The Engineers Take Over

PLAYER PIANO By KURT VONNEGUT Jr.

Two books that were popular several decades ago--Ignatius Donnelly's "Caesar's Column" and Jack London's "The Iron Heel"--are brought to mind by Kurt Vonnegut's novel. In it, as in them, we are taken into the future and shown an America ruled by a tiny oligarchy, and here too there is a revolt that fails.

The important difference lies in the fact that Mr. Vonnegut's oligarchs are not capitalists but engineers. In the future as he envisages it, the machines have completed their triumph, dispossessing not only the manual laborers but the white collar workers as well. Consequently the carefully selected, highly trained individuals who design and control the machines are the only people who have anything to do. Other people, the great majority, can either go into the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, which is devoted to boondoggling, or join the army, which has no real function in a machine-dominated world-society.

It is a little like "Brave New World," except that Mr. Vonnegut keeps his future closer to the present than Aldous Huxley succeeded in doing, and his satire therefore focuses more sharply on the contemporary situation. The machines he is talking about are not gadgets he has dreamed up; they are in existence, as he is careful to point out. Moreover, his engineers are less of supermen than Huxley's Alphas, and their group morale is maintained by methods one can find described in William H. Whyte's recent book, "Is Anybody Listening?"

The story, which is told in a skillful, lively fashion, concerns Paul Proteus, one of the privileged engineers. Unhappy in his own role and increasingly aware that the masses are being frustrated and degraded, he joins and becomes nominal leader of a revolutionary organization, the Ghost Shirts. At first the rebellion seems to be succeeding, but then the mob gets out of hand, just as in "Caesar's Column" and "The Iron Heel," and there is an orgy of destruction. Proteus and his companions, however, do not give up hope until they find that their revolutionary followers are busily making gadgets out of the scraps of the machines they have been destroying. That is too much, and they surrender to the oligarchy.

"Player Piano" is a less earnest book than either "Caesar's Column" or "The Iron Heel," and a less serious one than "Brave New World," but what Mr. Vonnegut lacks in fervor he more than makes up in fun. To take only one example, nothing could be more amusing than his account of the antics of the aspiring engineers when they gather on an island in the St. Lawrence for pep talks, competitive sports, formalized informality and the careful cultivation of the big shots. Whether he is a trustworthy prophet or not, Mr. Vonnegut is a sharp-eyed satirist.

Literary editor of The New Leader, Mr. Hicks is the author of "There Was a Man in Our Town."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-player.html

After the Bomb, Dad Came Up With Ice

CAT'S CRADLE By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The narrator of "Cat's Cradle" purports to be engaged in compiling a responsibly factual account of what certain interested Americans were doing at the precise moment the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Through correspondence with the three children of the late Felix Hoenikker, Nobel Prize winner and so-called "father of the atomic bomb," he evolves a portrait of the man in relation to his family and the community.

We learn that at the eventful moment in question Dr. Hoenikker was, in fact, "playing with a bit of string," having made of it a "cat's cradle"--and that his youngest son, to whom he had never previously spoken, was frightened when Dad came up to him, jerking the string back and forth, saying: "See the cat! See the cradle!"

We further learn that on the night of his death, years later, he was again "playing around"--in the kitchen this time, with some water and bits of ice. With his characteristically pure-science approach ("Why doesn't someone do something about mud?" the Marine Corps general had asked him) he has isolated crystals of ice in such a way that water can now be caused to freeze at a relatively high temperature. "Ice-9" it is called. The family dog laps at a bowl of water which has been touched with a piece of Ice-9 and is promptly frozen stiff. The Hoenikker children carefully divide this last gift to mankind from Dr. Hoenikker.

Following the doctor's death, the story devotes itself to what happens to the three children and to Ice-9. Frank, the eldest, has become the right-hand man of Manzano, the President of a Caribbean island. The daughter and the younger brother visit the island to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of Frank to the regional sex-goddess; we soon learn that he has bought his position of power with a piece of Ice-9--which President Manzano then uses to commit suicide, thereupon naming Frank his successor.

Frank declines the responsibility and offers the post to the narrator. As the two of them try discreetly to dispose of the President's frozen corpse, the narrator realizes how extensive the spread and acquisition of Ice-9 has become. The younger brother, Newt, a midget, has exchanged his share for a few mad nights with a Russian circus performer, also a midget. The unmarriageable daughter, a six-foot bean-poler, has used hers to buy a handsome physicist. Finally events reach their inevitable conclusion--the freezing of all the earth's waters, and life itself.

"Cat's Cradle" is an irreverent and often highly entertaining fantasy concerning the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists. Like the best of contemporary satire, it is work of a far more engaging and meaningful order than the melodramatic tripe which most critics seem to consider "serious."

Mr. Southern's novels include "The Magic Christian" and "Flash and Filigree."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-cat.html

Do Human Beings Matter?

GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER, OR PEARLS BEFORE SWINE By Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

An analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's newest novel really requires the services of a social historian rather than a book reviewer. Here is a book that is devoid of anything as square as a plot, its text broken up into short epiphanies, like poetic cantos, with typographical squiggles for segues. Drawing on his researches in the Sunday supplements, the reviewer might well ask: Is this high camp, like Rudi Gernreich lingerie? Or maybe medium camp like a Tiffany chandelier? Well, no matter. Looking back at an earlier book by Mr. Vonnegut--"Cat's Cradle," a work from the same unbroken mold--one sees that this is a writer with an excellent ear, a knack for arresting imagery, and a Message. In "Cat's Cradle," the message is that the annihilation of the human race is not a good thing, even though the human race is only so-so. In "God Bless Your, Mr. Rosewater" (its subtitle is "Pearls Before Swine"), the author's estimation of humankind is unchanged, although his visions are less flamboyant and his narrative less inventive.

Reducing the gist to what can be scratched by thumbnail, we come up with the following:

The hero of this treatise, a sensitive Croesus named Eliot Rosewater, renounces the life of an international playboy and takes up poverty as a vocation. He leaves the decaying East for the decaying Midwest, specifically a festering burg named Rosewater, Ind.--seat of the original Rosewater fortune, now the fourteenth largest in America, created during the Civil War by cowardice and knavery. Here Eliot sets himself up as a notary public, mahatma, and volunteer fire buff. Once ensconced in Rosewater, the Hoosier guru proceeds to relay fire alarms, answer the phone in reply to calls instigated by his advertisements ("Don't kill yourself, call the Rosewater Foundation") and give out small sums of money to the undeserving poor until he makes the ultimate gesture. He wills away all of it. Finis.

Now, looking beyond the up-to-date format, we find that the Rosewater-Vonnegut ethic is built up of old theses, like an ideological parfait. At the base of the mixture is the notion put forth by James Barrie in "The Twelve Pound Look," an idea that was to leave him the richest author in Christendom--namely, that failure is better than success and that the poor are better than the rich because they are poor. Sitting on top of this is a dollop of Huey Long (whom I don't think Mr. Vonnegut mentions) and a dash of Thorstein Veblen (whom he does). Nestling atop is a special maraschino: the idea that the unfortunate are nonetheless swine, devoid of will and intrinsic significance, who must be loved for what they are. (Paradox! Love of humanity! Pop philosophy! Dammit, I must stop reading Tom Wolfe.)

Getting back to matters literary: can "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" be called a novel? Well, there are no ground rules to outlaw any unique narrative style. Sterne and Joyce are both accepted as novelists by most high school graduates--but if a novel should project a view of life by means of character, this book is not being merchandised in the proper category. Random meditations, si, Fiction, no. This should certainly not deter Mr. Vonnegut. I think Nietzsche started the same way.

Mr. Levin conducts the Reader's Report column in the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-rosewater.html

Books of The Times

A Slight Case of Candor

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE By Kurt Vonnegut.

Last summer, when The New York Times Book Review asked a pride of distinguished novelists which of their works they would most like to reread while lolling among the sand castles, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. replied, disarmingly: "I can't stand to read what I write. I make my wife do that, then ask her to keep her opinions to herself." Diogenes would have shucked his barrel for honesty such as that. Nor was the remark a momentary lapse of candor. In his preface to "Welcome to the Monkey House," a collection of 23 stories and one essay, the author of two such zestful novels as "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," and "Cat's Cradle" again smiles and tells it straight.

"The contents of this book," he says with good-natured detachment, "are samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels. Here one finds the fruits of Free Enterprise." Well, to paraphrase Lamont Cranston, "the seeds of Free Enterprise bear bitter fruit."

A Slick (True) Love Story

From Collier's, a conspicuous failure of our capitalist magazine economy, comes the largest harvest of stories (seven) and the earliest. The oldest saw print in the faraway year of 1950. From Playboy, a heart-warming success story of competition in the marketplace, comes the title story, published this year. Between these dead and thriving examples of what turns a freelancer's heart to pulp, readers will also find represented Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Venture, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. Plus, as a bonus, "In honor of the marriage that worked I include in this collection a sickeningly slick love story from The Ladies Home Journal, God help us. . . . It describes an afternoon I spent with my wife- to-be. Shame, shame, to have lived scenes from a woman's magazine."

This Vonnegut is obviously a lovable fellow. Moreover, he's right about the story, which is indeed a sickening and slick little nothing about a soldier who goes A.W.O.L. in order--How to say it?--to sweep his girl from the steps of the altar into his strong and loving arms.

When not in love, Vonnegut's stories fall into two general classifications. One uses contemporary settings, smoothly and mechanically plotted down to the obligatory twist near the finale and featuring easily recognizable types: the rich, stuffy benefactor of a prep school who tries to wangle the admission of his nice-but-not-too-bright son; a neighbor obsessed with the exciting idea of home decoration and furnishing; a vicious juvenile delinquent saved by a high school band teacher's therapy ("Love yourself, and make your instrument sing about it."). A subcategory of this group, if you're still interested, often takes place on Cape Cod--Vonnegut lives in Barnstable--and describes the encounters of simple folk in unlikely circumstances. A shy clerk comes commandingly alive only as an actor in amateur theatricals. A salesman of storm windows and bathtub enclosures tells tales of a few high and mighty who have been his customers.

Mixed Bag of Sci-Fi

Vonnegut's other favorite bag is science fiction, a genre usually marked by a weakness of real characters and the pronouncement of human messages. Here, the message is crisply transmitted and often with humor in stories about a world without war, achieved by a single scientist's powers of concentration; life without fear, won by freeing the spirit from the body; and the realization of instant, synthetic happiness by tuning in on the radio waves of distant stars with a "euphoriaphone." In one of the liveliest sci-fi stories, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," the discovery of an anti-aging potion has pushed the world of 2158 to a population of 12 billion, which largely exists on a diet of processed seaweed and sawdust. In the three-room apartment of a housing development that covers what once was southern Connecticut live the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Harold Schwartz, 172. Gramps, a crochety tyrant who is glued to television, barks, "Hell, we did that 100 years ago," and regularly disinherits family grumblers who are restlessly waiting--vainly, it seems--for him to die and vacate the only private bedroom in the place.

The title story takes up the same theme, overpopulation, but treats it sententiously. World Government is waging a two-front war on the problem by encouraging "ethical" suicide and by making sex joyless; the latter is accomplished with mandatory pills that numb the body from the waist down. Our hero is Billy the Poet, whose special pleasure is deflowering the Junoesque virgins administering the program and who heads a coeducational underground whose members favor birth control, of course, and aim to revive the hearty sex of their ancestors. Among these forefathers, presumably, is Hugh Hefner of Playboy, author of a relentlessly documented "philosophy" that rests on pillars of thought similar to Billy's. With this in mind, how uncharacteristically unkind of Vonnegut to have written on another, earlier, occasion: ". . .the science fiction magazine that pays the most and seems to have the poorest judgment is Playboy."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-monkey.html

Books of The Times

At Last, Kurt Vonnegut's Famous Dresden Book

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE OR THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe." He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance.

Next to being born, getting married and having children, it is probably the most important thing that ever happened to him. And, as he writes in the introduction to "Slaughterhouse-Five," he's been trying to write a book about Dresden ever since. Now, at last, he's finished the "famous Dresden book."

In the same introduction, which should be read aloud to children, cadets and basic trainees, Mr. Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." He's wrong and he knows it.

Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story. The story is sandwiched between an autobiographical introduction and epilogue.

Fact and Fiction Combined

The odd combination of fact and fiction forces a question upon the reader: how did the youth who lived through the Dresden bombing grow up to be the man who wrote this book? One reads "Slaughterhouse-Five" with that question crouched on the brink of one's awareness. I'm not sure if there's an answer, but the question certainly heightens the book's effects.

Here is the story: Billy Pilgrim, "tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola," was born in Ilium, N.Y., the only child of a barber there. After graduating from Ilium High School, he attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in World War II. He served with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in Dresden when it was firebombed.

After the war, he went back to Ilium and became a wealthy optometrist married to a huge wife named Valencia. They had two children, a daughter named Barbara who married an optometrist, and a son named Robert who became a Green Beret in Vietnam.

In 1968, Billy was the sole survivor of a plane crash on top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. While he was recovering in the hospital, Valencia was killed in a carbon- monoxide accident. On Feb. 13, 1976, Billy was assassinated by a nut with a high- powered laser gun.

As you can see, there is much absurd violence in this story. But it is always scaled down to the size of Billy Pilgrim's world, which makes it more unbearable and more obligatory for the reader to understand the author's explanation for it. As I said, Mr. Vonnegut knows all the tricks.

Now there are two things I haven't yet told you about Billy Pilgrim, and I'm hesitant to do so, because when I tell you what they are you'll want to put Kurt Vonnegut back in the science-fiction category he's been trying to climb out of, and you'll be wrong.

First, Billy is "unstuck in time" and "has no control over where he is going next." "He is in a constant state of stage fright...because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next."

Story Told Fluidly

This problem of Billy's enables Mr. Vonnegut to tell his story fluidly, jumping forward and backward in time, free from the strictures of chronology. And this problem of Billy's is related to the second thing, which is that Billy says that on his daughter's wedding night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, flown there through a time warp, and exhibited with a movie star named Montana Wildhack.

The Tralfamadorians are two feet high, green, and shaped like plumber's friends, with suctions caps on the ground and little green hands with eyes on their palms at the top of their shafts. They are wise, and they teach Billy Pilgrim many things. They teach him that humans cannot see time, which is really like "a stretch of the rocky Mountains, " with all moments in the past, the present and the future, always existing.

"The Tralfamadorians...can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them." They teach Billy that death is just an unpleasant moment. Because Billy can go back and forth in time, he knew this lesson when he was in Dresden. In 1976, when he was assassinated, Billy Pilgrim was trying to bring this message to the world. He knew he would die, but he did not mind. "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello," he said.

I now, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him that the Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which mean you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-slaughterhouse.html

Books of The Times

Is Kurt Vonnegut Kidding Us?

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS OR GOODBYE BLUE MONDAY . By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. With Drawings by the Author.

You have to hand it to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In his eighth novel, "Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday," he performs considerable complex magic. He makes pornography seem like any old plumbing, violence like lovemaking, innocence like evil, and guilt like child's play. He wheels out all the latest fashionable complaints about America--her racism, her gift for destroying language, her technological greed and selfishness--and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful, and lovable, all at the same time. He draws pictures, for God's sake--simple, rough, yet surprisingly seductive sketches of everything from Volkswagens to electric chairs. He weaves into his plot a dozen or so glorious synopses of Vonnegut stories one almost wishes were fleshed out into whole books. He very nearly levitates. Yet--astonishingly--this fiction is also a factual announcement of his intention to give up fiction. And what mars the book is that one believes the fiction, but not the facts.

Up to a certain point, it is easy to accept what is going on in this "tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." It's amusing and charming, yet oddly frightening, to watch Kilgore Trout--the undiscovered science-fiction writer who has kept popping up in Mr. Vonnegut's previous works--hitchhiking across America to a Festival of the Arts in Midland City, where he has been invited through the lone intervention of that benign-evil millionaire, Eliot Rosewater.

Gentle Satirical Thrusts

It's quite marvelous the way Trout contemplates the word PYRAMID written in giant letters on the side of a trailer-truck he is riding in, and then wonders, "Why would anybody in the business of high-speed transportation name his business and his trucks after buildings which haven't moved an eighth of an inch since Christ was born?" And gets the answer from the truck's driver: "He [the boss] liked the sound of it." Which leads Trout to imagine a story "about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted with the sounds. . . . So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music."

With such graceful, gentle satirical thrusts, Mr. Vonnegut takes care of most of what is absurd and downright evil in American civilization--everything from Vietnam to sex, from war to massage parlors.

And it's charming, yet oddly terrifying--charming terror, terrifying charm may well be Mr. Vonnegut's exclusive trademark by now--to see Dwayne Hoover, the automobile dealer who owns much of Midland city, going inexorably insane because of the bad chemicals in his system. For Dwayne Hoover's incipient insanity--which will break out when Hoover reads a story by Kilgore Trout (a message from the Creator of the Universe telling the reader that he alone has free will among a race of robots)--enables Mr. Vonnegut to skewer everything that is absurd and evil in the rest of civilization--from Nazis to paranoia, from genocide to people bogged down in their various bad chemistries. As we all ought to know by now, there are few writers around with Mr. Vonnegut's gift for assuming the guise of deadpan and then spotlighting without malice or bitterness the most hideous aspect of the human species.

A Certain Coyness

But I began worrying after a while about certain narrative charms that Vonnegut keeps plying. After several repetitions, I got bothered by his repeated use of the exhortation to "Listen" with which he begins so many of his paragraphs, as well as the three little words "And so on" with which he concludes some of his most appalling descriptions. Even those dumb, lovable drawings began to pall after a time. I think I understand what he is getting at--that fictional art simply won't serve an more as he approaches middle age and a deeper insight to his own motives for writing (not to mention the impotence of art to purge the earth of evil); and that the persona who is creating "Breakfast of Champions" is trying to get a last desperate grip on the most simple rudiments of story-telling. But there is a certain coyness in this desperation, especially since it is surrounded by so much polish and inventiveness.

And when Mr. Vonnegut's persona gives up fiction before our very eyes. . . . When he self- destructs himself as a novelist by first warning us in the middle of his book that "Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun story-telling." . . .And then, at the very end, telling his characters that they are free, releasing them, and then somersaulting "lazily and pleasantly" into the void of his private concerns. . . . I found myself asking questions that blighted the experience of reading "Breakfast of Champions." Most of these questions are too complicated to be squeezed into this space. But not least among them were these: if your fiction must be destroyed, Mr. Vonnegut, then why create more fiction in the process of destroying it? If you must beg comparison to Tolstoy freeing his serfs, or Jefferson his slaves, why not just do the deed? Or are you just kidding us?

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-breakfast.html

Books of The Times

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

WAMPETERS, FOMA & GRANFALLOONS: (OPINIONS) By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There was a time not to long ago when I desperately clung to Kurt Vonnegut's name. It was the one that came most readily to mind whenever I was asked who among the newest American writers would make the literary galaxy. Without racking my brain too much I could have come up with the names of other writers of equal reputation: Barth, Pynchon, Barthelme and so on. Mr. Vonnegut's was the surest. One could admire the others, but the author of "Player Piano" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," one enjoyed. And nothing in literature lasts that is not enjoyed. Not that Mr. Vonnegut's work was exactly cheering: with all its freewheeling manner, if involved readers in a conspiracy of doom that was perversely calming--what's left to be done after the funeral? Long before "moonwalk" his imagination had sought a far-off planet from which to view the earthlings below. What he saw so simplified and enlarged the present moment that it could be grasped in its totality. From "Cat's Cradle" on he has been our cultural critic and guru.

A decade later, one can see he is not in a class with Orwell (whom he favors) nor even with Twain (whom he resembles physically these days). As a social satirist he is too playful; the moral quality is muted in him--as it is in another writer of prophetic aspirations, William Saroyan--by a strain of deep sentiment that seeks release in laughter. Grim, ironic, laughter for "atheist" Vonnegut, genial humor for earthy Saroyan. Mr. Rosewater/Vonnegut's desperate plea, "God damn it, you've got to be kind," would grate on the ear of the cocky young optimist of "My Name Is Aram." And vice versa. To achieve a feeling of oneness with humankind, all Mr. Saroyan had to do was "remember that living people are as good as dead." That could do as a survival kit for the Depression years; it was hardly adequate for the surreal world after World War II, and a writer who had actually seen living corpses as a prisoner of war. The idiom of the age ruled out positive thinking.

Revelations Beyond Opinions

Other circumstances ruled it out as well. In this provocative volume of articles, campus speeches, miscellaneous pieces and an interview, Mr. Vonnegut's self-revelations go beyond the "opinions" of the subtitle. At 51, he is understandably eager to tell us who he is and why. But not being introspective by nature, he imagines that the book "shows [me] trying to tell the truth nakedly, without the ornaments of fiction." That is a "foma" (harmless untruth in Mr. Vonnegut's dictionary) that his fans will be quick to spot. Anyone who has watched him on the platform knows how well he doubles for Billy Pilgrim, fresh from the land of flying saucers, as he glides from earnestness into his very own blend of glib cynicism and ancient wisdom. So it goes.

But style is the man, as the saying goes, and along the way--as he ruminates on space programs, on the 1972 political conventions, on Richard M. Nixon or Hermann Hesse, on genocide in Biafra, or the systemization of human aspirations--there are capsule glimpses of the inner man. In his delightful "Yes, We Have No Nirvanas," he can, at the same time, epitomize the leader of transcendental meditation and suggest why he could never himself be among the quarter of a million followers of "the darling man": the Maharishi reminds him of "the euphoric men" at General Electric in Schenectady (where Mr. Vonnegut used to be a public relations man years ago) who "thought it was ridiculous for people to be unhappy, when there were so many things they could do to improve their lot." Mr. Vonnegut opts for Jesus on the spot.

With "the mysterious Mme. Blavatsky," on the other hand, Mr. Vonnegut is "charmed and amused." Her spooky spiritualism notwithstanding, "she brought wisdom from the East, which was very much needed. . . If she garbled or invented some of that wisdom, she was doing no worse than other teachers have done."

There are degrees of danger in modern man's avid urge toward a "better" life; in Mr. Vonnegut's eyes, such gullibility assumes plaguelike proportions when manipulated by power-mad politicians, self-deceived heart and kidney transplanters and technologists who have sold their souls to science. The word "soul" is not Mr. Vonnegut's word here, but what unleashes his wildest irony is the absence of something very much like it in Mr. Nixon's "spiritual" adviser, the man who indirectly helped design his "neo-Metternichian scheme for lasting world peace." "The single religion of the Winners," he notes, "is a harsh interpretation of Darwinism which argues that it is the will of the universe that only the fittest should survive."

Moral Outrage and Deep Fatality

If there are some too slight or cute items in the volume, the sardonic piece on the Republican National Convention ("In a Manner That Must Shame God Himself") more than makes up for it. And the Playboy interview, though shot through with "foma," has surprises. In a rare moment of unabashed compassion, Mr. Vonnegut tells the interviewer: "People are too good for this world." Earlier, he grows sublime as he urges the graduating class at Bennington to "believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrater of the grandest dreams of God Almighty." Some pessimist.

Yet for Mr. Vonnegut (who admits to "depressions"), the apocalypse has physical reality. "The sun," he says, "is going to exhaust its fuel. . .the planet is surely dying." For a man with a background in physics and anthropology, that is short of hallucinatory. The gallows humor is more than an idiom of the age. At every turn, moral outrage meets with a deep fatality about a future in which good and evil themselves will be ground into a "system." In the end, like his characters, Mr. Vonnegut looks outside reality for help. "The only way in which Americans. . .can rescue their planet," he observes, "is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their imagination." Ironically, only the imagination can keep the truth inviolate. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut--and may the works of your imagination multiply.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-wampeters.html

Books of The Times

SLAPSTICK By Kurt Vonnegut.

In his last novel, "Breakfast of Champions," Kurt Vonnegut not only bade farewell to all the literary characters who had served him over the years (Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, and others), he also happened to give up storytelling altogether. Well, of course one didn't believe him; he was just walking his despair around the block. But in his eighth and latest novel, "Slapstick, Or Lonesome No More," it looks as if Mr. Vonnegut was serious about renouncing fiction. The book begins with a Prologue, the first sentence of which announces, "This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography," and the remaining pages of which give news of Mr. Vonnegut's background and family; and explain how he came to daydream the fantasy that follows.

And even after we realize that this fantasy is storytelling after all (albeit without Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, and others), we note that the short paragraphs in which the story is told are shorter than they have ever been before in any previous Vonnegut novel. We note that the author's already familiar mannerisms have gotten even more pronounced. (For instance, perhaps a third of the paragraphs in the book end with the two words "Hi ho"--as in "It is a thing I often say these days: 'Hi ho.' It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long. Hi ho.") We note that the novel touches on the usual Vonnegut themes--such as the horror of war, man's cruelty to fellow man, and the unhappiness of America--and treats them in the usual Vonnegut way--that is, by regarding them with a form of radical innocence that wonders just why wars must be fought, why man should be cruel to man, and why countries should be unhappy.

In short, we note that Vonnegut seems to be doing what he does most easily, and doing it more easily than he has ever done it before. So if he hasn't actually given up storytelling, he seems to be putting less effort into it than ever before.

Now of course to appear to be doing something effortlessly is not the same thing as not trying. They say it took Henri Matisse years of practice to toss off those effortless squiggles, and perhaps Vonnegut has now perfected his own sort of squiggle. What's more, his squiggles can be most entertaining. One cannot help but be diverted by his autobiographical prologue, in which he and his older brother Bernard Vonnegut, the atmospheric physicist who discovered the rain- making powers of silver iodide, fly off to Indianapolis for the funeral of a favorite uncle. (As one paragraph informs us, "This really happened.") After all, it is here that we learn some interesting, if melancholy, history of the Vonnegut family. (Among its several members who died too young was a sister of the author's who described her own impending death at the age of 41 as "slapstick.")

And though the story he daydreams on the night sounds perfectly dreadful any way you synopsize it--it is the memoirs of the last President of the United States--it has its amusing moments too. The President, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, won election on a plan to create instant extended families (hence his slogan, "Lonesome No More"). At the end of American history he sells what was once the Louisiana Purchase to the King of Michigan for a dollar he never receives. (I especially liked the childhood of Dr. Swain, who, along with his twin-sister, Eliza, was though to be "neaderthaloid," though in fact when they put their heads together, they were a genius who "could read and write French, German, Latin and ancient Greek. . .and do calculus too.") And Lord knows the squiggles are graceful.

But when I finished reading "Slapstick," I felt as if I had just devoured a bowl of air. Could this have been because I don't share Mr. Vonnegut's passion for Laurel and Hardy, whose caricature by Al Hirschfeld is reproduced on the dedication page, and whose film comedies of long ago impressed Vonnegut as the "grotesque, situational poetry" he intends this novel to be? Or is it because one grows weary of the author's pervasive sense of resignation, which makes him willing to settle for "a little common decency" instead of "love," and for his sister's tragic death dismissed as "slapstick"? Or is it that the tone of understatement that worked for Mr. Vonnegut in "Slaughterhouse Five," where being a prisoner in Dresden during its firebombing was the subject, is no longer effective in "Slapstick," where nothing much in particular, except perhaps the author's way of fantasizing, is the subject?

Whatever it is, one is left feeling empty by "Slapstick," Emptiness, conveyed with grace and style, still amounts to almost nothing. That is why, for all the new chic skill Mr. Vonnegut has brought to his latest novel, it still seems as if he has given up storytelling after all.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-slapstick.html

Books of The Times

JAILBIRD By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In his last novel, "Slapstick" (1976), Kurt Vonnegut told us that he believed in the Bill of Rights, Robert's Rules of Order and the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. In his new novel, "Jailbird"--his best, in my opinion, since "Mother Night" (1961) and "Cat's Cradle" (1963)--he adds another sacred document. It is the Sermon on the Mount.

Walter F. Starbuck is asked by Richard M. Nixon at a Congressional hearing in 1949 why, "as the son of immigrants who have been treated so well by Americans, as a man who had been treated like a son and been sent to Harvard by an American capitalist," he had been so ungrateful to the American economic system as to join the Communist Party. Starbuck replies: "Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir."

Harvard and Mr. Nixon, the Holocaust and Watergate, Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, trade unionism and conglomerate capitalism, not to mention Roy M. Cohn--these are the obsessions of "Jailbird," a fable of evil and inadvertence. Strong stuff, Starbuck would say, because strong stuff is the latest in a long line of Vonnegut semaphores, verbal kiss-offs: so it goes, hiho, I had to laugh, small world, strong stuff.

What has this stuff to do with Starbuck or the Sermon on the Mount? Starbuck is the son of a millionaire's chauffeur. Because he plays chess with the millionaire, the millionaire sends him to Harvard, where he has an affair with a radical young Irishwoman and joins the Communist Party. He is off, then, to join Roosevelt's New Deal. He quits the party on the occasion of the Nazi-Stalin pact. In Germany during and after World War II he meets and marries a death-camp survivor and has dealings at Nuremberg.

He returns to Washington to betray, by accident, a friend. Years of joblessness follow until Mr. Nixon makes him his special adviser on "youth affairs." Some of the Watergate money is stashed in his windowless office, and so he goes to jail with the big boys. Let out in 1977, he arrives in New York and falls into the clutches of a conglomerate that seems to own most of the world.

Starbuck is clearly one of those characters to whom history is always happening like an accident. His old girlfriend tells him: "You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed--so you were a good man just he same." As good as most of us, anyway, and soon to be back in jail.

Not once in "Jailbird" does Mr. Vonnegut nod off, go vague. His people bite into their lives. Kindnesses, as inexplicable as history, are collected, like saving remnants. New York, with catacombs under Grand Central Terminal and harps on top of the Chrysler Building, is wonderfully evoked. The prose has sinew. Mr. Nixon's "unhappy little smile," for instance "looked to me like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer." Or: "There was a withered old man...hunched over his food, hiding it with his arms. Sarah whispered that he ate as though his meal were a royal flush."

And when you think about it, the Sermon on the Mount is a radical document, promising that the meek shall inherit the earth. Shall they, indeed? Mr. Vonnegut has his doubts. It is the fashion these days for young academics, fresh from bravely grappling with the archetypes of modernism at a graduate seminar, to dismiss Mr. Vonnegut as simplistic. He is insufficiently obscure; he is not loud enough about the ambiguities. Well, as he would say, listen. The simple--courtesy and decency--is hardest.

In "The Sirens of Titan," the problem was how to cause "less rather than more pain," how to "love whoever is around to be loved." The message in "Mother Night" was "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" asked, "How to love people who have no use?" Laurel and Hardy were admired in "Slapstick" because, although they were not "really very good at life," at least they "never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies."

To be sure, his characters are given to dreaming of an escape hatch out of history, a secret village, a tropical island, a neutral zone, an alternative reality. But he doesn't let them get away with it. Everything isn't beautiful, and many things hurt, and neither technology nor organized religion is much help, nor "granfalloons' like the Communist Party and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Even play, as in "Cat's Cradle," can be monstrous, and art itself is a lie. Billy Pilgrim in "Slaughterhouse-Five" overhears Eliot Rosewater say to his psychiatrist, "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

Simple? Mr. Vonnegut brought all his characters along for Billy Pilgrim's ride in "Slaughterhouse." In "Breakfast of Champions," he cut them loose, set them free. One returns in "Jailbird," a man who writes science fiction novels under the name of, naturally, Kilgore Trout, who is in jail, naturally, for treason. These days, the Sermon on the Mount is treason. Mr. Vonnegut has exactly what Constant pined for in "Sirens": "a single message that was insufficiently dignified and important to merit his carrying it between two points." We read his novels the way that Mary Kathleen reads Starbuck's college books; "the way a young cannibal might eat the hearts of brave old enemies. Their magic would become hers." Ours.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-jailbird.html

Date: March 15, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 3, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline:
Lead:

PALM SUNDAY An Autobiographical Collage. By Kurt Vonnegut. 330 pp. New York: Delacorte Press. $13.95. By EDWARD HOAGLAND

''I DELIVERED a speech at the University of Virginia maybe eight years ago, which mercifully has been lost, so I do not have to paste it in here somewhere,'' says Kurt Vonnegut, in the middle of this odd miscellany of prefaces, introductions, letters, talks, reflections and what might generally be described as bathtub singing. An address that he does include, delivered in 1978 at Fredonia College, seems worth preserving, but, on the other hand, his commencement chat at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., four years earlier was not. His funeral eulogy for a friend named Lavina Lyon is embarrassing to read, but he gave an effective lecture at a motel in Morristown to the Mental Health Association of New Jersey, in which S.S. Lieut. Dampfwalze of Auschwitz recognizes ''nature's little danger signals early'' and puts himself into the hands of modern medicine, whereupon his eyes start shining again and his appetite comes back.
Text:

As ''my own vanity publisher,'' he reprints a rejected musical play called ''The Chemistry Professor,'' however, and a quote that he gave Newsweek that Newsweek didn't use, and a witless speech dedicating a new library at Connecticut College. But he loves Mark Twain and spoke rather succinctly about him in Hartford in April 1979 -the only problem being that even a fine address, if transcribed exactly, may suffer from rhetorical devices, such as repetition, that worked well enough from a stage but do not carry into a printed paragraph. We keep hearing repetition of another kind too, such as the ages of the six Vonnegut children or the joke Kin Hubbard, the Hoosier Humorist, used at commencements, because our casual author has made no allowance for the fact that what was a series of different audiences in Chautauqua has become one audience for this book.

Though Mr. Vonnegut believes he belongs to ''America's last generation of novelists,'' it would be wonderful if some young tiger were to pick up the kernel of his book and run with it - that is, as an idea for fiction. It would have a distinguished, best-selling author in his late 50's, a Hoosier-in-exile, an uneasy German-American, tired of the slamming that German-Americans have had to take, a man now comfortable and house-proud in New York City, also proud that his 13 books are still in print, but who speaks frequently about the Nobel Prize and frequently about his election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts ---------------------------------------------------------------------

Edward Hoagland's travel book ''African Calliope'' has just been published in paperback. He is working on his fourth novel. and Letters, and repeatedly refers to his resentment of The New York Review of Books and this publication, as well as the circumstance that his relatives in Indianapolis don't invariably cotton to his books either.

The voice is that of a generous soul, a humanist, justifiably proud of having adopted three of his sister's children when they were orphaned, and so ready to blurb young writers' books that for years (as he agrees) it was impossible to tell whether or not the praise in his blurbs was serious. Lately, he appears more concerned that writers his age be maintained in the style to which they have become accustomed. He throws the term ''major'' around very freely, and wants Irwin Shaw and Joseph Heller, for instance, who are figures of declining reputation, to remain as rich and famous as they were in their heyday, while presumably other friends and contemporaries like Richard Yates, who write just as well but are mentioned only in passing, are to be content in the less rich-and-famous state to which they have been hardened. A generous man, then, though uneasy about his own standing, he classes this book (indeed, six of his last seven books) as his worst, but feels guilty because ''Slaughterhouse-Five,'' the best, earned him two or three dollars for every man, woman and child incinerated in the destruction of Dresden, which was its subject.

He tells us he perorates to public gatherings mainly to massage his ego, but was unable to speak on the subject of Dresden. He tells us that some of his favorite ''great'' poems are by the Statler Brothers, a country-music quartet, that his house has four stories and was bought from the editor-in-chief at Alfred A. Knopf, and (many times) that his father and grandfather were architects. Though not actually an autodidact, he takes an autodidact's satisfaction in never having enrolled in an English course in college, and in having seen his master's thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago rejected. He is proud to have worked in the real world instead, as a public relations man for General Electric, but later also as a professor. He prefers the comfy wit of William F. Buckley to Gore Vidal's roughhousing, and claims his own mind and Thoreau's are similar, in that they have many fans who are undergraduates.

We hear that he has served on the New York State Council for the Arts, but not what that experience was like. And though he itemizes with some degree of irony who 372 of his friends are by consulting the computerized files of his photographer wife, Jill Krementz (who photographs them), unfortunately he says little or nothing about any of these people. He is upset that only one of his children knows the value of a dollar, and that his first wife and his two daughters have become born-again Christians, but does not describe them.

Mr. Vonnegut believes in the extended family. He prefers the Revised Standard Version to the King James Bible. He likes Celine and Cellini, and includes a graceful introduction published in three paperback Celine novels; also his own Paris Review interview; and a foreword to the Book-of-the-Month Club's edition of Jonathan Swift, which we will have missed because it was written badly and was rejected. One of the book's better sections is a family history written by the husband of his father's first cousin, and another is his daughter Nanette's angry letter to a disgruntled customer at a Cape Cod restaurant. Less felicitous are his own angry missives to a school board chairman in North Dakota who had burned one of his books and to a Writers' Union official in the U.S.S.R., in each of which, incidentally, he assures the recipient that the contents are ''strictly private'' and will not be published.

Mr. Vonnegut employs words like ''trepanned'' and ''jizzum'' regularly, and suggests what an agnostic ought to say when meeting God in Heaven. He buries James T. Farrell and Janet Flanner with appropriate honors, quotes Milos Forman and Robert Penn Warren on the subject of masturbation, and Conrad Aiken on fathers and sons. Aptly he describes most writers as ''dumb but patient'' in struggling towards eloquence, and as behaving like ''gut-shot bears'' after a certain age, in their restless anguish. He himself has not been a writer ''all gesture,'' all impossible promises to the TV cameras and gossip columnists about work yet to be done, as he suggests is the case with several writers of larger repute. But even his irony about himself has become anguished too. His first sentence here is: ''This is a very great book by an American genius.'' And the last: ''I thank you for your sweetly faked attention.''

Our imaginary young tiger of a novelist, fresh out of one of the writing programs where Mr. Vonnegut has taught, could turn this book into a gorgeous tour-de-force. The key to it would be to make the autobiographical musings more detailed and revealing than Mr. Vonnegut's, and the reflections, confidences and orationsnot copied from genuine letters and speeches, but invented and better.

Like Mr. Vonnegut, I admire his ''Cat's Cradle'' and ''Slaughterhouse-Five.'' (He grades them ''A+,'' compared to this volume's ''C.'') In very top form he has reminded me of Gunter Grass, who is a writer of genius. I don't know whether Mr. Grass started out with more talent, but Mr. Grass has manipulated the talent he has with relentless logic and daring. Mr. Vonnegut, by contrast, is always turning aside (as, again, he confesses) to pop a quick joke, from what seems faint-heartedness, or else will bring himself up short with one of his trivializing signature phrases: ''Hi-Ho,'' ''Peace'' or ''So it goes.'' Even in ''Slaughterhouse-Five,'' he quickly ducks into the incongruous sci-fi world of Tralfamadore whenever fright at the scenery of World War II overtakes him. A kind of congenital irresolution threatens to bring him down soon - as has happened with so many American writers before him - to a last couple of books which declare openly that he has failed to follow his premises through to a conclusion.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-palmsunday.html

Date: November 5, 1982, Friday, Late City Final Edition Section C; Page 23, Column 1; Weekend Desk
Byline: By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Lead:

DEADEYE DICK. By Kurt Vonnegut. 240 pages. Delacorte-Seymour Lawrence. $14.95.

IT is claimed repeatedly by his admirers that the messages of Kurt Vonnegut's fictions are far from as simple as they sometimes appear, that we must not understand him too easily, that we shall not know him by the famous taglines that have been accumulating ever since ''Slaughterhouse Five'' - So it goes, hiho, small world and so on.
Text:

Very well, then. We will dismiss the last lines of his 10th and latest novel, ''Deadeye Dick'' - ''You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet.'' That's far too obvious to be what Mr. Vonnegut is getting at with this tale of passion and passivity in the American town of Midland City, Ohio.

Neither will we focus undue attention on the black joke of Midland City's being depopulated by a neutron-bomb explosion, which ''was a big news story for about 10 days or so. It might have been a bigger story, a signal for the start of World War III, if the Government hadn't acknowledged at once that the bomb was made in America. One newscast I heard'' called it ''a friendly bomb.'' Somehow the point of this apocalyptic incident and the repeated references also lack a certain complexity.

And happily, there is no single repeating tagline in ''Deadeye Dick.'' If there is a Vonnegutian leitmotif here, it is the notion that we all start off as ''wisps of undifferentiated nothingness'' and that we step on and off the stage of life by having our ''peepholes opened and closed.'' But this is worked into the middle of various paragraphs, not the end. And it hardly amounts to a meaning, however charming or cute it may be.

No, for complexity of meaning we shall have to turn to the central incident of ''Deadeye Dick.'' On Mother's Day, 1944, just after Eleanor Roosevelt had had lunch with the Waltz family of Midland City, 12-year-old Rudy Waltz went up to the arms room and playfully squeezed off a rifle round that killed a pregnant housewife who was vacuuming her home eight blocks away. Ever since, Rudy Waltz has been known as Deadeye Dick.

The local police chief, having his own violent secret to protect, was willing to get the family off. But Father Waltz, a talentless but wealthy artist who once was a friend of Adolf Hitler, wants to take the blame for his son's mistake. And Rudy himself concludes ''that the best thing for me and for those around me was to want nothing, to be enthusiastic about nothing, to be unmotivated as possible, in fact, so that I would never again hurt anyone.

''To put it another way: I wasn't to touch anything on this planet, man, woman, child, artifact, animal, vegetable, or mineral - since it was very likely to be connected to a push-pull detonator and an explosive charge.''

In short, there is a huge stone of guilt weighing down the center of this novel. But what does it really mean? That the guilt of the son is visited upon the father? Or vice versa? Or that the guilt of anyone is visited upon everything else, including the smoothness of a novel's plot? I just can't say.

I don't really get it. Of course, there are those who claim that the point of a Vonnegut novel is precisely not to get it. It is the very randomness of its action that appeals, especially to younger generations that always knew better than to try to figure out a world in which anything can blow up in your face.

Maybe so. And besides, there's so much else to like about ''Deadeye Dick'' - especially the strongly dramatized scene in which Rudy Waltz's older brother, Felix, invites the poorest but most beautiful girl in town to the senior prom, but Father Waltz prepares such a bizarre reception for the girl that she runs away and doesn't see the Waltzes for several decades.

And there is always Mr. Vonnegut's unfailing ear for the American vernacular, and the way he works it into the most unlikely of contexts: ''Speaking of amphetamine: Father's old friend Hitler was evidently one of the first people to experience its benefits. I read recently that his personal doctor kept him bright eyed and bushy tailed right up to the end with bigger and bigger doses of vitamins and amphetamine.''

Still, the randomness of Mr. Vonnegut's plot in ''Deadeye Dick'' is not random in a way to support belief in randomness. Something ill-defined or unspoken seems to be lying just beneath the surface of events and directing the flow of the randomness. I honestly don't know what this something is, but I suspect that it accounts for why all of Mr. Vonnegut's novels since ''Slaughterhouse Five'' seem to have grown increasingly facile and mannered. True, ''Deadeye Dick'' is better than ''Jailbird,'' which was in turn an improvement on ''Slapstick.'' But that's not really saying very much.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-deadeye.html

Date: October 6, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 7, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Lorrie Moore; Lorrie Moore, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, is the author of ''Self-Help,'' a collection of stories, and of a novel to be published next year.
Lead:

GALAPAGOS By Kurt Vonnegut. 295 pp. New York: Seymour Lawrence/ Delacorte Press. $16.95. YES, American culture is more smart than wise. But Kurt Vonnegut, that clown-poet of homesickness and Armageddon, might be the rare American writer who is both. He dances the witty and informed dances of the literary smart, but while he does, he casts a wide eye about, and he sees. He is a postmodern Mark Twain: grumpy and sentimental, antic and religious. He is that paradoxical guy who goes to church both to pray fervently and to blow loud, snappy gum bubbles at the choir.

None of this, of course, is news to Mr. Vonnegut's fans, and neither is this: His most recent novels have not been his strongest. ''Jailbird'' was the most restrained and accomplished and contained Mr. Vonnegut's most memorable female characters. But ''Deadeye Dick'' suffered from a deadly narrative sprawl, and ''Slapstick'' floundered in silliness, exemplified by the irritating mantra ''Hi ho.'' Despite its courage and farsightedness, much of Mr. Vonnegut's recent work has seemed fatigued, marred by sloppy writing. It is prose that makes a beeline for a punch line - like a man for a water fountain, only to find it dribbling, not working right at all.
Text:

''Galapagos,'' however, seems to scrabble back toward the energies of earlier works. It is the story, sort of, of a second Noah's ark, a 1986 nature cruise booked with celebrities (Mick Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Jacqueline Onassis and others) that in the wake of planetary catastrophe - famine, financial crises, World War III and a virus that eats the eggs in human ovaries - is fated to land on the Galapagos Islands and perpetuate the human race. Humanity ''was about to be diminished to a tiny point, by luck, and then, again by luck, to be permitted to expand again.''

All this may sound like a glittery and Darwinian ''Gilligan's Island'' - not really what ''Galapagos'' is at all. Although certainly the novel has something to do with the giant crush America has on celebrity, the famous people never really do make it into the story, and what we end up with is a madcap genealogical adventure - a blend of the Old Testament, the Latin American novel and a lot of cut-up comic books - employing a cast of lesser-knowns that includes a schoolteacher named Mary Hepburn, an Ecuadorean sea captain named von Kleist, a former male prostitute named James Wait (whose skin color is ''like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria''), a dog named Kazakh (who, ''thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality''), plus a narrator who turns out to be none other than the son of Kilgore Trout, that science fiction hack from Mr. Vonnegut's earlier books.

Leon Trout, Mr. Vonnegut's doppelganger, speaks to us, moreover, from a million years hence, from the afterlife, whence he can best pronounce on what was wrong with us 20th-century folk - our brains were too big - and reveal what, through evolution and for purposes of survival, we became: creatures with smaller brains and flippers and beaks. Even if people of the future ''found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?'' Leon Trout asks. And: ''It is hard to imagine anybody's torturing anybody nowadays. How could you even capture somebody you wanted to torture with just your flippers and your mouth?''

Mr. Vonnegut has probably always been a better teller than maker of stories. One continually marvels at the spare, unmuddied jazz of a Vonnegut sentence and too often despairs of his ramshackle plots. ''Galapagos'' is, typically and perhaps aptly, structured spatially, like an archipelago, tiny islands of prose detatched from that apparently dangerous continent of time -childhood reminiscences, parables, interviews, real and invented history, nature writing, sapient literary quotations, a soldier's confession. (The novel, alas, has always lacked a natural form.) This is a narrative style engendered by emergency, the need to get directly to something. It is susceptible, however, to an unhelpful chaos and can defeat its own purpose by blithely wandering off and turning whole characters and events into charmless non sequiturs, whole chapters into scrapbooks of blather and dead end.

But Mr. Vonnegut seems eventually to get where he wants, shining his multicolored lights and science fiction ''what ifs'' on the huge spiritual mistake that is the Western world. He wants to tell us things: It is not the fittest who survive - it is merely those who happen to survive who survive. The earth is a ''fragile habitat'' that our big brains have failed to take care of. We must hope for flippers and beaks - or nothing at all. We are all, finally, being too mean to one another. ''I'll tell you what the human soul is,'' a character in ''Galapagos'' says. ''It's the part of you that knows when your brain isn't working right.'' ALTHOUGH not as moving as, say, ''Slaughterhouse-Five,'' ''Galapagos'' does have moments (of father-son vis-a-vis) that bring a glug to the throat. And although more wobblingly cobbled and arrhythmic comically than ''Breakfast of Champions,'' ''Galapagos'' can be as darkly funny. Mr. Vonnegut asterisks the names of characters who are going to die and, after their inevitably gruesome deaths, kisses them off with the elegiac ''Oh, well - he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.'' Early in the novel, he even puts Captain von Kleist on ''The Tonight Show,'' and what follow are the best laughs in the book.

Mr. Vonnegut's work long ago broke ground for such writers as Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Tom Robbins - all curators of the rhetorical and cultural non sequitur. But Mr. Vonnegut's grumbly and idiomatic voice has always been his own, unfakable and childlike, and his humanity, persisting as it does through his pessimism, is astonishing, seeming at times more science fiction than his science fiction. As for his suspended concern for the well-made, big-brained novel, Mr. Vonnegut has opted to zoom in directly for the catch, the idea, the oracular bit. His books are not only like canaries in coal mines (his own analogy) but like the cormorants of the Galapagos Islands, who, in their idiosyncratic evolution, have sacrificed flight for the getting of fish.

VON KLEIST ON TV

He . . . had in his files a transcript of the Captain's performance on ''The Tonight Show.''. . .

CARSON: ''Von Kleist'' doesn't sound like a very South American name somehow.

CAPTAIN: It's Inca - one of the commonest Inca names. . . . You read the accounts of the Spanish explorers who destroyed the Inca Empire because it was so un-Christian -- CARSON: Yes -- ? CAPTAIN: I assume you've read them. CARSON: They're on my bedside table. . . .

CAPTAIN: Then you know that one out of every three Indians they burned for heresy was named von Kleist. CARSON: How big is the Ecuadorian navy? CAPTAIN: Four submarines. They are always underwater. They never come up. . . . CARSON: But they keep in touch by radio? CAPTAIN: No. They maintain radio silence. It's their own idea. We would be glad to hear from them, but they prefer to maintain radio silence.

CARSON: Why have they stayed underwater so long?

CAPTAIN: You will have to ask them about that. Ecuador is a democracy, you know. - From ''Galapagos.''

ADVANTAGES DARWIN LACKED

For Kurt Vonnegut, there were a few natural twists on the winding road of creativity before he got to ''Galapagos.'' As he explained recently in his Manhattan brownstone, ''I was a biochemist before the war, studying at Cornell, but I left after three years. I spent most of my time there writing for The Cornell Sun - anything to get away from biochemistry.'' Time out for World War II: Corporal Vonnegut, infantry scout, was captured, became a prisoner in Germany, survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden and later wrote ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' about that terrible experience. After the war he attended the University of Chicago. ''It was heaven,'' he says. ''I was excited there, studying in one of the great anthropology departments in the world. I learned about cultural relations, folk societies, natural habitats, a lot of other things that remained with me. My master's degree from Chicago is in anthropology.''

Four years ago Mr. Vonnegut and his wife went on a cruise to the Galapagos Islands. ''Of course, I was fascinated by the island's natural life,'' he says. ''I spent as much time there as Charles Darwin did - two weeks. We had advantages that Darwin didn't have. Our guides all had graduate degrees in biology. We had motorboats to move us around the islands more easily than rowboats could when Darwin visited the Galapagos in the 1830's. And, most important, we knew Darwin's theory of evolution, and Darwin didn't when he was there. His 'Origin of Species' came out 20 years after his journal of the voyage on H.M.S. Beagle.''

Mr. Vonnegut has retained his interest in anthropology. ''I've tried to make the book as responsible as possible scientifically,'' he says, sounding as mock-serious as one of his familiar characters, Kilgore Trout, whose son, Leon Trotsky Trout, is the ghostly narrator of ''Galapagos.'' Laughing, Mr. Vonnegut says, ''If my predictions in the book are wrong, I will return all the money.'' - Herbert Mitgang

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-galapagos.html

Date: September 9, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Section 7; Page 12, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By JAY MCInerney; Jay McInerney is the author of the novels ''Bright Lights, Big City,'' ''Ransom'' and ''Story of My Life.''
Lead: LEAD:
HOCUS POCUS
By Kurt Vonnegut.
302 pp. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $21.95.
Text:

Like many of Mr. Vonnegut's novels, ''Hocus Pocus'' is a retrospective first-person narrative in which several time and story lines gradually converge. It is told by one Eugene Debs Hartke and purportedly written in prison on scraps of paper, each scrap a thought, story or digression unto itself - a form ideally suited to Mr. Vonnegut's thumbnail essayistic bent and his high-speed forward- and reverse-narrative time travel.

Hartke is a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Vietnam War, a thoughtful but not tormented man who killed many human beings on the orders of his Government and dispensed many official lies as an information officer. After leaving Vietnam and the Army he becomes a teacher at Tarkington College in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, a gentle institution that specializes in nurturing the dyslexic and moronic sons and daughters of the ruling class.

After years of pleasant academic rustication, Hartke is fired from the college at the behest of a right-wing television demagogue who feels that Hartke is too pessimistic. Pessimism, as everyone knows and as the board of trustees reminds him, is un-American and probably even anti-American. A physics teacher, Hartke has made the mistake, among others, of informing his students that the idea of perpetual motion is a pipe dream. Unpatriotically, he explains, ''I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.''

When he is dismissed, ostensibly for sexual misconduct, Hartke finds employment just across the lake at the former state prison, run by a Japanese corporation that operates it much more efficiently and profitably than the state did. ''Color-coded'' prisons have become a growth industry, in part because most productive domestic industry has disappeared. ''Poor and powerless people, no matter how docile, were no longer of use to canny investors.'' The prison where Hartke works, near the college town of Scipio, is populated entirely by black inmates, the Supreme Court having decided that it was cruel and inhuman to confine one race with another. America has been largely resegregated -black insulated from white, rich from poor.

Hartke manages to teach some inmates how to read, though the immediate reported benefits of literacy are mainly an increased pleasure in masturbation and wider circulation for the anti-Semitic tract ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'' ''The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment.''

When gang members launch a military operation to break out a drug dealer, the entire prison population escapes and crosses the frozen lake to the Tarkington campus. For a variety of reasons, not least the racist supposition that blacks could not possibly have planned the escape, Hartke is eventually arrested as the leader of the uprising and incarcerated himself. Prison may not be such a bad place to be in the year 2001. Most of the United States has been sold to foreigners, and what is left is broken down and depleted. Black markets, race war, martial law, tuberculosis and AIDS are all somewhere between endemic and epidemic.

Like Eugene Debs Hartke, Mr. Vonnegut has always been a pessimist - ''a pillar of salt,'' as he describes himself in his novel ''Slaughterhouse-Five.'' Like Lot's wife, he looks back at the carnage. In this case, he also looks forward, somewhat in the manner of another biblical personage, Jeremiah.

The bitter ironies in his books have always been tempered by a whimsical stoicism, despair averted by glimpses of individual compassion and the mild palliative of ''harmless untruths'' like the pleasantly ditsy religion of Bokononism in ''Cat's Cradle.'' He is a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion, a cynic who wants to believe. His fiercest social criticism is usually disguised in parable. In ''Cat's Cradle,'' for instance, a substance called Ice Nine, which on release freezes all the water on the face of the earth, stands in for nuclear weapons. In ''Slaughterhouse-Five,'' the extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians provide a cosmic perspective on the inexplicable suffering and horror of the firebombing of Dresden. In ''Jailbird,'' the terrestrial rape of the environment is echoed in the story of the planet Vicuna, where scientists found a way to convert time into food and energy, thereby running out of it.

As if racing against such a clock, Mr. Vonnegut is working much closer to the ground in ''Hocus Pocus,'' which has more in common with Anthony Trollope's book ''The Way We Live Now'' than with Arthur C. Clarke's ''2001.'' It is the most richly detailed and textured of Mr. Vonnegut's renderings of this particular planet. Unlike many of his major characters, Hartke seems like a real person, and Scipio seems like a real town. Some readers may miss the wilder leaps of imagination and the whimsy, but what is gained is a muscular dignity of voice that only rarely is tendentious. And, like outer space in ''The Sirens of Titan,'' ''Hocus Pocus'' is not without ''empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.''

If he eschews parables, Mr. Vonnegut still finds abundant metaphors for our current situation. Hartke compares the land of the free and the home of the brave to a vast plantation, the soil and labor of which has been exhausted. The owners, whites of European descent, are selling it off, dispossessing the laborers. The buyers, mainly Japanese, find themselves as an army of occupation in a hostile, primitive land, bogged down in a terrible quagmire that may prove as destructive to their nation as Vietnam was to ours. Prisons spring up like the antibodies that attempt to form hard protective shells around the germs of tuberculosis, which is enjoying a comeback.

But don't worry. There is sort of a bright side to all of this. The science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout briefly appears - along with others in Mr. Vonnegut's repertory company, represented by a story called ''Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamador,'' in which he speculates that the whole point of human history is to breed strains of germs powerful enough to travel through space and spread DNA throughout the universe. Once we are through trashing and poisoning the planet, any germ hardy enough to survive here could presumably make it anywhere.

SAVE US FROM THE LOWER CLASSES

When I tried to tell the hostages a little about their captors, about their childhoods and mental illnesses, and their not caring if they lived or died, and what prison was like, and so on, Jason Wilder actually closed his eyes and covered his ears. He was being theatrical rather than practical. He didn't cover his ears so well that he couldn't hear me.

Others shook their heads and indicated in other ways that such information was not only tiresome but offensive. It was as though we were in a thunderstorm, and I had begun lecturing on the circulation of electrical charges in clouds, and the formation of raindrops, and the paths chosen by lightning strokes, and what thunder was, and on and on. All they wanted to know was when the storm would stop, so they could go on about their business.

What Warden Matsumoto had said about people like them was accurate. They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives.

They didn't rage against the convicts. They were mad at the Government for not making sure that escapes from the prison were impossible. The more they ran on like that, the clearer it became that it was their Government, not mine or the convicts' or the Townies'. Its first duty, moreover, was to protect them from the lower classes, not only in this country but everywhere. Were people on Easy Street ever any different? From ''Hocus Pocus.''

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-hocuspocus.html

Date: October 18, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 12, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By JULIAN MOYNAHAN; Julian Moynahan teaches English at Rutgers University and is finishing a book on Irish writing.
Lead: LEAD: BLUEBEARD By Kurt Vonnegut. 300 pp. New York: Delacorte Press. $17.95.
Text:

BLUEBEARD By Kurt Vonnegut. 300 pp. New York: Delacorte Press. $17.95.

BY the high imaginative standards of Kurt Vonnegut at his best - ''Cat's Cradle'' and ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' come to mind - ''Bluebeard,'' it seems to me, is a minor achievement. It's cast in the form of fictional autobiography and is set in large part in the much-publicized art and writing scene of the Hamptons on Long Island. In a preliminary note the author calls his book a ''hoax autobiography'' and rather defensively remarks that he isn't writing a ''responsible history'' of Abstract Expressionism or, on the other hand, distorting the actual lives of certain ''real and famous'' persons - such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko, with whom his autobiographical hero is supposed to have been friendly before their brilliant careers ended in suicide or quasi-suicidal accident.

A certain defensiveness also appears in the title. The book's hero, the Armenian-American Rabo Karabekian, who is in his early 70's, is well aware that he has been a bad husband and father. He is divorced and his grown children will have nothing to do with him. Also he is rather apologetic for having failed as a would-be master in the New York School of 50's painters and sculptors while quite accidentally becoming wealthy from having accumulated without much cash outlay a collection of valuable art from people he used to go drinking with at the Cedar Tavern in Manhattan. He also owns a valuable estate in the former potato fields of Long Island where so many New York artists in the 40's and 50's found studio space, visual stimulation or relief, and summer homes.

However, the specific application of the Bluebeard motif has to do with the mysterious contents of a long, windowless, former potato storage shed on Karabekian's property, which is always locked. He keeps hinting, to the point of tiresomeness, that its contents provide some sort of master key to the design and meaning of his career, and to the various stages of recent history, beginning with the Depression, through which he has lived. Rabo lost an eye, becoming a ''cyclops,'' during World War II, and like Billy Pilgrim of ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' and Kurt Vonnegut himself, he was a prisoner of war in Germany.

I shall not divulge the contents of the shed, but will suggest that what is in there is thematically linked to one of Mr. Vonnegut's favorite and perhaps obsessive notions. That is the idea, following such overwhelming 20th-century horrors and atrocities as Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Dresden raid - this last, we remember, was witnessed and survived by the author from his underground vantage point in the German slaughterhouse - that we are all war prisoners, all targets leading forfeited lives, whether we know it or not, and whether or not the particular bomb or bullet with our name on it has yet been sent hurtling toward us.

MR. VONNEGUT has always struck me as a major talent who doesn't always manage to put it all together. In the memoir he is writing, the war survivor Karabekian, who had earlier been apprenticed to a wealthy artist, a master of pictorial realism, describes how his sheer talent exceeded his master's and also how it has failed to unfold. He boasts he could paint anything perfectly and confesses he has found nothing he really wants to say through art.

Rabo has an eccentric house guest, Circe Berman, who devours the installments of the memoir with intense curiosity and without his permission. A wizard novelist of ''adolescent fiction,'' she is as cool as ice-nine, even though her severe insomnia has her lapping up sleeping potions like mother's milk. It's pretty clear she thinks her host's major problem is his bungled relations with her sex. She doesn't, however, offer him another chance nor does he ask for one.

Some readers may be satisfied by what is revealed when the potato shed is unlocked. I wasn't altogether satisfied. Mr. Vonnegut isn't stalling at this stage of his career, but he isn't moving ahead either.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-bluebird.html

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Lights Comic Paths of Despair

Barnstable, Mass., March 20--Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is an author who lives on Cape Cod with a wife and six children, meditating on the Sodoms of our age, wondering whether the next brimstone shower will be the last.

In comic outbursts against the rules of reason, and in science fictions opposing the conventions of time--artful exercises such as "Cat's Cradle," which has sold over 150,000 copies, and "The Sirens of Titan," which has sold over 200,000--Mr. Vonnegut cries out that the worst is yet to come.

Since he simultaneously lights the path of despair, he is being hailed as a guru for the young--or for anyone else reluctant to embrace the future or to accept the past. Mr. Vonnegut's brew of indignation and whimsey, and his impatience with sham, have won him a large following on college campuses. He lectures frequently to students and spends much of the rest of the time wondering why they look to him for moral counsel.

"You can't write novels without a touch of paranoia," he says. "I'm paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.

"I suspect them of making money any way they can. It intrigues me that people want to be rich, and I try to imagine what they do when they are rich."

'Crude Sort of Darwinism'

Thanks to what he calls "a crude sort of Darwinism," people "are very willing to kill, to make killing machinery, and let kids go over to Vietnam to run the killing machines."

"The suggestion of declaring a victory in Vietnam and withdrawing is charming," he said. "I'd simply get out. I've lost my honor enough to know that it doesn't come to much to lose one's honor.

"Unfortunately, military successes are seen as a proof of moral or racial superiority. The other people--by virtue of not being bulletproof--will not be permitted to reproduce.

"When I lived in Schenectady, the old families were Dutch Reformed. The biggest and oldest church in town was Dutch Reformed--very stern, the church of the Boers and apartheid.

"Neither there nor elsewhere do the sermons preach against something simple--like greed or killing someone.

"When the powerful man is confronted by Harlem, his reaction is that nobody can do anything about it."

He pursued: "I think people should be offended by so many things, beginning with the sight of a rabbit killed by a hunter.

"You can teach savagery to people, and I think a lot of people teach savagery to their children to survive. They may need the savagery, but it's bad for the neighbors. I prefer to teach gentleness."

Mr. Vonnegut added: "I would alert teachers to the fact that paranoia is part of every personality. I would tell teachers to direct this paranoia in some way--toward being suspicious of the military-industrial complex, for example, although I've always liked engineers.

"I want scientist to be more moral," he continued.

"It's simpler to save the planet than it is to save a marriage. Show enthusiasm for birth control. Stop polluting the atmosphere and the water. Don't go to work for people who pollute. Don't make weapons."

That Day in 2158

In his fiction, he describes the awful consequences of ignoring such advice. The problem of overpopulation is occasionally left to Ethical Suicide Parlors and to Howard Johnson's, which give the condemned a suitable send-off.

"Welcome to the Monkey House" tells about that awful day in 2158 when New York has finally extended itself into Connecticut and an elixir called antigerasone takes care of muscle tone in those more than 150 years old. One character assures another that "you've got to realize, the world wouldn't be able to support 12 billion people if it wasn't for processed seaweed and sawdust."

Mr. Vonnegut's latest novel--"Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade," to be published March 31--deals with the firebombing of Dresden and a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore. There are five sexes on Tralfamadore, but its flying-saucer crews have identified seven on earth.

In "Breakfast of Champions," the book on which he is now working, everybody in the Middle West is a robot except one Pontiac dealer. The robots are tying to decide how far to let this fellow go in seeding the planets with free will and reason. The dealer is meanwhile all choked up by his discovery that in the age of Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel the Great Lakes disappeared under excrement and Clorox bottles and 10 per cent of the atmosphere was destroyed by pollution.

'Preserve the Game Board'

Mr. Vonnegut's own indignation extends even to nonpolitical games. "Parker Bros. has one for every gathering," he noted, "and there's a game for every season--ice hockey, basketball, baseball, football. Life soon appears to be a game, and its isn't. In games the object is to win, but in life the object is not to win. The object of the whole world is to preserve the game board and the pieces, and there is no such game.

"But everyone has my sympathy," he conceded, "even those I'm most indignant about. I've never written a story with a villain. I think even the rich and the powerful are capable of great moods of tenderness, brought on by dogs and children.

"I think everybody's programmed, and can't help what they do," he said. "But I'd still oppose the rich and powerful that's the way I've been programmed."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-despair.html

The Guest Word

Vonnegut's Responsibility

MOTHER NIGHT By Kurt Vonnegut.

Mother Night" is the Vonnegut book that has not been reviewed anywhere, ever, because it was sold first into paperback for a handy sum: he needed the money for his large family. And paperbacks don't get reviewed, so it has been ordained. Authors always feel that readers should know and care more about this kind of literary imperative than they do; there is more to what makes reputations than is taught in classes on literature.

"Mother Night" is odd-man-out in another way, being a straight novel. You needn't realize this at once or, indeed, at all; for it is a tale as monstrous as we read in the newspapers. As early as page 4 we find an 18-year-old Jew who guards our criminal hero in a Jerusalem jail; he does not know the name of Joseph Goebbels, but insists that Tiglath-pileser the Third, an Assyrian who burned down Hazar (a small town in Israel) in 732, was a man remarkable enough to be remembered by educated humanity. This sort of homely detail, instantly recognizable as the stuff of our zaniness, transports us further than any space-time warp and does not really need the addition of Vonnegut's elegant fantasy to make chimera land.

The criminal here is an American, Howard W. Campbell Jr., an ordinary pleasant fellow, like us all. He was comfortably acclimatized, not being political by temperament, in Nazi Germany, but was recruited to be a spy for Us by an agent who recognized in him a fatal sense of the dramatic: he would never be able to resist seeing life as a battle between Good and Evil. During the war he invented and broadcast propaganda for the Nazis, while working reliably for Us. Fifteen years after the war, while living quietly with his memories in Greenwich Village, he was caught, mostly because of his own feelings of guilt or puzzlement about who really had done what--a specifically Vonnegut identification with the ambiguities of complicity.

Irrational, of course; because, judged by what he had done, he had been a very clever fellow and, indeed, a hero; and besides, he had survived, no mean achievement these days. His thoughts-- well, they were another matter; and besides, he was no Eichmann or Calley to take orders and not know what it was he did: "My case is different. I know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone."

The force of Vonnegut's questioning is such that one has to sit sown to think, to define degrees: Vonnegut simply cannot bear what we are, of course--like a lot of writers. The growl, the wince, the scream, that come off so many pages is due to this. But no other writer's sorrow, no other writer's refusal to play the child's game of Goddies and Baddies, is strong enough to make me remember, for instance, that before 1939 a great many people were shouting we should stop Hitler, that Nazism could be stopped if America and Britain wanted to. He makes me remember- -he rubs our noses in the results of our missed chances--that when Nazism was not stopped, but flowered (to succumb to the associations of the word) into the expected and forecast war, how soon our judgments became warped by the horribleness of what was going on. The horribleness of the Nazis, of course: for almost at once Good and Evil became polarized into Us and Them and quite forgotten was the knowledge that the war could have been prevented if our governments had wanted. What Vonnegut deals with, always, is responsibility: Whose fault was it all--the gas chambers, the camps, the degradations and the debasements of all our standards? Whose? Well, ours as much as theirs.

This is so, that is, if you can believes in responsibility at all--it is here that Vonnegut is moral in an old-fashioned way. He does take the full weight of responsibility, while more and more people are shrugging off the we should have and we ought to have and we can if we want and coming to see history as a puppet show and our--humanity's--slide into chaos as beyond our prevention, our will, our choice. The strength of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., this deliberate and self-conscious heir, derives from his refusal to succumb to this new and general feeling of helplessness.

There is another way he is an original: for most of his career he has been in the category "space fiction" or "science fiction" where, for the most part, the chilliness of space derives from the writers' insistence that we do without the comforts of our own patterns of ethic, where we can so whole galaxies crumble with less emotion than we feel pouring boiling water into an ant's nest. Usually, in the center of Jex 132 (male) or Janni X56 (female) there is an emptiness which some claim is the proper imaginative response to the possibilities of all-space, but which in Vonnegut's people is filled with the emotions you and I would feel if we knew a molecule was loose that will freeze our world solid in a breath.

Precisely because in all his work he has made nonsense of the little categories, the unnatural divisions into "real" literature and the rest, because he is comic and sad at once, because his painful seriousness is never solemn, Vonnegut is unique among us; and these same qualities account for the way a few academics still try to patronize him: they cling to the categories. Of course they do: they invented them. But so it has ever gone.

Ordinary people, with whole imaginations, reading the newspapers, the comic strips and Jane Austen or watching the world reel by on television, keep an eye out for Ice-9 while hoping that we are indeed recognizing the members of our karasses when they come near, try to make sure that we don't pay more than what is due to the false karasses, and dare to believe that while there is life, there is still life--such readers know that Vonnegut is one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best.

Doris Lessing's most recent book was "The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories." Her new novel, "The Summer Before the Dark," will be published in April.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-lessing.html

Top - Back to main page - Biography - Books written by Kurt Vonnegut - Translations into Spanish - Kurt Vonnegut’s art - Books about Kurt Vonnegut - Articles about Kurt Vonnegut - New York Times' Book Reviews - KV's Gift to the Students - Links

Academic year 2000/2001
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Roland Bartels robar@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press