Processed Cheese

by Stephen Wright

From an "astonishing" writer (Toni Morrison), the savagely funny story of a couple who unexpectedly come into some money in a wealth-obsessed America deranged by Mammon.

A bag of money drops out of the sky, literally, into the path of a cash-starved citizen named Graveyard. He carries it home to his wife, Ambience, and they embark on the adventure of their lives, finally able to have everything they've always thought they cars, guns, games, jewels, clothes—and of course sex, travel, and time with friends and family. There is no limit except their imagination and the hours in the day, and even those seem to be subject to their control.

Of course, the owner of the bag is searching for it, and will do whatever is necessary to get it back. And, of course, these new riches change everything—and nothing at all.

Darkly hilarious, Processed Cheese is both satire and serious as death. It's a road novel, a family story, and a last-girl-standing thriller of once-in-a-generation vitality and inventiveness. With the clarity of a Swift or a Melville, Wright has created a funhouse-mirror drama that puts all the chips on the table and every bullet in the clip, down to the last breathtaking moment.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Satire, Novels, Audiobook, Book Club

400 pages, Hardcover

Published January 21, 2020

About the author

Stephen 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.

Reviews

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

The opening chapters of Stephen Wright’s new novel, “Processed Cheese,” inspire a grim thrill. Here, one is tempted to believe, is a writer crazy enough, crude enough and gluttonous enough to swallow the whole Trump era and then belch out its poisonous comedy.

Wright, who comes trailing blurbs from the likes of Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates and Thomas Pynchon, is the author of five frenetic novels that romp through fields of violence and madness. His last book, “The Amalgamation Polka,” appeared in 2006 and offered a bizarre picaresque of the Civil War. Now he’s back with an outrageous farce about money, sex and guns, which is to say, about America circa now.

The premise of “Processed Cheese” is simple; its execution cuckoo — a critical term I don’t think I’ve ever used before. Wright sets his story in a cartoon world of. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

[Matt Comito]

Jesus Christ with the stupid Pynchonian naming convention thing (but worse), fuck right off

[Wendy Cosin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quit after 30 pages. Billed as a social satire, good writers blurbed Stephen Wright’s other books, but I found Processed Cheese very tiresome. Boring writing. Ridiculous names for everything gets old fast.

I received a free copy of the ARC.

[3 no 7 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only way to truly enjoy "Processed Cheese" is by listening to the audio book. The names are just enough off kilter that they sound both descriptive and hysterically contradictory. The sound of everything is slightly unbelievable and yet strangely familiar. The chapter with “money” as the only text just HAS to be heard and not read. This is a land where people live in mammoth city, and bags of money fall from the sky. They buy everything and anything they want, food, guns, clothes, drugs, cars, and jewelry. Everything and everyone is bizarre and yet astonishingly believable. “Processed Cheese” is not a book with some elegant theme; it has no grand purpose other than to point out the meaninglessness of everything.
In this time of pandemic and self-quarantine, people need to laugh at everything, especially each other. “Processed Cheese” fits this bill. Every page is irrational; every syllable is laughable, and there is no other purpose to anything. But you MUST listen to the audio book, and not actually read those “words” to absorb the absurdity.

[Da · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an awful book. It tries so hard to be a social satire but ends being a bizarre and discursive book with an incoherent narrative. Some established writers blurbed the author’s “excellent” writing, and I now realize that they’re his friends. Do yourself a favor and avoid this thing, your time on earth is too precious for it.

[Jon Higgins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would rather eat Velveeta.
Disappointing.

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse)]

I received a beautiful complimentary hardcover edition of this book from the publisher based, they said, on my review of Wright's Meditations in Green. I am grateful, even tho' I couldn't finish it.

1. I still think Meditations in Green, Wright's first book, is extraordinary. I've read it at least twice, although not recently. Times have, as they are wont to do, changed. The times then - specifically, the aftermath of the war in Vietnam; soldiers returning from it to social vilification and the ongoing, unsupported tortures of PTSD based on what they had seen and done - were brutal in so many ways. Wright's style - chaotic, psychaedelic, violent and poetic - was a perfect medium for his message. MiG is finely crafted. Wright's voice is a unique one. His capacity to present a character barely managing to hold on to humanity in the face of inhumanity, sanity in the face of insanity, and having the reader root for him each step along that precarious knife-edge, was and is (IIRC) astonishingly virtuosic.

2. I read Processed Cheese during the impeachment "trial". I stopped reading it on foregone-conclusion day. This is not a review so much as an explanation for why I had to stop reading.

3. It's been a fuck of a three years, eh? I'm Canadian, living part-time in the U.S., and it's been a fuck of a three years for me ... my heart bleeds for those for whom these three years have been so much more devastating, so much more deadly, so much more dispiriting.

4. I think I don't need to tell you, but I'll state it for context: Kids are in cages. The planet is burning. Racism, misogyny and hatred are thriving. The "head of the free world" has unleashed, sanctioned and demonstrated exactly how to be a corrupt, moral and intellectual degenerate, entirely and only for the purpose of his own personal power and greed, and has been allowed to get away with it by the whole political structure of the U.S., which has been co-opted. Or worse.

5. These are the kinds of times that call for satire. Smart, biting, UNIFYING satire - an essential tool of resistance in an autocracy. This novel (according to its blurbs and descriptions) supposedly is satire.

6. Three things:

a) these days, satire has been rendered impotent by the very people and institutions we most need to satirize. We can't even recognize it any more. How many of you have read a headline and said, oh, that's gotta be The Onion. And ... nope. Or vice versa. Things that formerly would have been seen as so over-the-top, so unbelievable, so impossible to take seriously are, in fact, true. And truth - incontrovertible, indisputable, proven beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt (reasonability being another construct that is being eroded daily), like where Kansas City is and whether a hurricane is about to hit Alabama not to mention whether a president obstructed Congress and abused his power - are labelled "fake," called a "hoax."

b) This, Processed Cheese, or maybe we should call it Meditations in Orange, might not be very good satire. I dunno, 'coz I had to stop reading it. Or maybe it's just not good enough. See a), above. It's not Stephen Wright's fault it's not good enough, if in fact it's not. And I applaud him for trying, 'coz it's important that we do.

c) the problem with satire, where imho it is failing these days, is that one has to confront, caricaturize, make overt, blow up and exaggerate that which one is satirizing. And for me, at my age and in my current disposition, i.e. SICK AND FUCKING TIRED OF IT ALL, I can't tolerate it. I won't tolerate it. I can't listen to him. I can't see him. I won't centre him. I won't GLORIFY him. 'Coz that's another problem with satire these days: it has become, or is too often mistaken for, or - the worst! - is gleefully and wholeheartedly appreciated as GLORIFICATION. No press is bad press. The deplorables bask in his deplorability ... and their own. Nothing fucking sticks to that cretinous mass of lie-spewing criminal imbecility and all his like-minded, ethically-impaired minions.

7. The first novel I read this year, Jami Attenberg's All This Could Be Yours, also presents a Tr*mp-like character in all his reprehensible, porn- and domestic-violence fuelled ugliness. It doesn't intend to glorify. It doesn't intend to centre this man, this kind of man. It makes no bones about him being a thoroughly evil and disgusting human being we are entirely justified to hate. And she kills him off (this is not a spoiler, he's on his deathbed from the beginning). Even so, even tho' we don't hear from him or see him directly, he's the centre around which the novel's galaxy of characters spin. Ugh.

8. Two in a row and barely two months into this, yet another, shitshow of a year. No. No no no no no nonononononono.

Thank you for reading. Good luck and best wishes to you, and this novel, and us all.

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hoo boy. From the author of the extraordinary Meditations in Green and Going Native, a 392-page reminder that the English language is bereft of a proper antonym for the word "disappointed"—perhaps because such an exalted state is wholly theoretical. (No use in conjuring up a signifier for a thing that doesn't exist.) If the dopey naming convention† doesn't make you heave the book across the room like some sort of radioactive dog turd, the cartoonish sex scenes are practically an invitation to surrender to the loutish delights of voluntary illiteracy. In other words: Booooo.

†Pynchon gets away with this sort of thing because he's been doing it for nearly 60 years and because he's, you know, Pynchon.

[Ashley · Rating 1 out of 5]

50 pages into this book, it became clear that I would rather eat 50 lbs of processed cheese than sit through another page.

[Andy Weston · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quit after 50 pages.
It was billed as being satirical, but was tedious and going nowhere - unlesssomeone can convince me otherwise??

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was irritating, but really otherwise fine. i haven't a clue why it was written. it lacks the undercurrents of humanity that were so well executed in wright's earlier novels. was it just so he could laugh at the shit falling out of his keyboard?

[Jessica Manning · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I could give this zero stars I would. I couldn’t get past chapter 5. This book makes no sense and literally gave me a headache when I tried to read it. Don’t be fooled by the cover and synopsis, it’s all fake. This book is horrible.

[Jeanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to stop reading this bizarre book! Couldn't even make it half way through. No words....

[Melissa T]

I had a feeling that this was going to end up as a DNF for me. But, I gave it a try anyways, because sometimes I'm wrong, and books I don't think I'll like, I actually do.

Not this time.

I just couldn't handle the bizarro naming convention where just about everything has some ridiculously idiotic name, including the two main characters, Graveyard and Ambience. I wasn't about to put myself through 400 pages of that crap, so I DNF'd this at 22 pages in.

*I won a free copy of this book via Goodreads Giveaways.*

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won this book through the Goodreads giveaway, one of the first i ever won and was insanely excited to get it since i have not read anything by this author and the zany title which appears to have little to do with the summary just grabbed my interest.

So I'm about 300 pages into this book... It took me a while to get past the weird names for foods, and especially, people, they are still throwing me off here and there. I was excited to read this, its not exactly dragging but its not running right along for me either, there are sometimes it holds my interest and other times i fall alseep after 4 pages.

With the end looming, I'm sure ill be finishing this, though I've thought about putting it down and onto the next more than once when i couldn't get it to hold my interest, I find myself hoping for some kind of twist coming shortly before the end.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably the first book I’ve finished with the lowest average star rating of anything I’ve ever encountered on GoodReads. And there was certainly a reason this was the case. The novel is littered with ridiculous names which are supposed to indicate the stupidity of society and consumerism, but which mainly just end up being ridiculous and stupid themselves. The premise sounded like a lot could be done with it; however, the story never coalesced or got going. Many chapters seemed disconnected or just plain superfluous. One magnificent chapter where a stripper is hired to eat money was unfortunately not really connected to the overall storyline in any way. Somehow Stephen King is blurbed talking about the brilliance of this book. Leaves me wondering if he actually read it. Also leaves me wondering why I read it. Skip this one.

[Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Processed Cheese is an interesting title, given that all cheese is processed. I mean, cheese doesn't grow naturally in nature, right? And neither does meaningful content in this novel. The clever names for people places and things wares out real fast. I suppose there's some moral or two about money but it's nothing pithy or new. I think Mr. Wright thought having lots of sex, guns, and money, would make a memorable book. He thought wrong.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

America. Land of the free, home of the brave, stars and bars forever, don’t tread on me. Or, as summarized with a certain acerbic élan by the great Ishmael Reed in his 1972 novel MUMBO JUMBO: “the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grew at the South Pole.” American writers have always tended to excel at the hype and hucksterism for which their nation is renowned, and of course Alfred Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, and Walt Whitman, if strong representatives of this particular mode, all to a man practiced it with an unmistakable ironic edge. It’s a big part of the genius of the great Stanley Elkin, even pretty damn central to what Ishmael Reed is up to himself. Foreign literary minds stranded in the United States have often themselves modulated their voices to varying extents to account for the sales patter et al., and if we think of the American mercantile colossus as key to the nation’s new imperial M.O. in the aftermath of the Second World War, well, we know that Runyon, Lardner, and W.W. came along well before that, and it might serve us also to note that Aldous Huxley, in his novel AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN, saw the apparatus in full apparent deployment, raging and raring, in 1939, the situation in Eurpoe and beyond anything but a done deal. How can we not think of Sinclair Lewis’s prophetic creation, Elmer Gantry, eponymous antihero of a canonized 1927 classic and pretty demonstrably a significantly-more-easy-to-credit embodiment of a ‘type’ recognizable to those familiar with the current POTUS, one Donald J. Trump, so help us God. Somewhere in the 20th century the satirization or parody of American salesmanship begins to merge with a new mythology of devolution and idiocracy; it is in large part thanks to these trends that we can start to account for PROCESSED CHEESE, Stephen “Not the Stand-Up Comic” Wright’s extremely masterful new novel. This is Wright’s fifth novel. I have read all of them, starting with 1983’s MEDITATIONS IN GREEN and leading up to 2006’s THE AMALGAMATION POLKA, the last to have appeared prior to PROCESSED CHEESE, though my sequence in doing so was slightly achronological. It is the two novels sandwiched between MEDITATIONS and POLKA—these being 1988’s M31: A FAMILY ROMANCE and 1994’s GOING NATIVE—that made the most indelible impressions on me personally. GOING NATIVE is an especially critical novel from my vantage, and I've regularly declared it among my favourite novels of the 20th century (or indeed ever). M31 and GOING NATIVE are dark and extremely unsettling novels of entropy in which the trajectories of characters—or cyphers who challenge the very idea of “character”—fragment or come undone in inverse relation to the tunnelling or narrowing of their trajectories. When I think of his novels I think of the determining role performed by a car’s headlights, which create a predictive field of marginal futurity and project luminous tunnels into the immediate horizon of eventuation, only suppose we now imagine that what is being determined up ahead is precisely the immediate proximity of chaos, void, and indeterminacy itself. We might say that PROCESSED CHEESE appears on the surface to deviate from this manner or method, but I think it becomes clear fairly quickly, and hopefully to the reader’s great satisfaction (I will certainly testify to my own!), that it is less a matter of an inadequate assessment we might perform at the surface generally, more likely just one we have been primed to make in the early going, which is to say the first few chapters. We begin in a somewhat fanciful, galumphing register. I am inclined here to print the opening paragraph in its entirety: “The day was hot. The sky was blue. Graveyard was tired. He’d been pounding the pavement for hours. He was looking for work. He had no job. He had no money. He was flat broke. You know how that is. Sweetbreads and applesauce, he said to himself, I need some cash real bad.” Slightly goofball, more than a shade affably guileless. No sooner has Graveyard made his wish then, well, on earth is it done. “Just then a big canvas bag came sailing down out of nowhere and crashed into the sidewalk inches from his feet.” The bag is full of “plastic-wrapped bricks of fresh one-hundred dollar bills.” The opening chapter is called “A Windfall,” the event for which it is named delivered with the utmost expedience. Much of what directly succeeds the immediate presentation of the canvas bag stuffed with cash money continues to suggest that the novel we are reading is something like a frolicsome absurdist parable. We meet Graveyard’s wife Ambience. She is bedridden with a bad case of interminable despond. Prone to crying jags, she shares the bed with her cat NipperPumpkinClaws (or Nipper for short) and spends a lot of time peering dispassionately at or into the television. “Whenever she was down she watched television. Lots of television. E. coli contaminations. School shootings. Child predators. Any television.” News of the windfall arrives by way of her returning husband. “She tossed the bills into the air. They fluttered down like leaves. Like petals. Like promises.” Obviously we cannot help but apprehend the profusion of odd, extremely stylized names. Graveyard, Ambience, NipperPumpkinClaws. Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. As the novel proceeds, we will meet many other character, including, but not limited to: VelvetRope, Warranty, Herringbone, UnauthorizedReproduction, TrollFarm, CocktailRepartee, RiderAgreement, RoamingMinute, SideEffects, VariancePanoply, CanceledStamp, and, a personal favourite, the joke an exemplary one, a college girlfriend one character recalls being the greatest performer of fellatio he has ever known, her name AccountsReceivable. The character names obviously reflect a practice of locution consummately hijacked by nonsensical advertising malarkey and hollow corporate patter. The novel does much to conflate these domains, unleashing an endless fusillade of batty designators. After Graveyard and Ambience acquire their effectively bottomless bag of windfall lucre, they lean into shopping so hard that they begin to warp space-time, their modest living space rapidly stuffed to bursting. 103-inch HootchieCootchie flat screen, cartons of Pat and Pending’s RoyaleMuddyDrawerSurprise, “a brand new pair of eight-hundred-dollar Loubotomy fuck-me stilettos,” “a singular Tri-Gem Elaboration from PattyCake, Ltd., featuring the exclusive anthracite and freshwater pear-dial and scratch-resistant blue platinum casing engineered to withstand not only the inconveniences of deep space exploration but also high-speed impacts of up to two hundred miles per hour.” PROCESSED CHEESE is, suffice it to say, the most chock-a-block-with-berserk-names-for-things novel that could possibly currently be on the, ahem, market. An enterprise called KidMeNot & Sons. The BlackBerry reimagined as a DingleBerry (later we have the brainiacPhone8). Panavision becomes MannaVision, YouTube becomes MooTube. (A great deal of fun is had with food and food combinations: “Wahoo indigo rounds parboiled in sugar water, then oven-poached in a creamy bath of frolic oil and wester butter.”) We don’t want to get into this stuff too exhaustively, there being practically no end to it, but along with people and brand names we need to make mention of place names: Graveyard and Ambience live in Mammoth City, he’s originally from Randomburg and she Flinchtown, they will go on an exotic vacation to a place called Bullionvilla, there will be mention of peripheral localities such as AnglesBent, a day-trip up into a mountain range known as the Bric-A-Bracs. In short: not officially sanctioned places we know to exist. If there is all manner of wild invention or weird slippery equivalence (MooTube on the internoodle, say), some things do carry over from our world pretty much as is. Alcohol and opiates are here (as they’d have to be), as are Annie Oakley and Christmas. We will likewise recognize a great many slang terms for money (or real currencies we know to have been repurposed idiomatically). Kopeks, shekels, ducats, doubloons, “the hocus-pocus of boodle.” Tellingly, these parallel Graveyard’s maximally colourful terms of endearment for Ambience: sweet taffy, luscious lady, caramel cluster, lemon drop. Another domain of conflation here: romantic love and the reification of fetishized purchasing power. All these names, their wackiness, the zeal with which they are deployed: this is at the heart of what we might begin by mistaking PROCESSED CHEESE for being, i.e. the sum total of such business. Again, I would argue that such a misread is likely to be dispelled in fairly short order. Insofar as the matters we've been discussing are concerned, Wright’s latest might seem to have much in common with George Saunders’s 2006 collection IN PERSUASION NATION, the point at which I recall starting to grow somewhat tepid toward Mr. Saunders. Wright has taken a good deal of time with both of his last two novels, and you will note in the perfunctory page of copyright for PROCESSED CHEESE that a small portion of the novel originally appeared in CONJUNCTIONS backs in Spring of 2009, more than a decade before the appearance of the finished novel and much closer to the publication of IN PERSUASION NATION. While I would agree that the Saunders collection primarily consists of hectoring allegories and bombastic metaphorical/analogical point-scoring, Wright’s novel succeeds in transcending the limitations of a somewhat showy conceit on account of its bravura literary daring at levels more thoroughly human than might at this point be apparent. This is not to say that the whole grotesque commercial cavalcade is anything but the foundation of the novel, rather that this fails to prevent Wright from credibly constructing a world and from making us inhabit it along with Graveyard and Ambience, both of whom prove to be as dynamic as the fastidious narrative armature that fields them and into which they are fielded. Chapter-to-chapter, the novel increasingly wows, especially as pertains to its mobilization of a sophisticated schematic that has been engineered to deliver startling returns. Take as an example the brilliant way we are introduced to members of Graveyard’s family of origin before we know who they are, or how the denouement allows for various chickens to come home to roost on multiple fronts. Many readers will no doubt be duly impressed by the sly consummation of a crypto-feminist undercurrent. It is not a short novel. Neither is it one in which any space can be deemed to have been wasted or misused, a matter that becomes increasingly clear and in a manner most gratifying. We have apprised in passing how the quick introduction of the cash windfall appears to warp space-time. What this ultimately speaks to is a chance shift in epistemics, a wildly destabilizing one, suggesting that the traditional cash-strapped, wage slave episteme was itself already a matter of chance. Graveyard, newly wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, rhapsodizing: “Why, the wunnerful, wunnerful, fabulous, fantastical mojo of money. From now on our lives are gonna be exploding with all sorts of spooky flavors. Coincidences, enchantments, charms, jokes, prophecies, puns. And cake. Lots of cake.” Everything has shifted, life has to adapt to a new crazed regimen, though Graveyard cannot yet espy the fatalistic implications, drunk as he is on the possibilities (all of them so much 'processed cheese'). The novel more or less culminates in a brutal, destructive showdown, and here, our hero and heroine suddenly involved in a calamitous fight to the death, an echo of the chance condition of our socioeconomic conditionality finds a refrain in the heightened senses excited by confrontation and conflagration: battle itself marks elevation into “an entirely different level of being.” It is not just Wright’s title alone that draws attention to a certain commonality or complementarity with Adam Levin’s BUBBLEGUM, another American novel from 2020 (a year which in itself feels almost like ascension to “an entirely different level of being”). In the Levin, there is a wonderful passage in which a rich man is imagined by his economic inferior, the novel’s protagonist, attempting via outlandish means to explain the two men’s incompatible epistemes, a matters of their lacking not only a shared language but totally opposing cognitive models as relate to vast sums of money. That rich man has his equivalent in PROCESSED CHEESE, this being MisterMenu, the loathsome scion whose wife originally threw the bag of legal tender over the balcony in a pique of acrimony. MisterMenu—who we first meet sitting “in the shade of the popcorn tree on the grand terrace of his duplex penthouse” and “sipping goosenut water out of what was called a libation vessel back in the old coca-leaf-and-obsidian-knife times”—represents the impossible, heinous wealth of the 1%, but also the callous using of people, their despoliation without recompense. He is dangerous because he is unaccountable, and he wants his canvas bag back, all the monies accounted for, even though the impossible-to-spree-spend bottomless bag is mere peanuts to the guy. What we have is an absurd discontinuity or incongruity of domains, but it just so happens to be the fundamental reality of 21st century inequality. PROCESSED CHEESE is suffused with a sense of suddenly very real impermanence from the standpoint of “the corporate plantation everyone was now happily born into” conceived of from the standpoint of what is toward the end of this fatalistic novel framed as “the butt end of the corporate life.” It is a novel in which absurdly named individuals fuck and spend money as though there were no future and no meaning, the indication being that there is indeed neither future nor meaning. The novel features numerous suggestions of an eschatological mindset, apocalyptic precognition, the ultimate absurdity being that we unwashed hordes are expected to toil miserably while the self-anointed exceptionals luxuriate in abundance more abundant than makes anything like practical sense. Wright’s fatalism is ultimately tragicomic, and as in M83 and GOING NATIVE its doom tunnels, narrows, locks into a hellacious, splintering predestination (though we do, strictly speaking, end on a gag). The names of its two maritally conjoined protagonists are ultimately more than merely fanciful and/or silly, Graveyard bespeaking the inevitable, inviolate resting place that laughs in the face of our hapless striving, Ambience the gaudy interior decoration of purgatory, the feng shui of the cheeseland we inhabited during our fitful and absurd mortal sojourn, supposedly a matter of very fine and laudable things…however poorly divvied.

[Steven Begg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well this was a strange one…

If you find yourself frustrated with materialism, egotism, and frankly capitalism; give this book a read. However, you should bear a few things in mind…

This book is essentially one long analogy (metaphor?) about money’s effect on people. I wouldn’t consider it a spoiler since it happen on page one, but basically a bag filled with millions of dollars falls out of the sky almost hitting one of the main characters named Graveyard, and the story essentially follows him and his partner Ambience lavishly spending and the way it effects their lifestyle and psychology; and of course chaos ensues…

It gets rather difficult to read at times, partially because there are some brutal sex scenes, but also many geographic locations, character names, and various items purchased (a commentary on branding/etc.) that are so absurd it really becomes difficult to keep track. My recommendation would be not to waste your time digesting every bizarre product name that is listed in a paragraph (and trust me there will be a lot, Graveyard LOVES to spend) and just kind of skim through them.

Otherwise buckle up! This book is overwhelmingly satirical, absurd, and frankly; an accurate portrayal of consumerism.

[Geoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

A satirical social commentary on the hollow and meaningless lives that many of us lead glued to our screens looking for the latest meme or “viral” video in between seeking out temporary gratifications of the latest “must have” food craze, binge-worthy television series, drugs, cars, top music hit, sex, tattoos, etc.

I enjoyed the premise and the naming scheme (delivery service “Excess Express”, for example). In the end though, the book came up short and carried on too long.

[Kelby Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn’t even finish. It was horrible.

[Crystal C · Rating 1 out of 5]

Borrrriiinnnnggggg

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won this ARC in a Goodreads giveaway. This is the first thing I've read by the author.

First, the good: The flow was good (for the most part, see the bad). Having never read the author before, this book shows promise and skill.

The bad: The name were so ridiculous that the story was hard to read to the point where I hated the names of people, places, and things in this book. Some of the chapter seem out of sequence or cover more time than they should in the course of the story (I hate books that don't adhere to a consistent time line, for me it screws up the flow of the story). There are a lot of sex scenes that are anything but sexy, again partially due to the names. There is a lot of drug use and the description of the effects of the same drug seem inconsistent.

It's easy to see that this is supposed to be a spoof on modern society but I didn't find it interesting or funny. I'd give the author another try but if the names in his other books are as stupid as the names in this book I doubt I'll get past page 1.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had so much potential!! But ultimately just wasn’t for me /:

[Merry Kringles · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has taken me over a year to read.

And I feel no better for it. There's a few nice quotes, probably a lesson or two in there, but it was clunky. My main issue was the names.

[Derri Crenshaw · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why did he make her lick the money 😭😭

[Tessyohnka · Rating 1 out of 5]

At about 40 percent in, I was frustrated and decided to read one of the reviews upon which a friend had based her recommendation of this book for us to read and discuss over breakfast. I was disappointed to find that the review was not particularly glowing, and in fact the author of the review comes right out and says that he was overwhelmed by the satire and the violence. My disease (being psychically incapable of marking a book DNF) made me keep going, but there was no redemption. Throughout the read my regular response was to just how GRIM a world is described! Beyond that I was annoyed that the author was trying way too hard to get in every last word combination in his naming of people, corporations, brands and needlessly lengthy lists of drink ingredients. I considered two stars because there were one or two ideas that I found entertaining, but was too exhausted by the read to change my rating.

[Leon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve read all of Stephen Wright’s books and consider myself a fan, but boy was this one rough. Aside from his usual interesting prose, there’s not a whole lot going on here; the theme is so on the nose and it’s obnoxiously repetitive. I made it 50% through and decided I got it. Skipped to the last two chapters and, as suspected, I hadn’t missed a thing.

[Andrea · Rating 1 out of 5]

Graveyard is on his way to look for a job when a bag of money drops from the sky and falls into his path. Graveyard hurries home to his wife, Ambience to share in the good news. Together they go on a spending journey to have everything they always wanted. The owner of the money bag begins to search for his money and is willing to do whatever is necessary to get it back.


At first, I thought the character's names were a bit weird but, I thought I can just ignore it. But, when everything started having wack-a-doo naming, even the days of the week. I started losing interest in the novel very quickly. It took more effort to remember the weird names and what they meant. I spent more time trying to decipher the names than I was focusing on the novel. I couldn't even make it past a few chapters before I realized this book isn't for me.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

With Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison praising his past work, I had hopes for Wright's book. YIKES! Empty characters with cluttered lives. I felt I was tripping through a hoarder's house as I read this book flooded with (only sometimes slightly amusing) names. I suspect that Stephen Wright had more fun writing this book than I had reading it.