SOURCE: "Stephen Wright's Style in 'Meditations in Green'," in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 126-36.

In the following essay, Stewart discusses the metaphorical implications of Stephen Wright's experimental style in Meditations in Green.

Stephen Wright's 1983 novel Meditations in Green distinguishes itself as the work of a strikingly original literary talent. Like such works as Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (1977), Michael Herr's Dispatches (1978), and Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers (1979) it possesses an overt sense of "literariness," of realized aesthetic intentions, not found in the majority of narratives written about the Vietnam War.¹ With a verbal virtuosity, which only occasionally overreaches, Wright transcends the type of war narrative that adheres to a more confined style of conventional realism. In so doing he is able to suggest an ample set of truths about the Vietnam War and American society with a vividness that more traditional narrative styles...