Hystopia

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Certain historical facts have been twisted to fit Eugene Allen’s fictive universe. The fires his text describes did consume most of Detroit and parts of Flint, and raged through the state to the north, but they did not, of course, burn the entire state from top to bottom. Details of the seventh assassination attempt made on John F. Kennedy, now known as the Genuine Assassination, have been changed slightly in Allen’s narrative, which has it taking place on a mid-August afternoon in Galva, Illinois. As we know, Kennedy was killed a month later, on September 17, as he drove through the town of Springfield, Illinois, on one of his intimate wave-by tours, “throwing [his] fate to the whims of the nation,” as he said so often in his later speeches.

That Kennedy deliberately endangered himself in public outings as a way to defy previous attempts made on his life is historical fact, and historians will be debating for years the effectiveness this gesture had in reducing, or increasing, the number of attempts on his life (six), and whether it helped to extend his physical life along with his political life. The great ash heaps — still smoldering as Allen worked on the novel — certainly could be seen from an apartment at 22 Main, in Flint, in which Myron Singleton and Wendy Zapf had their first furtive lovemaking session. But the ash heap didn’t stop — as Allen claims — at Bay City (which burned for three years) but extended all the way up into the thumb region before petering out. Another backdrop of Allen’s narrative, the second great lumber boom, was simply a creation of his vivid imagination.

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