Hystopia (Means)

Hystopia 
David Means, 21016
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780865479135


Summary
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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 17, 1961
• Where—Kalamazoo, Michigan., USA
• Education—B.A., College of Wooster; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Nyack, New York


David Means is an American author of several short story collections and the 2016 novel Hystopia. He has been a part-time member of the English department at Vassar College since 2001 and lives in Nyack, New York, along the Hudson River. He and his wife have two children.

Education
Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Means graduated from Loy Norrix High School in and received his bachelor's degree in 1984 from the College of Wooster. He went to graduate school at Columbia University where he received an MFA in poetry.

Work
Hystopia, Means's 2016 novel, presents an alternate version of history in which John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and is in his third presidential term. The story focuses on the horrors of the Vietnam War, which Kennedy prosecutes with determination. Various comparisons have been made to David Foster Wallace, Charlie Kaufman, Kazuo Ishiguro, and even Hemingway.

In addition to his collections, Means's stories have appeared in many publications, including Esquire, The New Yorker, and Harper's. They are frequently set in the Midwest or the Rust Belt, or along the Hudson River in New York. Means has been compared to such writers as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro while Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times compared him to Eudora Welty and John Cheever. Praised for his sharp prose, James Wood in the London Review of Books wrote...

Means' language offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality. Sentences gleaming with lustre are sewn through the stories. One will go a long way with a writer possessed of such skill.

(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/23/2016.)

Book Reviews
Hystopia, David Means's dark acid trip of a novel, reads like a phantasmagorical…mash-up of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Charlie Kaufman's screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Michael Herr's Vietnam classic, Dispatches. It's a meditation on war…and the toll it takes on soldiers and families and loved ones. It's also a portrait of a troubled America in the late 1960s and early '70s—an America reeling from unemployment and lost dreams, and seething with anger, and uncannily familiar, in many ways, to America today. Perhaps most insistently, it's an exploration of how storytelling—the causal narratives we manufacture in our heads—shapes our identities and provides a hedge against the chaos of real life.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


The horrors of war, especially the traumas of America’s experience in Vietnam, birthed the recursive, thickly ironized literary sensibility we call postmodernism. David Means’s violent, mind-warped novel-within-a-novel Hystopia is a throwback to this style’s heyday, a drug-addled nightmare version of American history nodding in the direction of Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson.... Hystopia’s tale-swallowing metafiction ingeniously embodies the self-replicating mental prisons of war trauma (in Allen’s telling, even enfolded veterans feel caged inside their forgetfulness).
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


Supremely gonzo and supremely good.... If Flannery O'Connor had written about Vietnam, Rake is the kind of character she would have created.... What is the relation between the chaos of lived experience and the coherence of narrative? How is trauma tied to the fracturing of narrative, to our inability to see the past as past, distinct from, yet leading to the present? Henry James once described the real as "the things we cannot possibly not know." Hystopia often reads, strange as it sounds, like a Jamesian investigation of knowledge, albeit one fueled by amphetamines.
Anthony Domestico - Boston Globe


Subtle yet evocative..... [T]here is a lot to unpack in this novel whose central themes include, but are hardly limited to, trauma, memory and violence..... [Means is] a writer of imagination and vision, someone for whom history is not ossified but still very much alive, and rich with possibilities for reinvention.
Shoshana Olidort - Chicago Tribune


Brilliant..... [T]he writing is beautiful and exuberant, moving and funny, and always one step ahead. The descriptions of getting stoned are as vivid as the landscapes. Means s characters live in a state of constant sensory attention that keeps them always attuned to the texture...the smell of lakes and trees, the taste of carbon.
Christine Smallwood - Harper's


(Starred review.) After four story collections, Means delivers his first novel, and it’s a dazzling and singular trip.... Means writes stunning prose and draws his characters with verve.... [Hystopia] reads like an acid flashback, complete with the paranoia, manic monologues, and violent visions, proving that some traumas never go away.
Publishers Weekly


John F. Kennedy has survived several assassination attempts and founded a federal agency called the Psych Corps, meant to keep the nation positive. (Vietnam vets have the horrors they've seen scrubbed from their memories.) Into this fake brightness lands a vet named Eugene Allen, who writes the novel within this novel. Eyebrow-raising.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A compelling, imaginative alternative-history tale about memory and distress . . . 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.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [P]recise, relentless, unsentimental...[tracing] the inevitability of loss. [O]ne of the pleasures of this dark and complex work is to see Means stretch out. Even more, however, it's the novel's manic energy, its mix of realism and satire, set in an alternative universe.... Means' first novel is a compelling portrait of an imagined counterhistory that feels entirely real.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Hystopia...and then take off from there:

1. The war veterans take a drug called Tripizoid to enable them to forget the trauma of war. Even providing that it works, are the veterans better off with "therapeutic amnesia"? Is there a benefit to the erasure of traumatic memories...to not remembering? If you cut out memory, what is left?

2. What is the purpose of the novel within a novel—a novel "enfolded" within a novel? How is the inner novel linked to the real one (David Means's Hystopia)? Why might Means have chosen to structure his story this way? Consider that the "editor" tells us Eugene Allen suffered from “Stiller’s disease”—the "propensity...to witness the world from a distance and within secure confines." Is that what David Means is choosing to do,as well?

3. Can you draw parallels between Hystopia's veterans of 40 some years ago and today's veterans from the Middle East? What other ways does the novel comment on contemporary life?

4. Talk about the title, "Hystopia"? What is its significance...its play on words?

5. Why does Rake, whose failed enfolding sends him on a killing spree, deliberately leave clues behind for the Psych Corps?

6. How has Hank, unlike Jake, been able to reverse the mal-effects of his failed treatment? What are the ways in which he is able to find peace?

7. Talk about the references to Hemingway's traumatized veterans. As Agent Singleton notes:

Hemingway's war had produced a certain kind of character, a new way of thinking and speaking that came from what was left out, from the things war had demolished and pushed away forever.

What does Singleton mean? What was "left out" in the "new way of thinking a speaking"? How is this observation relevant to Singleton, Rake and Hank?

8. The author juxtaposes the natural world and the man made world. Describe the state of the State of Michigan, the setting for the novel. In what way does Michigan border on dystopia? What are the parallels to the "rust belt" of today.

9. How does the rather uplifting conclusion of Allen's novel conflict with the editor's note at the very beginning about Eugene Allen's suicide and his sister's unhappy end?

10. One of the major concerns in the book is the role of memory in preserving personal history—and thus self-identity. What, for instance, is the relationship among Rake, Singleton, and Wendy if their memories are erased?

11. How might this book be using personal amnesia as a metaphor for national amnesia?

12. Talk about the following passage: "Don’t accuse the kid of bending history. Accuse history of bending the kid. And the war, the war bent him, too. Like so many, he came back changed."

13. Reviewers have compared this book to an acid trip. Care to comment?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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