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In the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, Chief executive John F. Kennedy is entering his third term in office. The Vietnam Warfare rages on, and the leader has created a vast federal organization, the Psych Corps, focused on maintaining the nation's mental hygiene at all necessary. Soldiers going back from the conflict have their battlefield traumas "enfolded" - wiped from their memory through drugs and remedy - 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 background is the eye-sight of 22-year-old Eugene Allen, who has delivered from Vietnam to write the book-within-a-book at the center of Hystopia. In conversation with a few of the greatest conflict narratives, from Homer's Iliad to the Rolling Rocks' "Gimme Shelter", David Means channels the speech of Allen, the young veteran out to write a novel that can bring honor to people he fought with in Vietnam while also capturing the tragic background of his own family. The critic Wayne Wood has written that Means' words "provides an exquisitely correct and sensuous register of the often crazy American reality". In Hystopia, his highly predicted first novel, David Means brings his full talent to tolerate on the crazy simple fact of stress, both national and personal. Outlandish and sensitive, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly triumph over. The answers it includes are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its individuals, and wrung from the author's own center.
