Traumatised Vietnam vets bring mayhem to the streets of a reimagined 1960s America in this ambitious but problematic contender for this year’s Booker prizeImagine that the Man Booker prize had always been open to novels from the US. Would Graham Swift’s Last Orders still acquire won in 1996,the year David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest? How approximately Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, the year Don DeLillo published Underworld?It’s tough not to feel that a certain anxiety approximately answering (or even asking) those questions might lurk behind talk of the prize having lost its identity, or after the recent rule change that lets the panel nominate US writers such as David Means. Hystopia,approximately a parallel America during the Vietnam war, exhibits a level of conceptual and stylistic density that British novelists seldom hazard; it flies the flag on this year’s longlist for the kind of maximalist aesthetic the judges were once obliged to ignore.
Means avoids clarity and spends a lot of time outlining his alternative reality in a vortex of fiddly counterfactuals Related: Slade House by David Mitchell review – gleeful, and skin-crawling brilliance Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com