MEDITATIONS IN GREEN

by Stephen Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 1983

There are three long, uncommonly vivid and well-written battle scenes in this Vietnam novel, winner of this year's Maxwell Perkins award: a green soldier's first experience of being under attack; a patrol coming upon a downed American helicopter whose crew and troops are hanging from the rotors, butchered; and the final overrun by VC and NVA soldiers of the base of the 1069th Military Intelligence Group, the unit with which the novel is concerned. The troops of the 1069th are given to fragging, freakouts, cinematography, dope, and cynical dialogue--lots of verbal goofing, very Sixties. Their primary assignments are involved with planning defoliation--which gives another facet of meaning to the ""green"" in the title: the jungle here is a world of wonder, impenetrable, making it obvious to all who move through it that the jungle--and not the soldiers--will ultimately win. And Wright's principal narrator-protagonist, Spec 4 James Griffin, who tries to remain detached through the pressures of war, will--as an unstrung survivor--eventually take to a mystical, hysterical, yet moving sort of botany in his postwar San Francisco apartment. Still, though the everyday madnesses and horrors are set forward here with verisimilitude, clarity, and occasional brilliance, only those above-mentioned battle scenes offer sustained, gripping narration. Elsewhere, Wright's kaleidoscopic, fragmentary approach--flashbacks, flash-forwards, letters--makes it difficult to stay closely interested in Griffin's deterioration; and the ubiquitous botany metaphor, while providing several evocative, distinctive sequences, eventually becomes an over-utilized, over-literary distraction. A good Vietnam novel, then, with warfare-episodes of enduring power, but not a fully involving or deeply affecting one.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1983

ISBN: 0375712933

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION