Review: 'Hystopia,' by David Means

In a 2010 interview with the Paris Review, short-story writer David Means said he had avoided writing novels for "fear of wasting time — and in doing so not being able to tell the stories that want to be told." Said short stories often plunge into a single, violent moment — a bank robbery, a railroad mugging, a man bursting into flames — and ripple outward, gesturing toward some past fray or future distress. Lonely souls (vagrants, lusty seminarians, alcoholics) try to unscramble the manifold bafflements of trauma and disappointing pasts to carve out something like existential respite.

Means' prose is hard-cutting, incisive and occasionally lush. Long, winding sentences encapsulate chaotic moments — or in the case of "Hystopia," beleaguered rants from head cases — and linger with imagistic, musical prose. But these strengths eschew showiness, even with the metafictional framing. (The story is a novel within a novel.)

In this alternate history, John F. Kennedy has survived half a dozen assassination attempts and is entering his third term as president. He tries to bolster his resolve to keep troops tangled up in Vietnam with a PTSD recovery program called "enfolding." Psych Corps, headquartered in Flint, Mich., heads the program. The treatment involves re-enacting a trauma and, with the aid of a drug called Tripizoid, canceling it out.

Though given an orienting preface by veteran Eugene Allen, "author" of the novel within a novel, who recently committed suicide, readers are mostly left to flesh out these particulars as the story progresses. The main plot follows the vet Rake, who helps his young girlfriend, Meg, escape from the grid (the post-treatment safe zone) to drag her along on killing sprees, where, afterward, he finger-paints "cryptic designs, a pentagram (sometimes) and a cross (most of the time)," with victims' blood.

Singleton and Wendy, two recently enfolded Psych Corps trainees, are assigned to hunt him down. Instead, they sidestep duties to engage in a romantic fling, which is forbidden. (Intercourse can cause someone to "unfold.") Overseeing the manhunt is Sgt. Klein, who makes a "fish-mouth suck … around his pipe stem," and comically rants to Singleton about his days in Korea. Their stories intertwine and ultimately converge in surprising ways.

Situated somewhere between Denis Johnson's searing and sad "Tree of Smoke" and the rambunctiously peopled "Catch-22," "Hystopia" makes old wounds seem not so old. In this turgid and unnerving political climate, one is often left to wonder who's tripping and who's sober.

In the Paris Review interview, Means said that novels are often "bloated." They develop in expected ways and, quite simply, say nothing new and don't surprise. But here, where love, conspiracy, war and drugs contend in cataclysmic head trips and bleached landscapes, Means deploys impressive psychological insight in impeccably rendered increments. No ifs, ands or bloats about it.

Josh Cook's writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review and the Millions, among others. He lives in St. Paul.

Hystopia
By: David Means.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pages, $26.