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"By the early 1970s, President John F. Kennedy has survived several assassination attempts and--martyred, heroic--is now in his third term. Twenty-two-year-old Eugene Allen returns home from his tour of duty in Vietnam and begins to write a war novel--a book echoing Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five--about veterans who have their battlefield experiences "enfolded," wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy. In Eugene's fictive universe, veterans too damaged to be enfolded stalk the American heartland, reenacting atrocities on civilians and evading the Psych Corps, a federal agency dedicated to upholding the mental hygiene of the nation by any means necessary. This alternative America, in which a veteran tries to re-imagine a damaged world, is the subject of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. The critic James Wood has written that Means's language "offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality." Means brings this talent to bear on the national trauma of the Vietnam era in a work that is outlandish, ruefully funny, and shockingly violent. Written in conversation with some of the greatest war narratives from the Iliad to the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," Hystopia is a unique and visionary novel"-- "A visionary first novel taking place in an alternate version of Vietnam-War-era America"--… (more)
User reviews
Iggy may just be Christ.
While this book has some interesting dystopian ideas (enfolding, a geographic area for the enfolding process and newly enfolded, etc), it is disgustingly over-the-top violent. And the extreme violence is totally unnecessary as the author's ideas are good. Making it more shocking
An author to avoid. I question anyone who thinks this sort of crap is worth writing and sharing. Ugh.
WTF is this doing on the Booker longlist? Very disappointing.
Maybe that still sounds intriguing but it all fell flat for me, and I had little interest in finishing it and barely registered how it all ended. I enfolded it and forgot it. There was a duo of Psych Corps agents Singleton and Wendy and they are hunting the un-enfolded Rake and Hank and Meg. And Kennedy does get assassinated after apparently recklessly continuing to present a target. I guess it is all a statement on perpetual war a la Orwell's “1984” and how Presidents are interchangeable in the greater military-industrial complex. The influences from Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”/Coppola's film “Apocalypse Now” (the team sent out to remove a crazy) to the Oppenheimer documentary film “The Act of Killing” (re-enactments of atrocities) were obvious and nothing unique seemed to occur.
I read this as part of my goal to finish the 13-book Booker 2016 Longlist and would be very surprised if it made the 6-book shortlist.
Stray Observation
- The fictional characters of the Eugene Allen story-within-a-story visit Ernest Hemingway's fictional "Big Two-Hearted River" towards the end of the book. Hemingway's story had his proxy-fictional-self of Nick Adams return to his beloved woods and fishing grounds to recover from the ravages of World War I.