Hank’s attempts to heal his soul by means of immersing himself in the natural world recall Nick Adams in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” — another traumatized Michigan veteran of war. In fact, Hank takes Meg to the Two-Hearted River, telling her “a writer used it in a story, and made it into something it wasn’t.” Agent Singleton, meanwhile, has been reading “A Farewell to Arms” and thinking about the connection between Hemingway’s war and his own. “Hemingway’s war had produced a certain kind of character, a new way of thinking and speaking that came from what was left out, from the things war had demolished and pushed away forever.” The two couples in “Hystopia” are in many ways reminiscent of Hemingway’s Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley — all trying to escape their war.

The John F. Kennedy in “Hystopia” is recognizable if not historical, flirting with death on constant “wave-by tours” of the country (although the historical Kennedy, according to aides, hoped to wind down American involvement in Vietnam after the ’64 election). “That Kennedy deliberately endangered himself in public outings as a way to defy previous attempts made on his life is historical fact,” we are told in the (fake) editor’s note that precedes the novel within the novel. But one place where Eugene Allen’s narrative overlaps with the real-life Vietnam era is in the rise of anarchy and rioting; escaping the chaos, Wendy and Singleton drive north in search of Rake. Singleton imagines his mission is sanctioned by his superiors, though he may in fact be acting on his own, drawn toward his submerged past: Singleton, Rake and Meg’s lost boyfriend were all members of the same unit in Vietnam before an errant napalm strike killed one and left the other two badly wounded.

Early on, Means resorts to some clunky exposition — an officer lecturing Singleton on recent history and the basic principles of the treatment — to situate us in his fictive universe. But “Hystopia” quickly gains momentum and plausibility thanks to its richness of detail. Means is a writer of dazzling gifts: a challenging stylist and a keen observer whose senses seem, at times, pitched to a state of hyperawareness. “The trees were just beginning to change,” one character observes, “not in color but in the tenseness of the leaves, a loosening at the stems.” Though his fictive universe is horribly polluted and burned over, Means writes beautifully about the natural world, effortlessly conjuring the sound of the wind, the smell of Lake Michigan through the pines, “the dry, lonely sizzle of cicadas going about their afternoon business.”

Means creates a powerful sense of narrative inevitability as the two Psych Corps agents are drawn north in search of Rake and his captive, which is why a climactic scene involving an improbable duel and an experienced shooter who fails to sense that his pistol has an empty clip is jarring. (Shouldn’t the weight have given it away?) The story concludes on a curiously uplifting if slightly indeterminate note. But the illusion of a happy ending is punctured by the knowledge we’ve carried since Means’s earliest pages, where the commentary introducing Eugene Allen’s novel first reveals that its author has committed suicide and that his beloved sister, on whom the character of Meg was based, has come to no good end. It’s tempting to say that the novel written by Eugene Allen is an attempt to create an alternate, ameliorative reality, to enfold the trauma of both Allens — and of the traumatized nation — but that’s probably a reductive reading of this fiendishly convoluted and complex novel.