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Title: Hystopia
Author: David Means
Narrator: Nicholas Techosky
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
Language: English
Release date: 12-27-16
Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2016
At the end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded" - wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy. Any veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians.
This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the 22-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. In Hystopia, 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.
Critic Reviews:
"Hystopia is a thrilling novel - daring, immensely readable and also unexpectedly funny. David Means is that lucky (and brilliant) writer: a man in full possession of a vision." (Richard Ford)
"A riveting, hypnotic dystopia of Vietnam combat veterans during the (fictional) second JFK administration. Amazing writing - not for the faint of heart. (Jonathan Shay, author of Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America)
Members Reviews:
A demonic postcard you'll be happy to receive
Just when you thought the postmodern games of your childhood (see: Pynchon, DeLillo, DF Wallace) were being eclipsed as of late by an emphatic "return of the real," Means reshuffles the cards. Hystopia leaves a lot to the imagination. And I mean that as a sincere compliment. The book is formally sectioned in three:
1. short "editorial notes"
2. the main text of the novel (the "book within the book")
3. the "author's" own notes
Of course both "editor" and "author" here are fictional characters (hence my scare-quotes). Though the editor is unidentified, the author of Hystopia is known as Eugene Allen, a Vietnam vet who has an axe to grind with history. His vision of America at the end of the 1960s feels more real than any history book -- as a trip that went from groovy to bad, to worse, and then worse. It's strange that Means' publishers even need promote this book at all, given its subject matter: sex, drugs, and violence. It should sell itself! But don't come looking for a Hollywood thriller. The book reads as a demonic postcard documenting the midwest undergoing the growing pains (or death pangs?) of American industry's transition into a post-industrial society. A domestic war, we are shown, was always mirroring the one abroad. It is for this reason that I want to claim that, though not a perfect book, Hystopia is an important book for our times. It gives us opportunity to name the prehistory of today's warmongering politicians and the ethics of wars abroad that come all too close to home for the majority of Americans, not to mention the veterans themselves.
For all the nuances of its plot, however, the book deserves your attention for the strange beauty and ease of its prose.
