Mind Picker: Hystopia

War reports: The siege of Hue dragged on as the Marines struggled once again to take what was left of the Citadel. Jason Williamson – a.k.a. the stoned reporter – filed nightly radio reports in a drug-dreary voice that was oddly comforting. His modus operandi, which had won him a Pulitzer, was to be on the ground as stoned as possible and to catch a new perspective, to offer up reports steeped in the language of visions. He was on the so-called wire, or outside the wire, or near the wire, filing from a microphone attached to the lapel of his flak jacket, pausing to let the pop of gunfire punctuate his whispery narrative, which seemed at an odd remove from reality, peppered with phraseology that could only come from tripping, describing the way the tracer fire wrapped long ribbony bands over the Vietcong, a sweep of galloping ghosts.

Hystopia itself is “at an odd remove from reality”: it opens with a series of editor's notes, author's notes, and transcripts from interviews with those who knew the (fictional) author, all to set up an alternate history in which JFK survived the 1963 assassination attempt, went on to win a third term as president (hey, if it was good enough for Roosevelt), and as he doubled down on the Vietnam War, returning veterans were “enfolded” (through a combination of drugs and reenactments, the worst of traumatic war memories are tucked away inaccessibly in the vets' minds), but some veterans resist the process, becoming outlaws and gathering in Michigan where, by 1970, they have burned the state down. This is a tricky-clever plot, and while I can appreciate the craftsmanship of what author David Means achieved here, all of this story-at-a-remove kept the characters at a remove as well; I had zero emotional connection to this book, and as a result, I was left unsatisfied. More than anything, Hystopia reminded me of Infinite Jest: and you can feel free to call that a classic or a work of genius if you wish, but using an adjacent-reality to expose the inner workings of our own does nothing for me personally.

What we eventually learn about the fictional author of the book-within-a-book, Eugene Allen, is that he went to Vietnam and returned a haunted man, driven to process what he witnessed by writing the novel Hystopia. This novel details the murder spree of a vet who refused the enfoldment; a scary psychopath who broke a young woman (based on the author's own sister) out of a psychiatric facility and brought her to his safe house in upstate Michigan. The novel also follows the two Psych Corps agents who are eventually sent to catch the killer (and although they were led to believe that their relationship was illicit, they may have been the pawns of their own government agency all along). **spoiler** And while this novel proposes a happy ending for the young woman, in the notes that follow the actual novel, we'll learn that Eugene's sister's remains were found deteriorated in the woods not long before he killed himself. /**spoiler** So, while on the one hand the reader is told that the book-within-a-book is pure fiction, the editor's notes at the beginning confirm that JFK had his third term and that Eugene Allen merely exaggerated the destruction of Michigan. There's a (fictional) quote from a noted critic calling the book-within-a-book a fictive world...bent double upon itself, as violent and destabilized as our own times, as pregnant and nonsensical (because of course none of this drugging and manipulating of the returning vets could be true), followed closely by a transcription of a vet saying: Don't accuse the kid of bending history. Accuse history of bending the kid. And the war, the war bent him, too. Like so many, he came back changed. This is followed by other vets saying that they were enfolded just as the book described, using drugs and dramatic reenactments. So, it happened, but it didn't happen, but it did happen; to what end?

The female Psych Corps agent (as the daughter of a Korean War vet and the former girlfriend of a damaged Vietnam Vet who likes to be referred to as the Zomboid) is the only one who looks at the bigger picture and comes up with lines like:She kissed him and then said, still whispering, that conspiracy was a male thing. Men had a need to find structures in encounters that arrived out of desire. They longed for string-pulling at the highest level. And: Men kill fucking men...Without something to enfold there's no enfolding. Men go out and make sure they have something to treat. So, war is inevitable? We will always throw our young people into the meat grinder, mistreat them when they (if they) return, look for easy solutions from Big Pharma, and happily swallow whatever official lies the government is feeding us even as they pull a lot of dubious strings behind the scenes? By taking all this to an absurdist extreme and setting it in the Vietnam era, is this truly a scathing critique of our own era and our own returning veterans? I don't know.

He sat next to her and looked at the sky, at the pearly whites and heavy grays and deeper silvers out to the horizon, gripping the water as it reached up – close in color, not too different – and the sky reached down to form a slice of deeper dark where the two met, and the heavy waves, closer in, lumbering slowly with larger gaps between as if avoiding each other, and he could hear – in the sound of the waves, in the lift of the wind – the way it spoke to the trees behind them, and the trees were speaking back, with a deep sigh, carrying the far-off scent of wide, boreal forests in the high reaches of the Canadian Shield, where an answer to the eternal question was forming.

I read this on the white sand beach along the eastern shores of Lake Huron; Michigan too far away to see on the other side of those breaking silver waves; and nothing about the writing made me feel connected to what was going on in the book. The book-within-a-book is followed by more editor's notes, letters written by the (fictional) author, and further interview transcripts, and while they did serve to answer some questions about reality (or at least “reality”), I honestly couldn't wait for them to be done; I felt my patience was being tried by the (actual) author. Definitely not my favourite from the 2016 Man Booker longlist.