Hystopia by David Means review – the virtuoso short story writer’s tricksy first novel

In an alternative version of 1970s America, the Vietnam war grinds on and on; but the urgent, unspoken presences on this novel’s pages are the veterans damaged by the US’s recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq

It’s not just generals who make a habit of fighting the last war rather than the one at hand; artists do it, too. The novels, films and television shows that best captured the dark paradoxes of the Vietnam War for Americans – Catch-22, Slaughterhouse 5 and M*A*S*H – were set during the second world war or the Korean war. So while David Means’s new novel features characters damaged by and obsessed with “Nam”, the unspoken, urgent presences on its pages are the US’s recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, or, rather, what they have done to the men and women who fought them.

But another war makes itself felt in this novel as well: the struggle between a writer and his times. Means has published four short-story collections and is acknowledged as a master of the form. His great subject is suffering and its transmission, through loneliness, grief and violence. With sentences that seem carved from granite, he depicts, typically, a dark midwestern landscape populated by the forsaken people who once served as the US’s industrial working class, as well as cannon fodder for the architects of the nation’s wars in Asia and the Middle East. Harm and bad luck are their legacy, passed on to strangers, friends and kin.

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