At one point in David Means’s supremely gonzo and supremely good new novel “Hystopia,’’ a character declares, “Iggy was Christ, or maybe Christ was Iggy.’’ Iggy is Iggy Pop, the lead singer of the proto-punk band the Stooges. It’s telling that, if there is a savior in the world of “Hystopia,’’ it’s the apocalyptically manic Iggy.

Set in Michigan in the late 1960s, “Hystopia’’ is about traumas: the traumas of Vietnam, familial history, a post-industrial, hollowed-out Midwestern economy. Means’s world is a druggy, bloody, ugly one, and Iggy is both Christ and John the Baptist, a voice crying out in the wilderness, “hollering against the fury of noise.’’

To clarify: “Hystopia’’ is set in Michigan in the late 1960s, but it’s a Michigan and a 1960s madder than our own. In this speculative take, President Kennedy survived several assassination attempts and ramped up the war in Vietnam. Now, vets are coming home and bringing the war with them, “knocking on home-sweet-home doors and stepping into living rooms with the Namscape still etched on the backside of [their] eyeballs.’’

In response, the government has set up a Philip K. Dick-sounding federal bureaucracy called the Psych Corps. The Corps practices “enfolding’’ — a cure that represses traumatic memory through drugs and “the reenactment of the trauma.’’ Such memories can be unfolded, or brought back into consciousness, in two ways: by “[i]mmersion in cold water,’’ a kind of reverse baptism, and by “fantastic, beautiful, orgasmic sex.’’ Southwestern Michigan, where Means was born, has been turned into the Grid, a space where vets are treated before being released back into society. Failed enfolds — those vets for whom the repressive process didn’t stick — terrorize the northern parts of the state.

“Hystopia’’ contains two interweaving storylines. In one, Rake, a failed enfold whose treatment has “doubled up a trauma so huge that he wants to eat the earth itself,’’ roams the Michigan countryside — blasting the Stooges, stealing drugs, killing cops, dogs, and random citizens. He’s prone to making deranged pronouncements: “I’m gonna hold the death card close to the vest and then slap it down on the table when the time comes’’; “My credo’s: never kill for a good reason.’’ If Flannery O’Connor had written about Vietnam, Rake is the kind of character she would have created.

In the other storyline, two Psych Corps agents, Singleton (an enfolded vet himself) and Wendy, fall in love, smoke lots of weed, take lots of pills, and attempt to hunt Rake down. We sense early on that Singleton and Rake are connected, that some enfolded memory, if it were only unfolded, would reveal “all narrative lines leading to Rake.’’ The search for Rake is both a Psych Corps procedural and a journey toward knowledge: Singleton both fears recovering his enfolded memories and longs for the “beautiful purge of inner tension’’ that such a recovery would provide.

Means has previously published four collections of short stories; “Hystopia’’ is his first novel. In Means’s stories, many appearing in the New Yorker, each sentence seems worked to perfection. In “Hystopia,’’ the prose is after different effects. One could imagine that Means had a mantra above his desk while writing: not “make it new’’ but “make it fast.’’ His sentences possess incredible velocity and force; poetry has, for long stretches, given way to propulsion.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t sharp observations. Means is particularly good on Michigan’s landscapes and skylines: “in the fury of a distant storm,’’ he writes, “tiny bolts were caught up in the clouds, flickering their underbellies visible and then, a second later, consumed back into darkness.’’ But even such a lovely sentence can’t slow down the novel’s furious energy.

This driving plot comes with a metafictional scaffolding. The story of Rake and Singleton is, we are told, really a novel written by a vet named Eugene Allen. Means’s novel begins and ends with supplementary texts: interviews with Allen’s friends and family, notes from Allen’s editor. (In Allen’s novel, Kennedy is shot in Galva, Ill.; in “reality,’’ he was killed in Springfield.)

Such metafictional tricks aren’t really tricks, though. Rather, they raise the novel’s most serious aesthetic and philosophical questions. What is the relation between the chaos of lived experience and the coherence of narrative? How is trauma tied to the fracturing of narrative, to our inability to see the past as past, distinct from, yet leading to the present?

Henry James once described the real as “the things we cannot possibly not know.’’ “Hystopia’’ often reads, strange as it sounds, like a Jamesian investigation of knowledge, albeit one fueled by amphetamines. To live in American history, Means suggests, is to negotiate continuously between knowing and not knowing, unfolding and enfolding.

HYSTOPIA

By David Means

Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

336 pp., $26

Anthony Domestico, an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, has a book on poetry and theology forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.