Other Novels

Disciples: Baskerville, 1997

From Library Journal: on amazon.com

"Only a couple of hours before the baby was kidnapped, the grandfather reached reconciliation with death." The promise of a fast-paced, multidimensional story in this opening sentence is fully realized as we view ensuing events as recounted by the grandfather, the kidnapper, the baby's mother, a protege of the grandfather, and several others. Wright (After Gregory, LJ 11/15/95) endows each character/narrator with a distinctive personality, bringing their voices into a harmonized inquiry into the intertwined natures of consciousness and discipleship. Rich in ideas and accessible in style, this novel will appeal to readers of both serious and popular fiction." Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1997

Telling Time: Baskerville, 1995

From Library Journal: on amazon.com

Former college president and little-published paleontologist Thomas Westerly has a stroke, but not before trying to intervene in a hostage crisis near his retirement home on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. As his extended family gathers to bid farewell and attend the upcoming funeral, Wright's (Tony and Susan, LJ 2/1/93) ensemble piece begins to take shape. Thomas's hit-and-run accident, in which he killed a jogger; the sexual pressuring of his fiancee, who became his wife; and nebulous reasons for involvement with the island's hostage-taker skew his descendants' opinions and seduce them into looking for additional scandals in Thomas's life. Gradually, life in the Westerly family unfolds as a litany of sexual initiations, resentments, and neuroses, held together by both the patriarch's generous spirit and his blemishes. Told by many voices, the various stories are changing, pathetic, and even hilarious, in a wonderfully multiple portrait of personal history and family relations. Highly recommended.
Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After Gregory: Baskerville 1994

From Kirkus Reviews

Sometimes indecipherable, often intriguing, this literary and existential mystery-within-a-novel may remind readers of the fiction of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and other authors who chart the modern American search for identity. Wright's (Tony and Susan, 1993, etc.) book opens with a man writing about his life. The man reveals that he was formerly known as Peter Gregory, a 35-year-old high school English teacher with an ex-wife and kids, who tried unsuccessfully to drown himself in the Ohio River. Fleeing a past that may have involved the murder of his neighbor with a hammer, he hitches rides east, assuming and discarding aliases along the way: Murray Bree, the hitchhiker, is traded for Stephen White, the typewriter-shop employee, and so on. When an eccentric billionaire summons him to his New York office and gives him a grant he can't refuse--$30 million to become yet another new person and cut all ties to the past--he becomes the miraculously fortunate Stephen Trace. Unfortunately for Trace, the detritus of Peter Gregory's life keeps resurfacing. When his benefactor dies in a plane crash and the company's successors come after Trace for his assets, he is forced to flee once again, this time back into the past for a dramatic reconciliation. Wright skillfully conveys how we choose to elude our pasts rather than face them, molding ourselves into different people for separate occasions. While at first we grumble over seemingly meaningless names, the literary games the author plays, and the rules he breaks, the story gains clarity and absorbs us after we start worrying about what the hero is going to do with his cash. Not a mystery in the conventional sense but certainly mysterious, Wright's novel challengingly suggests that we are all con artists in flight from ourselves. An intellectual wordsmith's whodunit. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.