Welcome to Wonderland
Recovery from the Vietnam War is elusive and strange in this Man Booker longlisted novel, finds
Based in New York, David Means is an awardwinning writer, but Hystopia is his debut novel. Both daring and darkedged, I was surprised at the layers of response that hit me at the end — grief at what a government can inflict upon its people for spurious reasons coupled with grief at individual stories and busted-apart families.
It is the 1960s, Kennedy is in his third term of office and the Vietnam War produces trauma both off field and on.
The novel presents narrative and history in fractured states as though neither can bear the weight of cohesion nor simplistic comprehension.
Eugene Allen, a 22-year-old Vietnam veteran, returns home to write a novel that explores his war experience and family tragedies. His novel becomes the harrowing centre-piece of the book; a novel within a novel.
Back home, veterans are subjected to recovery treatment that involves drugs, sex and water. The aim is to enfold the unbearable trauma of the subjects within a state of forgetting.
In a thinly disguised version of his own life, Allen’s characters hit crisis point.
Rake has failed the enfolding programme and is on a violent rampage having kidnapped Meg. Singleton and Wendy, enfolded agents, are on the hunt for Rake. Rake and Meg end up in a cottage in the woods with Hank, a selfenfolded vet who keeps me reading. Hank is the saving grace, the antidote to idiotic authority, the tender moment.
The frame story is like a poignant wing nut on Allen’s narrative. We know from the outset that Allen commits suicide. Extracts from interviews with family and friends are our entry and departure points into and from his novel.
The multiple voices underline the uncertainty of experience and the way stories are necessary yet inexorably untrustworthy. The sense of grief twists and pierces.
I felt like I was also in the murky, elusive state of forgetting where the story came to me in traces.
The long, breathless sentences belong to someone wanting to set his story out with all the detail that deposits the listener in the thick of the scene. Allen tells us that enfolded agents need ‘‘to reach out to stories and make them their own’’. I felt like I was experiencing a version of this as I read.
What affected me more than anything though was the arrival of grace.
Near the end of his novel, Allen admits that ‘‘the fact I got all the pain in the thing I am typing but couldn’t get that tiny sliver of grace irks me’’.
In his acknowledgements, Means identifies with his father’s belief ‘‘in the permanence of grace as the fundamental light in the darkness of existence’’.
Grace is what kept me reading within the slap of disintegration, unknowing and loss. Harrowing brilliance.