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Meditations in Green
Sardonic, searing, seductive and surreal, the award-winning Meditations in Green is regarded by many as the best novel of the Vietnam War. It is a kaleidoscopic collage that whirls about an indelible array of images and perverted Winky, who opted for the army to stay off of welfare; eccentric Payne, who’s obsessed with the film he’s making of the war; bucolic Claypool, who’s irrevocably doomed to a fate worse than death. Just to mention a few.
And floating at the center of this psychedelic spin is Spec. 4 James Griffin. In country, Griffin studies the jungle of carpet bomb photos as he fights desperately to keep his grip on reality. And battling addiction stateside after his tour, he studies the green of household plants as he struggles mightily to get his sanity back. With mesmerizing action and Joycean interior monologues, Stephen Wright has created a book that is as much an homage to the darkness of war as it is a testament to the transcendence of art.
And floating at the center of this psychedelic spin is Spec. 4 James Griffin. In country, Griffin studies the jungle of carpet bomb photos as he fights desperately to keep his grip on reality. And battling addiction stateside after his tour, he studies the green of household plants as he struggles mightily to get his sanity back. With mesmerizing action and Joycean interior monologues, Stephen Wright has created a book that is as much an homage to the darkness of war as it is a testament to the transcendence of art.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
18 people are currently reading
1154 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Wright
147 books104 followersStephen 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
July 15, 2023
War and its aftermath: the style of Meditations in Green is fancifully delirious and its narration is stark graphic…
It may seem to be fun but every man has turned into a set of phobias and psychoses… And men keep dying…
The war is over and life goes on but the main hero can’t forget the past and he is full of angst and anxiety and he dreams to become a plant so that his life would’ve been cool and calm and verdant…
Wars end but phobias and psychoses remain.
Trips struck the match with a cavalier flourish and attempted for the second time to start his first pipe of the day. Lungs wheezing like a pair of mildewed bellows, he sucked furiously on the black stem of his seasoned briar. A wisp of pungent smoke came and went. “Well, bite my butt,” he mumbled, scowling into the dead bowl. “This goddamn weather.” He tamped the springy contents down with a P-38 can opener, which shared the chain around his neck with a metallic swastika and a gold-plated scarab beetle. (His dog tags he had ceremoniously deposited one moonless night inside a Buddhist tomb, one of many overgrown and send-swept mounds heaped in apparently random fashion back at the perimeter like a distribution of shell craters seen in reverse stereoscopic lenses.) “The rain makes the grass damp and hard to light.”
It may seem to be fun but every man has turned into a set of phobias and psychoses… And men keep dying…
The man blubbered, staring with horror at his left leg which rested now incongruously beside his head, upsidedown and unattached. “Well, shit,” muttered Kraft and kicked the useless leg off into the underbrush. The wounded man’s white face looked as though someone had flicked a full fountain pen across it, a spattering of black marks like powder burns or bits of dirt driven by explosive force into the skin. At his other end black blood drained into the ground. Kneeling at his side, Doc quickly tied on the stump, stuck a needle in his arm. Then he cut open the shirt. “Jesus Christ,” said someone softly in anger and disbelief. The chest resembled a plowed field. The man looked up at Doc, a child’s look, as one hand reached tentatively for his groin, asking in a dry voice, “My balls, are my balls okay?” and Doc nodded, patting his forehead, and the man died.
The war is over and life goes on but the main hero can’t forget the past and he is full of angst and anxiety and he dreams to become a plant so that his life would’ve been cool and calm and verdant…
“I don’t know, Grif, do I know you anymore? You’re out in the boonies. This creepy apartment, your weird friends, hunkering down in the toilet all day. The boonies. Know what I think? I think that war’s got you bent out of shape. You’re all twisted up.” He began to chuckle quietly. “The war turned you around. You ain’t the same since you shipped out. Yeah, you’re all fucked up.”
Wars end but phobias and psychoses remain.
June 7, 2025
Stephen Wright’s debut novel, first published in 1983, is a difficult one to categorize. The Amazon blurb describes it as being “sardonic, searing, seductive, and surreal…” It is certainly all of that.
It is also overwritten, with sentences that cover an entire page and paragraphs that cover more than a page. After reading about ten or fifteen pages, I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to finish the book and after about thirty pages, I was almost positive that I wasn’t. In fact, I almost put it aside, but knowing that if I did I would never pick it up again, I soldiered on.
The book consists of vignettes, some as short as a paragraph and others that last as much as twenty pages. They alternate between a third person account of events that occurred during the Vietnam War and a first person account of events that take place in a large American city after the war – a war that never ends for the first person narrator, the book’s central character.
At first, I was put off by the long sentences, the long paragraphs, and the alternating settings. Eventually, however, I realized that while it was true that at times the book was chaotic to the point of being incoherent that what it was attempting to describe was also chaotic and incoherent. It was at that point that I was able to adjust to the rhythm of the book and found myself not wanting to put it down.
Walter Kendrick in his overall favorable review in the New York Times wrote, Wright’s “talent is impressive, though unruly.” And that “some of the excesses of the book can be ascribed to its being a first novel, mulled over for at least ten years. It tries to do too much – to describe the war, its aftereffects, the psychology of drug addiction and (most murkily) the role that green plants play in all these matters.”
Critic Nathaniel Rich in his review of the book wrote, “A good war novel forces you to visualize, in vivid detail, the horror and dysfunction of combat. A great war novel goes further – it makes you fear the horror personally.” By that definition, Meditations in Green is a great war novel.
I remember once reading that all war novels, by their very nature, are anti-war novels, the reason being that any faithful depiction of the horror of combat would have to leave the reader with a visceral abhorrence of war. Meditations in Green does that. Furthermore, it is more than a novel about the Vietnam War. It is in the tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, a novel about the absurdity of war – any war. Those two novels contain some humorous moments, and so does Meditations in Green. But the humor in all three novels comes in the dark variety.
The Amazon blurb also says that many consider Meditations in Green to be the greatest of all the Vietnam War novels. I have always been partial to James Webb’s Fields of Fire and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and the more recent Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. I always recommend them to other readers. I will also recommend Meditations in Green, but not without some reservations. It may not be for everybody – especially not for anybody who prefers a straightforward linear narration. (For the same reason, some people do not care for The Things They Carried.). My advice for anyone who does decide to read it is that they stay the course. Don’t give up on it too early.
Is Meditations in Green the greatest Vietnam War novel? Well, maybe not, but it does belong in the conversation.
It is also overwritten, with sentences that cover an entire page and paragraphs that cover more than a page. After reading about ten or fifteen pages, I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to finish the book and after about thirty pages, I was almost positive that I wasn’t. In fact, I almost put it aside, but knowing that if I did I would never pick it up again, I soldiered on.
The book consists of vignettes, some as short as a paragraph and others that last as much as twenty pages. They alternate between a third person account of events that occurred during the Vietnam War and a first person account of events that take place in a large American city after the war – a war that never ends for the first person narrator, the book’s central character.
At first, I was put off by the long sentences, the long paragraphs, and the alternating settings. Eventually, however, I realized that while it was true that at times the book was chaotic to the point of being incoherent that what it was attempting to describe was also chaotic and incoherent. It was at that point that I was able to adjust to the rhythm of the book and found myself not wanting to put it down.
Walter Kendrick in his overall favorable review in the New York Times wrote, Wright’s “talent is impressive, though unruly.” And that “some of the excesses of the book can be ascribed to its being a first novel, mulled over for at least ten years. It tries to do too much – to describe the war, its aftereffects, the psychology of drug addiction and (most murkily) the role that green plants play in all these matters.”
Critic Nathaniel Rich in his review of the book wrote, “A good war novel forces you to visualize, in vivid detail, the horror and dysfunction of combat. A great war novel goes further – it makes you fear the horror personally.” By that definition, Meditations in Green is a great war novel.
I remember once reading that all war novels, by their very nature, are anti-war novels, the reason being that any faithful depiction of the horror of combat would have to leave the reader with a visceral abhorrence of war. Meditations in Green does that. Furthermore, it is more than a novel about the Vietnam War. It is in the tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, a novel about the absurdity of war – any war. Those two novels contain some humorous moments, and so does Meditations in Green. But the humor in all three novels comes in the dark variety.
The Amazon blurb also says that many consider Meditations in Green to be the greatest of all the Vietnam War novels. I have always been partial to James Webb’s Fields of Fire and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and the more recent Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. I always recommend them to other readers. I will also recommend Meditations in Green, but not without some reservations. It may not be for everybody – especially not for anybody who prefers a straightforward linear narration. (For the same reason, some people do not care for The Things They Carried.). My advice for anyone who does decide to read it is that they stay the course. Don’t give up on it too early.
Is Meditations in Green the greatest Vietnam War novel? Well, maybe not, but it does belong in the conversation.
October 2, 2008
This is a book that has remained among my Top 10 since I first read it in about 1987 or so (it was originally published in 1983). I really can't say enough about it, and while I recognize that war novels are not to everyone's taste, I have long encouraged everyone I know to read it, even if it takes them out of their comfort zone. It's one of those novels that transcends its genre. It is, quite simply, a classic--or at least, it deserves to be. And yet, so few people have ever heard of it, or of its author, Stephen Wright. He is not very prolific; his novels don't get a lot of popular press and aren't picked up for movie deals; and honestly, his style is a little outside the mainstream to be really accessible.
But, let me give you three reasons why, if you haven't ever heard of it or of Wright, you should consider checking out Meditations In Green:
1) Wright employs some of the most beautiful language and wordplay I've ever read to describe some of the most horrific images you will ever see rendered in print. I am trying to find a quotation that does justice, but it's kind of like quoting Dylan: it's ALL quotable, and it's very difficult to excerpt and retain the power of the whole piece, which needs to wash over you. Sometimes, it's what he says directly; sometimes it's the structure of long, run-on sentences as insidious and dense as the jungle, or short machine-gun wordbursts that puncture the page. His prose sweeps you up in its rhythm until you can actually feel your blood pressure rise in response. Sometimes, it's how he develops a scene and then ends abruptly with an unwritten thought--it's what is implied, not what is written, that is so powerful. This writing is so alive, it can be no less than a raging condemnation of the death and destruction it describes.
2) The central character is a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam veteran who was responsible for targeting areas for Agent Orange attack, and who now is going slowly (or quickly) crazy in an apartment in NYC (? -- some cement jungle, in counterpoint to the real one he's left half a world away). Chapters of him at work and at war in Vietnam; and him descending into the streets of the city and further into drug-induced madness back in the 'world' are interspersed with the meditations: very short chapters told from the point of view of a houseplant. Yes, really. It's a brilliantly-employed conceit. Nature, growth, life juxtaposed with madness, death and destruction.
3) Wright brings the hallucinogenic atrocity of Vietnam to life in detail and creates a testament to the insanity not just of that war, but of all wars. IMHO, it is the finest anti-war novel since Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. It bears some stylistic similarity to JGHG, but it is entirely Wright's own unique, wonderful, horrendous and magnificent creation.
***WARNING:***
The language and images in this novel are vivid, brutal, obscene and graphic. If you are easily offended by vulgarity, well--you'll be offended. But if you find unjust wars even more offensive, then I would encourage you to keep in mind that the last thing an anti-war novel should do is leave you feeling comfortable, or worry about offending the sensitive reader. Bravo to Wright and to all who refuse to sanitize or glorify war, and who use language appropriately to describe that which is truly obscene.
But, let me give you three reasons why, if you haven't ever heard of it or of Wright, you should consider checking out Meditations In Green:
1) Wright employs some of the most beautiful language and wordplay I've ever read to describe some of the most horrific images you will ever see rendered in print. I am trying to find a quotation that does justice, but it's kind of like quoting Dylan: it's ALL quotable, and it's very difficult to excerpt and retain the power of the whole piece, which needs to wash over you. Sometimes, it's what he says directly; sometimes it's the structure of long, run-on sentences as insidious and dense as the jungle, or short machine-gun wordbursts that puncture the page. His prose sweeps you up in its rhythm until you can actually feel your blood pressure rise in response. Sometimes, it's how he develops a scene and then ends abruptly with an unwritten thought--it's what is implied, not what is written, that is so powerful. This writing is so alive, it can be no less than a raging condemnation of the death and destruction it describes.
2) The central character is a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam veteran who was responsible for targeting areas for Agent Orange attack, and who now is going slowly (or quickly) crazy in an apartment in NYC (? -- some cement jungle, in counterpoint to the real one he's left half a world away). Chapters of him at work and at war in Vietnam; and him descending into the streets of the city and further into drug-induced madness back in the 'world' are interspersed with the meditations: very short chapters told from the point of view of a houseplant. Yes, really. It's a brilliantly-employed conceit. Nature, growth, life juxtaposed with madness, death and destruction.
3) Wright brings the hallucinogenic atrocity of Vietnam to life in detail and creates a testament to the insanity not just of that war, but of all wars. IMHO, it is the finest anti-war novel since Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. It bears some stylistic similarity to JGHG, but it is entirely Wright's own unique, wonderful, horrendous and magnificent creation.
***WARNING:***
The language and images in this novel are vivid, brutal, obscene and graphic. If you are easily offended by vulgarity, well--you'll be offended. But if you find unjust wars even more offensive, then I would encourage you to keep in mind that the last thing an anti-war novel should do is leave you feeling comfortable, or worry about offending the sensitive reader. Bravo to Wright and to all who refuse to sanitize or glorify war, and who use language appropriately to describe that which is truly obscene.
December 19, 2023
Some of the best prose I've read about Vietnam. A sprawling collage of hallucinatory war scenes and scarifying sketches that feels like it was stitched together into a novel after the fact. The present day PTSD frame narrative is fascinating but under-nourished. Sometimes the lack of structure can be exhausting, but I was glad I stuck it out. The parts here are greater than the whole and the thrills reliably come at the sentence level, in startling and electrifying bursts.
August 24, 2012
The man writes zero boring sentences. And I felt like I didn't breathe during the last 30 pages of this book.
January 10, 2008
The book cover states that this book is regarded by many as the best book ever about the Vietnam War, and having read most of the works considered part of the canon of that era, I in no small measure agree with the statement. It is nothing short of brilliant. The story (like other works of that era) is about a man’s struggle to adapt back to society as a vet, with enough flashbacks that you understand his mental and emotional wrestling. The prose is tight, the structure of the book is creative, the symbolism subtle – as good a work as I’ve read in the last five years.
April 28, 2022
Unlike other novels of the Viet Nam I've read this book isn't about front line combat units it's a story of a Military Intelligence unit, analysts, interrogators other operations and personnel in the unit and there are some characters. A few of the folks do go out attached to patrols with the Infantry, a patrol to located a downed Mohawk aircraft and it's crew which ends up being a harrowing experience. Lot of drugs, some good culture references and of course the green and green and more green. A book that will definitely be read again.
March 18, 2024
I'm not the aficionado of the massive heaps of art, literature, film and music left in the wake of the Vietnam War that some of my friends are . But this book and Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers" transcend their peers on every possible level.
Note: this book is not for the faint-hearted. Additionally, Wright will make you feel like you're on drugs, whilst writing about other people being on drugs. This is not entirely a good thing.
Note: this book is not for the faint-hearted. Additionally, Wright will make you feel like you're on drugs, whilst writing about other people being on drugs. This is not entirely a good thing.
October 27, 2013
"I don't know, maybe it's me, but I couldn't make any sense of it at all. I mean, there's no beginning, no middle, no end. There's no coherence. It just kind of settles over you. Like a musty tent."
Our hero, Spec. 4 James Griffin, is speaking above, but it's also a perfect description of the book, which reads like a memoir, wrapped inside a nightmare -- as brilliant, brutal and poetic as it is almost incomprehensibly bizarre.
Our hero, Spec. 4 James Griffin, is speaking above, but it's also a perfect description of the book, which reads like a memoir, wrapped inside a nightmare -- as brilliant, brutal and poetic as it is almost incomprehensibly bizarre.
August 11, 2012
I'm about a third of the way through, and while I admire this book, I am just not in the mood for it now. Another day.
August 15, 2007
Amazing writer.
He's the kind of writer that makes me want to quit writing.
He's the kind of writer that makes me want to quit writing.
March 31, 2016
War, pot, insomnia, Jimi Hendrix, death, boredom and horror...and green. Jungles, camouflage, paint, leaves, sunrises, and death in green and shades thereof.
August 19, 2025
Very nice👍
January 22, 2013
taken me a while to get to this.
..was smashed about the head by this, review later..
I came to this book via Wright's Going Native which was as I called it - lush, hyper-real/surreal and trippy - and this is the same, prose that glows.
Maybe I learnt nothing new in relation to war: maybe I'm Vietnammed (or war in general) out. What happens here covers familiar ground – it combines the hallucinatory horror of Apocalypse Now (released 3 years before) with the absurdity of Catch 22 (eg all the dogs in the camp compound are killed at the whim of one “general” (i'm guessing at rank, can't remember); a “sergeant” spends all his time making a film of the war, getting the staff to recreate scenes). But nevertheless it is a powerful and stunning indictment of war and its effects, and Wright is a superb writer and moralist:
‘But what’s it like to kill somebody personally. For the reader back home. Intimate details please.’
‘..I guess I’d have to say it’s like taking a shit. You know, some are good and satisfying, some okay, some just plain messy, but one way or another, it’s always nice to get the crap out’.
The following will give an idea of how the prose flows. It is one of the more gentle passages, I've spared you the heads blown apart and the torture:
The helicopter shook and shook like a wet dog. In a moment the gears and all the bolts would come loose, trickle out the bottom in a runny metallic shit.. The engine sounded like gravel in a blender. Griffin heard a voice in his ear, ‘Waste those motherfuckers, oh goddam godamm,’ and his hands were shaking the machine gun and his arms were shaking too and Pimplechin shaking up and down beside him was helping to feed the belt into the gun that shook to the trees, the paddies, the huts, the bugs on the ground, the bugs everywhere, shaking and shaking, his own parts coming loose, sliding around like yolks in a pan, shaking the bolt out of the center of the world so a trillion agitated pieces come falling down like Christmas snow in a plastic ball in synchronised vibration until all the bugs were gone because the pilot had swung the damaged machine away to sputter along off the bone white coast above the unarmed sea.
His achievement is to make the experience so vivid you feel it in your fingertips, feel the blood coursing round you, and make you glad you’re here, in Birmingham, UK, on a bus or on the sofa, but also remembering how soldiers are out there now fighting in your name too, and how stupid and endless war is. One war after another. Maybe the only proper response for those caught up in it is to go mad like Claypool here, from Indiana, who stops speaking or responding to anything, or 'Trips' who becomes obsessed with assassinating Sergeant Anstin, even after the war, tracking him down, mistaking innocent people for him. Alternatively you could get blown away by drugs:
Each day was a tube you curled yourself into a ball and rolled through. Zip. Dark tube connected to dark tube, a tunnel to tumble down. Zip.
..He glided over time in swift hydraulic comfort. Faces were like cities, the night was a smoky black mirror, the sound of a single word filled the chamber of the universe… he rode on cockroaches to the end of color, he watched machines dissolve into gray fluid that bubbled away into the ground.
This book stands comparison to any of the great war books, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, All Quiet on the Western Front, Johnson's Tree of Smoke, or the aforementioned 'Catch 22'.
..was smashed about the head by this, review later..
I came to this book via Wright's Going Native which was as I called it - lush, hyper-real/surreal and trippy - and this is the same, prose that glows.
Maybe I learnt nothing new in relation to war: maybe I'm Vietnammed (or war in general) out. What happens here covers familiar ground – it combines the hallucinatory horror of Apocalypse Now (released 3 years before) with the absurdity of Catch 22 (eg all the dogs in the camp compound are killed at the whim of one “general” (i'm guessing at rank, can't remember); a “sergeant” spends all his time making a film of the war, getting the staff to recreate scenes). But nevertheless it is a powerful and stunning indictment of war and its effects, and Wright is a superb writer and moralist:
‘But what’s it like to kill somebody personally. For the reader back home. Intimate details please.’
‘..I guess I’d have to say it’s like taking a shit. You know, some are good and satisfying, some okay, some just plain messy, but one way or another, it’s always nice to get the crap out’.
The following will give an idea of how the prose flows. It is one of the more gentle passages, I've spared you the heads blown apart and the torture:
The helicopter shook and shook like a wet dog. In a moment the gears and all the bolts would come loose, trickle out the bottom in a runny metallic shit.. The engine sounded like gravel in a blender. Griffin heard a voice in his ear, ‘Waste those motherfuckers, oh goddam godamm,’ and his hands were shaking the machine gun and his arms were shaking too and Pimplechin shaking up and down beside him was helping to feed the belt into the gun that shook to the trees, the paddies, the huts, the bugs on the ground, the bugs everywhere, shaking and shaking, his own parts coming loose, sliding around like yolks in a pan, shaking the bolt out of the center of the world so a trillion agitated pieces come falling down like Christmas snow in a plastic ball in synchronised vibration until all the bugs were gone because the pilot had swung the damaged machine away to sputter along off the bone white coast above the unarmed sea.
His achievement is to make the experience so vivid you feel it in your fingertips, feel the blood coursing round you, and make you glad you’re here, in Birmingham, UK, on a bus or on the sofa, but also remembering how soldiers are out there now fighting in your name too, and how stupid and endless war is. One war after another. Maybe the only proper response for those caught up in it is to go mad like Claypool here, from Indiana, who stops speaking or responding to anything, or 'Trips' who becomes obsessed with assassinating Sergeant Anstin, even after the war, tracking him down, mistaking innocent people for him. Alternatively you could get blown away by drugs:
Each day was a tube you curled yourself into a ball and rolled through. Zip. Dark tube connected to dark tube, a tunnel to tumble down. Zip.
..He glided over time in swift hydraulic comfort. Faces were like cities, the night was a smoky black mirror, the sound of a single word filled the chamber of the universe… he rode on cockroaches to the end of color, he watched machines dissolve into gray fluid that bubbled away into the ground.
This book stands comparison to any of the great war books, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, All Quiet on the Western Front, Johnson's Tree of Smoke, or the aforementioned 'Catch 22'.
April 30, 2017
A series of descriptions of drug highs,insanity, murder and battle gore that goes nowhere. There is no context, no motive, no origins, no fault. The obvious impression it made on me was that war is insane and repulsive but a sociopath will read it as an exciting adventure story.
The main character and narrator, Griffin, lacks emotion, with his observations on the chaos and violence, rendered in a poetic style that feels inappropriate for the subject. I felt the book was simply: 'and then the sarge tortured a gook(insert gruesome details), and then my buddy showed up with some heroin; and then we went on patrol and some guys go blown up(insert gruesome details)and this guy is crazy, and that guy is crazy, and I'm watching all of this and telling you about it.'-- drawn out with long poetic sentences. I'm not saying any of this is wrong, it just isn't enough for me. I find it boring.
He returns to the US and, sensitive soul that he is, gets into plants and plant-based meditation(?): hence the title, yet he never points the finger at, or even wonders, who it was that planted him there in that hell. Maybe he thinks it was destiny? and that Nixon, Dulles, Kissinger, 'gooks' et al were simply playing out their preordained roles. So no blame, no worries, just step over the body parts, smoke some dope and keep on talking about it, don't bother to think. The book's structure alternates between the US plant-related scenes and the war, but the US scenes are even weaker than the war ones, so it's a dead end device.
Griffin stops his pal 'Trips' from killing the old sarge back in the US but the entire narrative element is extraneous and ineffectual. Several well-written sentences and the book is readable but too much style and virtually no substance. Murder,madness, rape and torture in pretty language.
The main character and narrator, Griffin, lacks emotion, with his observations on the chaos and violence, rendered in a poetic style that feels inappropriate for the subject. I felt the book was simply: 'and then the sarge tortured a gook(insert gruesome details), and then my buddy showed up with some heroin; and then we went on patrol and some guys go blown up(insert gruesome details)and this guy is crazy, and that guy is crazy, and I'm watching all of this and telling you about it.'-- drawn out with long poetic sentences. I'm not saying any of this is wrong, it just isn't enough for me. I find it boring.
He returns to the US and, sensitive soul that he is, gets into plants and plant-based meditation(?): hence the title, yet he never points the finger at, or even wonders, who it was that planted him there in that hell. Maybe he thinks it was destiny? and that Nixon, Dulles, Kissinger, 'gooks' et al were simply playing out their preordained roles. So no blame, no worries, just step over the body parts, smoke some dope and keep on talking about it, don't bother to think. The book's structure alternates between the US plant-related scenes and the war, but the US scenes are even weaker than the war ones, so it's a dead end device.
Griffin stops his pal 'Trips' from killing the old sarge back in the US but the entire narrative element is extraneous and ineffectual. Several well-written sentences and the book is readable but too much style and virtually no substance. Murder,madness, rape and torture in pretty language.
March 10, 2017
The haphazard style, the cast of idiosyncratic grotesques, inevitably leads to comparison with Catch 22, but despite this the book stands up on its own. It's interwoven by a neat plant, growth metaphor that ties it all together, as if the book were wrapped up tightly in a jungle vine. The casual violence, the nihilism and surrealism are all present and correct but used in a deadening way - like a heroin memory, like a discarded needle in a dilapidated squat. Filled with apathy and numb pain, it speaks more than an out and out black and white declaration of dissent could ever hope to. From Trips' psychosis, and his flawed hunt for the man who killed his dog, to the presentation of one soldier's idea that the whole war is a movie way before Stone, Kubrick et al, this is a book that demands to be read more than once.
Read
May 25, 2018apart from the scenes of actual, like, mortar attacks & enemy fire & whatnot (which in their own right are some of the visceral-est and immersive-est you're likely to encounter), it also does a phenomenal job of rendering the poisonous banality in between, the injuries from drunkenly swan-diving onto tables, the dogs exterminated on a general's whim, the omnipresent chocolate cake w/ purple icing. doesn't seem to ever figure out exactly what it wants to articulate about plants; then again, i can't imagine a book about the vietnam war that sets out clear goals & goes on to accomplish its objectives would reflect the subject matter very well...
May 8, 2020
Plotless brain-fucked muddle through a senseless brain-fucked war. In some parts it feels like every over-done pastiche of every other bad Vietnam War movie, book, and TV show in the one place. It has its moments, don't get me wrong, but they're really not worth the sweaty wade through waist-deep literary muck to get to. The accolades lie, this is far from the best of anything "spawned" from Vietnam. The Things They Carried, Tree of Smoke, In Pharaoh's Army (I could go on) all did it so much better. Not worth the effort.
Want to read
March 12, 2024On page 45
August 15, 2014
Ptsd has become fashionable, the symptoms and descriptors described in the popular press have moved it from being a source of shame for those of us who finally succumbed to a desirable trait a topic of converstaion. It has become synonomous with the Vietnam War and a point of fascination for the wanna be's and the war junkie's. When I first collapsed under the weight after 30 years of struggle, I only found others who had seen and suffered, who knew what it was to experience the confusion and fear of battle; to struggle with a compress bandage in a futile attempt to stem the blood flow; to feel the exhilaration of holding the heat of death and destruction in their own hands; to see the fading light in a dying child's eyes; to shrug it all off "it don't mean nothin'". Men who coped with the nightmares, the flashes at the edge of their peripheral vision the hallucinatory sounds, tastes and smells; who knew the fluid land where the solid , the concrete melted like a wax candle yesteraday's moments projected like faded images through 35mm slide film over whatever might actually be in front of us; who know what it's like to grip a piece of furniture in a vice like grip to suspend the slide into the images there we don't want to see.
Now it is rare to find them in the places that are supposed to serve them. They have been pushed out by others who have no knowledge of the nether land. They may have their own form of suffering but it is not ours. We are back where we started now, alone or with one or two others who know those places. The so called mental health professionals proved ultimately to be useless and they are busy serving the purposes of their own careers by opening the flood gates to those whose so called trauma may be something else but is in no relationship to that sustained in combat.
That has it's own flavour and only another who has known it has anything really to say to us.
This book contains the best representation of the inner experience of my own life over a 20 year period, though my own experience lacked the added difficulty of drug adiction (alcohol my drug of choice) but the characteristics of the nether land were strikingly familiar, I had my own images my own experiences my own cast of characters but the surrealistic flavour of it all was just as absurd and just as potent. the sense of living in two places, my head and the world and the world the less substantial of the two; these was just as much mine as it was Griffin's. I could own his experience becasue I had lived it, this was quite a trip for me. It all came back, I remember how it was, at least like him I was able to eventually break out. That came from my own resources and happened in spite of everything "they" did for me.
Now it is rare to find them in the places that are supposed to serve them. They have been pushed out by others who have no knowledge of the nether land. They may have their own form of suffering but it is not ours. We are back where we started now, alone or with one or two others who know those places. The so called mental health professionals proved ultimately to be useless and they are busy serving the purposes of their own careers by opening the flood gates to those whose so called trauma may be something else but is in no relationship to that sustained in combat.
That has it's own flavour and only another who has known it has anything really to say to us.
This book contains the best representation of the inner experience of my own life over a 20 year period, though my own experience lacked the added difficulty of drug adiction (alcohol my drug of choice) but the characteristics of the nether land were strikingly familiar, I had my own images my own experiences my own cast of characters but the surrealistic flavour of it all was just as absurd and just as potent. the sense of living in two places, my head and the world and the world the less substantial of the two; these was just as much mine as it was Griffin's. I could own his experience becasue I had lived it, this was quite a trip for me. It all came back, I remember how it was, at least like him I was able to eventually break out. That came from my own resources and happened in spite of everything "they" did for me.
September 3, 2021
Fantastic mediation on the Vietnam war and on life. Irreverent and profound. Shades of Catch-22 mixed with deeper ponderings. I listened to it so wasn’t put off by what were apparently long run-on sentences. Highly recommended.
March 26, 2008
Well, I thought it was just fantastic.
But Wright is maybe a bit too in love with his metaphors.
But Wright is maybe a bit too in love with his metaphors.
February 19, 2018
Meditations in Green perfectly captures the weird amalgam of influences and cultural currents that was life in the Seventies in the United States. People who went to war in Vietnam as fresh-faced youth came home confused, addicted, honored and reviled. The novel’s main character, Griffin, is one of those young people. He spent more time stoned in Vietnam than he did sober, and now he’s trying to meditate himself into becoming a plant as a salve to the continuing confusion and a shield for feeling anything, especially pain. But he is also loyal and compassionate, so he’s trying to keep his friend Trips alive. This is no easy task—Trips has an even bigger dope gorilla on his back than Griffin, and he is convinced that their former sergeant is in the city. Trips plans to exact revenge on this man, and he operates on his own logic despite Griffin’s attempts to persuade him that he’s got the wrong man. And then there’s the bitterness …
America in the Seventies wasa gold mine for hucksters and self-styled gurus of all kinds, promising believers true happiness and enlightenment in the next session, the next pill, the next hit. Meanwhile, the social welfare system was just getting underway on a large scale. But the VA and the SSA were no match for the flood of people who needed their help—how else to explain why someone like Trips is drifting around on the streets, scoping out houses and plotting sight lines for explosives or gunfire.
This book contains the best written versions of the circular conversations that flow among a group of people whose consciousness has been raised by chemical means; in the funniest, Griffin, Trips, and a few others debate the pros and cons of using flying elephants instead of aircraft to conduct bombing runs. It also captures the disjointed, crystalline, terrifying and euphoric kaleidoscope of hallucinations, especially those that come on unexpectedly long after the drug has left the system. In fact, the book is structured like one of those dizzying trips, moving backward and forward in time and cutting suddenly between points of view. It is a book that will leave readers pondering long after the last page is turned.
America in the Seventies wasa gold mine for hucksters and self-styled gurus of all kinds, promising believers true happiness and enlightenment in the next session, the next pill, the next hit. Meanwhile, the social welfare system was just getting underway on a large scale. But the VA and the SSA were no match for the flood of people who needed their help—how else to explain why someone like Trips is drifting around on the streets, scoping out houses and plotting sight lines for explosives or gunfire.
This book contains the best written versions of the circular conversations that flow among a group of people whose consciousness has been raised by chemical means; in the funniest, Griffin, Trips, and a few others debate the pros and cons of using flying elephants instead of aircraft to conduct bombing runs. It also captures the disjointed, crystalline, terrifying and euphoric kaleidoscope of hallucinations, especially those that come on unexpectedly long after the drug has left the system. In fact, the book is structured like one of those dizzying trips, moving backward and forward in time and cutting suddenly between points of view. It is a book that will leave readers pondering long after the last page is turned.
September 12, 2024
I probably have 60 audiobooks I've purchased in the queue. I feel a responsibility to read them now that I made the decision to add them to my shelf. I almost wish they weren't there because my temptation is to beginn this novel over right now. I rarely say that. For one, I admit that when it began, I had a period where I couldn't line uo the numerous characters thrown together in a war zone already chaotic by the what constitutes war. The fault wasn't the author. Stephen Wright wanted me to experience the chaos. That's what he was brilliantly carving out with stacatto lashes at my psyche. I've probably read ten or more novels and non-fiction accounts of the Viet Nam war. Some have been mind bending, such as Going After Caciatto, or definitive, auch as The Things They Carried. Each adds to something I'm desperately trying to accomplish--to understand an experience I came so close to living. I just finished a good book called Perfume River. I had the chance to travel "In Country" and remember well the actual river neat Hue and the DMZ. The book is a little deceptive by it's title as the story is only 5% about the war itseld and 95% about a particular family back home where one son enlisted to Viet Nam and one son fled to Canada. The father that determined such behavior and the mother who stepped aside. Good story but not helpful for my needs. This one, however, hits the main vein. Stephen is masterful at capturing the way that men behave around one another. I warn any sensitive types to either avoid or, bravely, discover a truth. We're awful. o matter how civilized we may cocoon ourselves, was will strip us to our essential nature. It would be a hard read if irlt weren't so damned funny. Much like Heller's Catch-22 or much of Vonnegut, Stephen excells at making things that terrify and hurt into gut turning hilarity. This might at times feel a bit MASH but that tonality is used to accent a descriptive ability that captures horror both as beatific and banal. I fully endorse this novel as a must read for all Viet Nam junkies. It has all the rush of the needle and the damage done.
June 21, 2017
Probably the best Vietnam war era novel you have never heard about. Amazingly vivid detail and imagery showing the horror and dysfunction of combat, albeit, through the eyes of a non combat soldier slowly going mad while the world around him does the same. At times almost incomprehensible and incoherent, it's chaos seems to shadow the world in which the characters themselves live. Definitely worth reading although, beware, at some stage you too may find that you have no idea of what is going on as it's cadence seemingly follows that of the war itself, long periods of boredom and unsettling introspection followed by short sharp bursts of violence.
April 29, 2022
The book is split in two intertwined halves, a masterful description of the life inside a camp surrounded and mortared by Charlies and a series of meditations/divagations/explanations/I dontknowhowtoexpressthistuff happening to the protagonist during the aftermath of the conflict in the USA. After having unsuccessfully tried to decode the latter half, I gave up and simply skipped to the former. A very pity, because I consider the first part among the finest of the Vietnam war literature.
February 8, 2022
Creatively and cleverly written, but not much consideration is given to the reader. Plot is almost nonexistent and many passages are disjointed and confusing. I’m sure this is done for effect, but it doesn’t make for great reading.
July 1, 2019
Damn...
Read
September 22, 2019Crazy good imagistic prose, breaking down both the boredom and the violence.
December 26, 2019
The best Vietnam novel out there, for my money. Catch-22 meets Dispatches meets Junkie, with a pinch of Good Soldier Svejk. Excellence.
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