Going Native

This is a story in which the progression of the narrative is sacrificed for the sake of deeper portraiture of the American spiritual landscape. Each chapter introduces new characters in new locales, and tells their singularly bizarre tales with an almost hallucinatory rapture: there are Wylie and Rho and Tom and Gerri, two suburban couples having a banal barbecue, only to have Wylie disappear at the end; there is a crack-house couple a few doors away, lost in an endless high, and also missing their car; there is a souvenir shop-owner in the southwest who polishes a screenplay about aliens, and whose daughter gets picked up hitchhiking by a man who might be Wylie. The other chapters--about lesbian workers in a Vegas chapel, a porn film magnate, a Hollywood couple tripping in Borneo, a California woman who runs a tree nursery--are just as oblique in their relation to a succession of events hinted at, but never told, which seems to involve Wylie's journey across the country in a green Ford Galaxy. Wylie (perhaps) makes an appearance in every chapter, sometimes in cameo, sometimes in disguise, and often in violence. The effect of this manner of storytelling is at once compelling and alienating; the author refuses to ponder the psychology of his vagabond Wylie, while leaving no nuance unexplored among those whose paths he crosses. In the end, this is the darkest of novels, both in its subject matter and it execution, although readers may find themselves joyously careening through Wright's ( Meditations in Green ) absolutely brilliant maximalist prose in pursuit of a story that, in the end, remains an unsettling mystery. Author tour. (Jan.)