Hystopia (Means)

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