The nature of trauma is a subject David Means has often explored in his short fiction – his stories are full of desperate characters struggling with painful experiences on the fringes of post-industrial America. His debut novel – longlisted for the Man Booker Prize – continues the theme, though the narrative threads often get caught up in stylistic tangles.
He uses the familiar “novel within a novel” device – Hystopia being the title of an “alternative history” fantasy written by 22-year-old Eugene Allen, back from the Vietnam war at the end of the 1960s. In this story, Kennedy is entering his third term in office. There is much postmodern trickery. What would it be like if we could simply forget the most painful portions of the past?
In what seems like an attempt to make a better world – but ends up closer to things getting worse – a new federal agency institutes a policy whereby war veterans have their traumatic memories wiped out using a drug named Tripzoid. Those resistant to the technique, meanwhile, are left to re-enact the atrocities they have witnessed. The book is littered with scenes of violence.
“Traumatic memory is not narrative,” wrote the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, quoted in the epigraph – a warning, it seems, for anyone with the aim of turning it into one. The author’s way of pinning the subject down is to reject conventional, linear storytelling in favour of an “inner narrative”, which ducks and dives through time, at times circling around pain, at times staring it in the face.
It makes for bewilderingly – occasionally brilliantly – opaque reading. Means has produced a flawed but fascinating novel, showing us that utopias and dystopias are both sides of the same coin.
• Hystopia by David Means is published by Faber (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
View all comments >