This has the gooey, meandering prose of a P.K. Dick novel, & the existential confusion of one of those middling Dalkey Archive Press titles about a confused guy in Eastern Europe that only me & 30 other people (half of whom are reading this review) actually read.

The high-wire conceit here --the literal displacement of trauma-- is in pretty desperate need of some taut prose.

This is probably the 38th or 39th best Vietnam novel I've ever read. ( )

Like a Black Mirror episode, it was fun working out the internal logic of the alternate universe, but apart from some merrily excessive violence not much has stuck in my memory. To be honest, I found the set-up a bit too convoluted for its own good - it didn't seem to serve the story or lead to anything worthy of justifying all that hard work! ( )

Got halfway through.

While this book has some interesting dystopian ideas (enfolding, a geographic area for the enfolding process and newly enfolded, etc), it is disgustingly over-the-top violent. And the extreme violence is totally unnecessary as the author's ideas are good. Making it more shocking does not make it better--anything for shock value weakens the product.

An author to avoid. I question anyone who thinks this sort of crap is worth writing and sharing. Ugh.

WTF is this doing on the Booker longlist? Very disappointing. ( )

This wasn’t the alternative history that you might expect from a quick read of the blurb. It isn’t an alternate science fiction world where the U.S. is in an un-assassinated Kennedy third term where a Psych Corps uses a drug Tripizoid to “enfold” PTSD damaged veterans to wipe their memories and Pysch Corps teams hunt down un-“enfolded” vets who are rampaging in a lawless State of Michigan. The overall fiction is that there was a vet, Eugene Allen (from presumably the real world Vietnam War), who wrote such an alternate history book and then committed suicide. His supposed fiction is presented here with an editor’s introduction and notes.

Maybe that still sounds intriguing but it all fell flat for me, and I had little interest in finishing it and barely registered how it all ended. I enfolded it and forgot it. There was a duo of Psych Corps agents Singleton and Wendy and they are hunting the un-enfolded Rake and Hank and Meg. And Kennedy does get assassinated after apparently recklessly continuing to present a target. I guess it is all a statement on perpetual war a la Orwell's “1984” and how Presidents are interchangeable in the greater military-industrial complex. The influences from Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”/Coppola's film “Apocalypse Now” (the team sent out to remove a crazy) to the Oppenheimer documentary film “The Act of Killing” (re-enactments of atrocities) were obvious and nothing unique seemed to occur.

I read this as part of my goal to finish the 13-book Booker 2016 Longlist and would be very surprised if it made the 6-book shortlist.

Stray Observation
- The fictional characters of the Eugene Allen story-within-a-story visit Ernest Hemingway's fictional "Big Two-Hearted River" towards the end of the book. Hemingway's story had his proxy-fictional-self of Nick Adams return to his beloved woods and fishing grounds to recover from the ravages of World War I. ( )

Not sure it needed the “book within a book” conceit, but the novel bit was a kooky, frightening, hallucinatory ride chock full of paranoia and dread. Just the way I likes ’em.

Iggy may just be Christ. ( )