Ep. 21.1 - MEDITATIONS IN GREEN by Stephen Wright w/David Leo Rice
Meditations in Green is the debut novel of the writer, and Vietnam veteran, Stephen Wright. Published in 1983 to praise in mainstream circles—the New York Times review called it “brilliant, and scarifying,” Meditations offers an idiosyncratic, hilarious, and horrifying perspective on that blunderous War in in southeast Asia. If, as Stephen Dedalus says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Wright poses Vietnam as something like the “bad trip from which Spec.4 James Griffin is trying to come down.” In the book, we follow two lines of narrative. One is the 1980s in New York, Griffin is on the margins of society, trying to hold together his psyche as it is invaded by memories, a crazed war buddy, and #4 China White. In the other, we’re with James Griffin in the War as he analyzes aerial photographs for reconnaissance and bombing campaigns, ensconced within the 1069th Military Intelligence Group, a cast of characters only rivaled in imagination, tweaked verisimilitude, and absurdity, by books like Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a book that is funny, disturbing, brutal, and, in my opinion at least, one of the very best American novels on Vietnam war or any other.
David Leo Rice joins me to pore over the negatives of this novel. We talk the ongoing reverberations of the Vietnam war, Stephen Wright’s mastery of exposition and psychedelia, David’s personal experience studying under Stephen Wright, the consciousness of the jungle, the chaos of total information, James Wood’s notion of hysterical realism w/r/t MiG, the comfort of paranoia, and much, much more.
Subscribe to David’s substack, buy his books, and listen to his brilliant podcast WAKE ISLAND. He is one of the finest writers working today and I count myself fortunate to chat with him.
Check out David’s Vietnam-era story I mentioned at the top of the episode: “The Ward Clerk”