David Means

Harvard Book Store welcomes National Book Critics Circle finalist DAVID MEANS, author of four story collections, for a reading from his first novel, Hystopia.

About Hystopia

At the bitter 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—while 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 twenty-two-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. The critic James Wood has written that Means's language "offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality." 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.

Praise

“After four story collections, Means delivers his first novel, and it’s a dazzling and singular trip . . . Means writes stunning prose and draws his characters with verve . . . [Hystopia] reads like an acid flashback, complete with the paranoia, manic monologues, and violent visions, proving that some traumas never go away.” —Publishers Weekly

“[David Means's] 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 . . . Means' first novel is a compelling portrait of an imagined counterhistory that feels entirely real.“ —Kirkus Review 

“David Means takes us on a twisted, revelatory trip to the darkest corners of American life in the long shadow of the Vietnam War. Summon the courage to go along and you will be amply rewarded. Terrifying and beautiful, Hystopia defies every evasion or sentimentality in its resolute evocation of a history our culture so readily avoids. Robert Stone would be proud.”  —Christian G. Appy author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity