Hystopia

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.

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.

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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.)

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.

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