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Summary
Summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy is entering his third term in office. The Vietnam War rages on, and the president has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from the war have their battlefield traumas "enfolded" -- wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy -- while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the government and reenacting atrocities on civilians.
This destabilized version of American history is the vision of twenty-two-year old Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book-within-a-book at the center of Hystopia . In conversation with some of the greatest war narratives, from Homer's Iliad to the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," David Means channels the voice of Allen, the young veteran out to write a novel that can bring honor to those he fought with in Vietnam while also capturing the tragic history of his own family.
The critic James Wood has written that Means's language "offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality." In Hystopia , his highly anticipated first novel, David Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.
Author Notes
David Means was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of several collections of stories, including The Spot ; Assorted Fire Events , which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction; and The Secret Goldfish , which was short-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper's Magazine , Zoetrope , The Best American Short Stories , The O. Henry Prize Stories , and numerous other publications. He lives in Nyack, New York, and teaches at Vassar College.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After four story collections, Means delivers his first novel, and it's a dazzling and singular trip. The novel within this novel is flanked by interviews, editorial clarifications, and multiple attempts at a suicide note by "author" Eugene Allen, a Vietnam vet who reconciles the death of his sister by writing the story of three wounded Vietnam vets and two wounded women connected by repressed-or "enfolded"-trauma. Returning vets have their traumas-and all other associated memories-erased by the Psych Corps, a federal agency created by J.F.K., who has survived six assassination attempts and three terms in office as the 1960s draw to a brutal close. Rake, on whom the enfolding treatment didn't work, frees Meg from Corps treatment and keeps her captive on a murderous rampage across Michigan. They take shelter with fellow vet Hank, who has partially reversed his enfolding treatment and quietly plots to save Meg from Rake. Meanwhile, drug-addled Corps agents Wendy and Singleton embark on a "mission gone haywire" in pursuit of Rake. The two narratives alternate between briefly disorienting perspective shifts but eventually converge. Means (The Spot) writes stunning prose and draws his characters with verve-Rake is a memorable psychopath. This tale reads like an acid flashback, complete with the paranoia, manic monologues, and violent visions, proving that some traumas never go away. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Having established his literary standing with short stories, Means (The Spot, 2010) delivers his long-anticipated debut novel, a compelling, imaginative alternative-history tale about memory and distress. Now in his third presidential term, John F. Kennedy has survived multiple attempts on his life, flaunting his fearlessness in a series of national wave-by tours. Meanwhile, fresh off the battlefield, Vietnam War vet Eugene Allen pens a speculative tale in which the seemingly immortal Kennedy has founded Psych Corps, a government organization committed to preserving the mental state of soldiers and thus the country by expunging their traumatic memories with drugs and therapy, a process called enfolding. Psych Corps agents must track down veterans who have evaded the procedure, a band of whom are wreaking havoc around the Midwest. One such rebel is Rake, an impulsive murderer who leaves his bloody signature in his wake, dragging along his enfolded partner, Meg, who's not sure how she got into this mess. Another enfoldee, Psych Corps agent Singleton, plays by agency rules until he's off the clock, when his affair with a coworker threatens to reawaken his suppressed memories. By turns disturbing, hilarious, and absurd, Means' novel is also sharply penetrating in its depiction of an America all too willing to bury its past.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Adam Hochschild. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.99.) Hochschild, the author of "King Leopold's Ghost," structures this account of the conflict as a collective biography of Americans who fought for the Republican side. He investigates the romantic appeal of the cause and the reasons for its failure. HYSTOPIA, by David Means. (Picador, $18.) In this novel within a novel - framed as a manuscript by a fictional Vietnam veteran, Eugene Allen, written shortly before he committed suicide - John F. Kennedy is entering his third term as president and has founded a program, the Psych Corps, to treat traumatized soldiers. Allen's story centers on two corps agents who have fallen in love and set off to recover a young woman who has been abducted. LOUISA: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, by Louisa Thomas. (Penguin, $18.) Born in London, the woman who married John Quincy Adams lived across Europe with her family, then her diplomat husband, before coming to the United States. These experiences helped set her apart, as did the trove of writing she left behind. Thomas draws on Louisa's memoirs, travelogues and extensive correspondence to offer a rich interior portrait. FOR A LITTLE WHILE: New and Selected Stories, by Rick Bass. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) In this collection of tales, humans act on their animal natures, and the natural world is suffused with the holy; in one story, an ice storm and powerful arctic front leads a dog trainer and her client to an encounter with the sublime. As our reviewer, Smith Henderson, put it, Bass, "a master of the short form," writes not only "to save our wild places, but to save what's wild and humane and best within us." YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, by Tom Vanderbilt. (Vintage, $16.95.) Vanderbilt, a journalist, has written a guide to the invisible forces shaping personal preferences - and the companies trying desperately to understand, and profit from, taste. Taste is both contextual and categorical, he argues, leading to a baffling capriciousness in what people like and why. ELIGIBLE, by Curtis Sittenfeld. (Random House, $17.) A retelling of "Pride and Prejudice" unfolds in the Cincinnati suburbs: Liz, a magazine writer in New York, comes home to find her family in disarray, and meets Darcy, now in the guise of a neurosurgeon from San Francisco who is profoundly underwhelmed by the Midwest. Sittenfeld's version seamlessly transplants Jane Austen's story to a modern American setting.
Guardian Review
In an alternative version of 1970s America, the Vietnam war grinds on and on; but the urgent, unspoken presences on this novel's pages are the veterans damaged by the US's recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq It's not just generals who make a habit of fighting the last war rather than the one at hand; artists do it, too. The novels, films and television shows that best captured the dark paradoxes of the Vietnam War for Americans -- Catch-22, Slaughterhouse 5 and M*A*S*H -- were set during the second world war or the Korean war. So while David Means's new novel features characters damaged by and obsessed with "Nam", the unspoken, urgent presences on its pages are the US's recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, or, rather, what they have done to the men and women who fought them. But another war makes itself felt in this novel as well: the struggle between a writer and his times. Means has published four short-story collections and is acknowledged as a master of the form. His great subject is suffering and its transmission, through loneliness, grief and violence. With sentences that seem carved from granite, he depicts, typically, a dark midwestern landscape populated by the forsaken people who once served as the US's industrial working class, as well as cannon fodder for the architects of the nation's wars in Asia and the Middle East. Harm and bad luck are their legacy, passed on to strangers, friends and kin. As exquisite as Means's stories are, their emotional tenor ranges from the grim to the tragic, which on top of the fact that they are short stories, limits their appeal to all but the most stout-hearted readers. Publishers tend to view short-story collections as warm-ups to the inevitable novel, which is why Hystopia has been described more than once as long-awaited. But not every virtuoso of one form excels equally at the other, and Hystopia shows the strain of an author pushing to adapt to a form in which he is not at home. The novel comes with a lot of metafictional apparatuses. It is framed with editor's notes and appendices explaining that the main body of the book is the work of a veteran named Eugene Allen. The novel within the novel takes place in an alternative version of the 1970s, one in which John F Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963, but instead has survived multiple attempts to kill him and has prevailed on the US public to (unconstitutionally) elect him to a third presidential term. In Hystopia, Vietnam grinds on and on at Kennedy's command and has been stripped of all elements of geopolitical strategy or significance, however misguided or trumped up. The novel is set entirely in the state of Michigan, and while many of its characters are veterans psychologically swamped by the horrors they endured or perpetrated in the war, no one bothers to speak of why. The war simply is. Like, perhaps, life itself, it is a factory for producing trauma, and the management of trauma is what preoccupies every character in Hystopia. A government agency known familiarly as Psych Corps has developed a medicated technique, called "enfolding", that allows veterans to partition off their memories of horrific events in an inaccessible corner of their brains. They have institutionalised denial. A big chunk of Michigan has been set aside for the rehabilitation and reintegration of the "enfolded", but since the process, when it goes awry, causes the subject to become fantastically violent, other parts of the state have been nearly taken over by "wayward" vets and motorcycle gangs. The novel focuses on two heterosexual couples: a pair of Psych Corps agents assigned to track a psychopathic "failed enfold" named Rake and two hostages held by Rake in a rural house in the lawless sector of northern Michigan. For the first two thirds of the book, these characters seem mired in a drug-fuelled state of gluey semi-stasis, while all around them the novel sizzles and hisses with proliferating what-is-real palaver reminiscent of the fiction of Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace. Singleton, an enfolded Psych Corps agent, suspects that his assignment might be his boss's new variation on enfolding: "If this is some sort of treatment, or if we're supposed to be thinking this is treatment, he'd want us to be aware that we're aware of our own awareness of the situation." Can Means himself really care much about this flimsy paranoia and the elaborate conceit of Eugene Allen? It's as if he feels that the stuff that novels are made of -- multiple storylines, rising and falling cadences of narrative excitement, the construction of a plausibly imagined world -- are merely the extraneous, padded scaffolding erected around a truth, rather than a form that truth can take. When he turns, instead, to another character's beautifully precise observations of the natural world ("The trees thinned where the rocky berm began, showing shards of slate-colored lake"), the book settles into itself, but to keep things moving forward it must revert to its frantic efforts to wrestle with "big ideas". For Means, whose great theme is the starkness and communicability of pain, as well as those flashes of beauty that make it worth bearing, many of the elements required by a novel are superfluous. Like enfolding, they keep us from looking at what he most wants us to see. * To order Hystopia for [pound]12.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Laura Miller.