You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Stephen Wright, the author, most recently of Going Native from

Faris Strauss and Cheru.

He's the author as well of M31, a family romance, and his first novel was Meditations

in Green, a novel of Vietnam.

Now, going native starts out, to my mind, very pleasurably,

that there's a certain kind of writing that reminds me of a childhood thing that I kind of love.

There was a magazine called Highlights Magazine,

and every month in that magazine, you'd be asked to look at this picture and find things hidden in the picture,

you know, concealed among the striations of a tree bark would be a hen, you'd circle the things you'd found and so too in

this book you one notices that the um the wife's name is roe and um and before long i believe we hear

about things from acme and the hero's name is Wiley,

and we think Roe, Roadrunner, Wiley Coyote, Tom and Jerry come over,

and a whole neighborhood of Looney Tunes starts to swarm in the understructure of the prose.

And there is a feeling that the prose is being used as a filter

between the reader and whatever actual activity is occurring on the page.

There's a network of grid and camouflage going on.

I thought I'd start this second part of the interview

...