"Hystopia" by David Means

An audio book, and my attention wavered.

It begins with editor's and pre-readers' notes about accuracy etc. The supposed novelist, Eugene Allen, an ex-soldier, killed himself and had a troubled sister. In the novel, Kennedy was president for 3 terms. Psych Corp is trying to preserve mental hygene after Vietnam. Unwanted memories are re-enacted hoping that the re-enactment will cancel out the original memory (like sine waves carefully synced). The technique is called "Enfolding". A drug, Tripizoid, helps.

Enfolding doesn't always work. To cancel a war memory requires canceling related memories too, and if a war memory involves someone who was a schoolmate, school/childhood memories may have to be eliminated.

Singleton, an agent, starts having an affair with Wendy, another agent. Such relationships aren't allowed. Orgasm can unfold the treatment. Singleton finds out that Rake, an ex-friend whose enfolding failed, may be committing multiple crimes. Singleton thinks that Psych Corps meant he and Wendy to find each other and investigate.

Wendy and Singleton find Hank and Meg (Rake's victim?). They tempt Rake out of hiding and set up a duel in which he dies. Singleton and Meg think they both knew Billy T before their unfolding treatment.

At the end there are more comments from people the supposed author knew, and more about the real Billy T and the author's sister.

The text is at times mesmeric, hallucinogenic in the intensity of its descriptions - think "Apocalypse Now".

Other reviews

• Laura Miller (As exquisite as Means’s stories are, their emotional tenor ranges from the grim to the tragic, which on top of the fact that they are short stories, limits their appeal to all but the most stout-hearted readers ... Hystopia shows the strain of an author pushing to adapt to a form in which he is not at home. ... For Means, whose great theme is the starkness and communicability of pain, as well as those flashes of beauty that make it worth bearing, many of the elements required by a novel are superfluous. Like enfolding, they keep us from looking at what he most wants us to see.)
• Jay McInerney (His vision tends toward the dystopian; the stories, set in contemporary Michigan and upstate New York, often feel post-apocalyptic, taking place as they do in poisoned landscapes littered with shuttered factories, populated with characters haunted by loss and prone to violence.)
• Anita Sethi