MixedThe New York Times Book Review... its first pages are absolutely brilliant, a frenetic, hilarious rush of pure feeling ... as the brand names and celebrity names pile up, along with a few bodies, it’s hard for the reader to hold onto the manic energy in Wright’s prose. He’s a masterly writer, with a wild sense of humor that he pushes as far as he can, but this fairy tale about our wealth-obsessed culture starts to drag. At one point, Graveyard asserts that money affects one’s perception of time, namely that \'it goes slower and I’ve got more of it.\' Eventually, you start to wish the money would simply run out ... reminds me, in both tone and theme, of George Saunders’s short stories Sea Oak and The Semplica-Girl Diaries, or even Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. But those works have brevity on their side, layering their absurdity with very real concerns about the inescapable nature of poverty, a flash of strangeness that echoes far beyond the page. By the time I reached the end of Processed Cheese, with its inevitable showdown and reckoning, I felt overwhelmed by both the satire and the violence. All that kept me going was Wright’s sentences, so wonderful, so bizarre, $100 bills pulled endlessly from a canvas bag.
