David Means. (2016). Hystopia: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

David Means. 2016. Hystopia: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

David Means, Hystopia: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

David Means. Hystopia: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

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1. • value: us history
2. • value: literary fiction
3. • value: assassinations
4. • value: PTSD
5. • value: war veterans
6. • value: American Authors
7. • value: Alternative History
8. • value: science fiction and fantasy
9. • value: Michigan
10. • value: Vietnam War
11. • value: American Literature
12. • value: alternate history fiction
13. • value: debut novels
14. • value: humorous novels
15. • value: literary novels
16. • value: science fiction novels
17. • value: alternate history novels
18. • value: vietnam war books
19. • value: funny novels
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21. • value: vietnam fiction
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Means, David
   • bioText: David Means was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of several short-story collections, including Instructions for a Funeral, The Spot (a New York Times notable book of the year), Assorted Fire Events (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction), and The Secret Goldfish, and of the novel Hystopia (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize). His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and other publications. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, Means lives in Nyack, New York, and teaches at Vassar College.
   • name: David Means

publishDate

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title

Hystopia

fullDescription

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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Christian Lorentzen, New York
   • content:

     "The most ambitious novel of 2016 so far, Hystopia might also be the last thing we expected in a first novel by the veteran storyteller David Means: a counterfactual narrative by a Vietnam veteran about his experience in a therapeutic, psychedelics-based trauma recovery program initiated by an unassassinated John F. Kennedy, with a Kinbote–like editorial apparatus attached. The concept is high, but the hardscrabble Means we've known for years is still present and in command."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe
   • content: "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?"
3. • premium: False
   • source: Jay McInerney, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Hystopia quickly gains momentum and plausibility thanks to its richness of detail. Means is a writer of dazzling gifts: a challenging stylist and a keen observer whose senses seem, at times, pitched to a state of hyperawareness . . .Means writes beautifully about the natural world, effortlessly conjuring the sound of wind, the smell of Lake Michigan through the pines, 'the dry, lonely sizzle of cicadas going about their afternoon business."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from February 8, 2016
     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.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from February 15, 2016
     In an alternative universe, John F. Kennedy was not killed in Dealey Plaza, but America is riven by Vietnam nonetheless. Means has made a career writing deeply rendered short fiction: four collections, including The Spot (2010) and Assorted Fire Events (2000). His work is precise, relentless, unsentimental, an art of missed opportunities and missed connections, tracing, more than anything, the inevitability of loss. These same themes mark his first novel but in a manner we haven't seen before. It's not just the difference between long and short, although one 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 where Kennedy survived Dallas (and several other attempts on his life) to become a public martyr-in-the-making, "driving around in an open limo, with Jackie at his side, doing the hand-wave, the little movement, half-hearted, just a flick of the wrist, all slo-mo, the way the motorcade moved." Kennedy is an ambiguous figure, architect of a failed Vietnam strategy that has led him to create the Psych Corps, a federal bureaucracy dedicated to wiping out the memories of returning veterans. The novel involves two such vets: Rake, who embarked on a Charlie Starkweather-type killing spree with his young girlfriend, and Singleton, an agent who must track the killer down. That's the traditional part of the story, but this is not a traditional narrative. Rather, it offers a melange of reference points--Starkweather, John Kennedy Toole (the novel is constructed as a book within a book, written by a suicide), and even, with its editor's notes and contextual material, Nabokov--set in a world that has unraveled in its own apocalyptic way. One unintended irony is the role of Flint, Michigan, devastated by fire and environmental degradation, where part of the novel is set. But Means is less interested here in where we are going than where we have been. "Don't accuse the kid of bending history," he insists. "Accuse history of bending the kid. And the war, the war bent him, too. Like so many, he came back changed." Means' first novel is a compelling portrait of an imagined counterhistory that feels entirely real.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from March 15, 2016
     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 soldiersand thus the countryby 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 15, 2015
     

     Means's first novel is rightly called long-awaited; his short fiction has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize. Here, 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.

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

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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...

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3. • code: FIC084040
   • description: Fiction / World Literature / American / 21st Century