephen". Now that we got that out of the way.

Most reviews reference this as a "horror" type novel, and even DeLillo calls it a "slasher classic". I guess. It didn't strike me a particularly violent novel. Well, it kinda was but most of the violence was off stage. But I must say, the second to last chapter was rather chilling.

So it's a road novel, in that we're (the reader) are following the trail of Wylie, a wandering suburbanite, who up and leaves his bbq one night and, as we're led to believe, kinda goes on this killing spree of sorts, though several times throughout the novel, you (the reader) begin to question if this is even Wylie you're reading about. And if not Wylie, then who is this psycho?


Quotes:

"But you [America] make a cartoon of everything: your movies, your clothes, your furniture, your books, your food, but especially your sex. Everything bright and tasty. But this is a dirty game you are playing with yourselves. This ideal of honesty and openness is a pathetic fraud. You pretend to be so innocent when none of you are and it is this charade that is genuinely pornographic." pg.146

"The momentary lull between driver and passenger transgressed by the inexhaustible exertions of Pastor Bob launching a possibility bomb into Satan's stronghold in Chillicothe, Ohio, where a sister in need required an emergency financial healing." pg. 89 (Look Perrys! Your hometown!)