Hystopia by David Means
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Back to the Womb

The effect of this novel isn't one of a narrative opened and closed. It is more one of the creation and sustaining of a single feeling of cold vulnerability to everything in the world - from its people to the natural environment. The reader as well as the characters search constantly for some reassuring meaning. The pervasive drug-induced haze distorts everything, however, inducing the perception one has in the midst of a severe hangover of being one or two nano-seconds behind reality.

There is pregnant malice and real danger everywhere, in every human encounter, in the pollution and changeable weather of the Great Lakes, in the governmental forces of law and order, in the suppressed memories buried, by choice or through so-called 'enfolding therapy', in one's own psyche. The artistic skill necessary to maintain this 'story truth' as opposed to 'happening truth', to follow Tim O'Brien (perhaps Means's closest stylistic antecedent), is considerable; And it works. Means is undoubtedly a pro, but perhaps insidiously so.

What is, if any, the underlying theme that ties together the strands of war, horror, psychosis, self-delusion, 60's drug culture, fading industry, assassination, Northern boreal forests, indeed North itself as well as, one supposes, actual experience in this complicated work? Could it be the clue is in the title: Hystopia, from the Greek Hyster-Topos, the womb-place? A place which is beyond memory as well as before it, and yet determines so much of our response to the world; that watery place of existence before birth in which there is no time, no morality, no chance of independence, and no defence from invasion and imminent destruction except the uncertain goodwill society might provide.

Means makes much of the mitten-shape of the lower peninsula of Michigan (the left hand presumably), the place where Vietnam veterans who have failed, or avoided, the memory-erasure of enfoldment congregate. Is it coincidence that there is an anatomical abnormality, bicornuate uterus, that is frequently mitten-shaped and results in a variety of difficulties from miscarriage to foetal deformity? Not, in other words, a good place to find shelter much less in which to grow up. Hey, stranger things have happened in post-modernist lit.

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