Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut

   1976; 275 pages.  Alternate Title: Slapstick or Lonesome No More.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Satire; Humorous Science Fiction; Absurdist Fiction; Futurism.  Overall Rating: 7*/10.

 

    Over the course of his long life, Dr. Wilbur Rockefeller Swain, or, as he is called now, Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, has endured many ups and downs.

 

    As a child, he was “neanderthaloid” ugly and stupid, so much so that his own mother referred to him and his twin sister Eliza as “a pair of drooling totem poles”.  Yet, when Eliza and Wilbur were in each other’s company, they connected like two specialized halves of a single brain, and produced genius intellectual concepts that would send Einstein back to the drawing board.

 

    As an adult, Wilbur became a Senator from the state of Vermont, followed by two terms as President of the United States.  The country prospered swimmingly until getting devastated by a plague called “the Green Death” combined with a sickness called “the Albanian Flu”.

 

    Now, as a 102-year-old geriatric hanging out in the lobby of the ruins of the Empire State Building, Wilbur decides to write his memoir.  His life seems to him to have been sort of like a slapstick comedy, something akin to a Laurel and Hardy routine, hence its title.

 

What’s To Like...

    Slapstick is a loosely autobiographical work by Kurt Vonnegut, with extra emphasis on his relationship with his older sister, Alice, who died in 1958, when Kurt was still a struggling writer.  I read the “Rosetta Books” e-book edition, which claimed it was 275 pages long, but it seemed much shorter than that.  The story is written from the first-person point-of-view, with 49 extremely short chapters (Wilbur’s memoir) bookended by a prologue and epilogue which are sort of an introduction and afterword from Kurt himself and kind of a “mini-memoir” of his life.

 

    While the 49 chapters do indeed provide a fictional chronicle of Wilbur’s life, the book is really just a means for Vonnegut to air his views on all sorts of his favorite subjects, including what the afterlife holds in store for us, and the feeling of “disconnect” in everyone's day-to-day life.  Indeed, someone (Amazon perhaps?) has suggested the alternate title “Lonesome No More”, which is both a sacrilege and a improvement over just plain “Slapstick”, as well as Wilbur’s campaign slogan when he runs for President.

 

    I chuckled at the role China plays in the story, especially since this was written in the 1970s.  Vonnegut portrays them as technologically superior to us: they’ve somehow transported several hundred explorers to Mars, without using a space vehicle; they know how to miniaturize humans down to where they can fit in a coat pocket, thus significantly lessening the amount of food needed to sustain the population; and probably screwed up gravity in the process, since it is now a variable, not a constant.  Some days all you can do is lay pressed to the ground during a period of high gravity.

 

    The suggested “cure” for Loneliness was fascinating.  As President, Wilbur ordains that everyone gets a new middle name (see second excerpt below for details); which instantly means you have thousands of cousins, brothers, sisters, etc. any and all of which you can contact for support, care, and affection.  Alas, even here in the story, mankind still fails to achieve a state of complete harmony.

 

    As he did in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut comes up with a catchphrase to close out any important point he’s making.  In Slaughterhouse Five, it was “And so it goes”; here it is “Hi ho.”  Those who are allergic to cusswords will be happy to know the first 93% of the book is remarkable clean (just eight cusswords noted), but at that point we encounter someone with Tourette’s Disease, with an outburst of its requisite swearing.  Subjects like incest, spousal abuse, and erections are also discussed in brief along the way.

 

    The ending is classic Vonnegut, having surprises and twists to it while at the same time somehow being not exciting or climactic.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.2/5 based on 644 ratings and 215 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.86/5 based on 37,892 ratings and 1,649 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Panjandrum (n.) : a person who has or claims to have a great deal of authority or influence.

 

Excerpts...

    We made at least one prediction that was so deadly accurate that thinking about it even now leaves me thunderstruck.

    Listen: We began with the mystery of how ancient peoples had erected the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, and the great heads of Easter Island, and the barbaric arches of Stonehenge, without modern sources and tools.

    We concluded there must have been days of light gravity in olden times, when people could play tiddledy-winks with huge chunks of stone.  (loc. 5237)

 

    “Your new middle name would consist of a noun, the name of a flower or fruit or vegetable or legume, or a bird or a reptile or a fish, or a mollusk, or a gem or a mineral or a chemical element—connected by a hypen (sic) to a number between one and twenty.”  I asked him what his name was at the present time.

    “Elmer Glenville Grasso,” he said.

    “Well,” I said, “you might become Elmer Uranium-3 Grasso, say.  Everybody with Uranium as part of their middle name would be your cousin.”

    “That brings me back to my first question,” he said.  “What if I get some artificial relative I absolutely can’t stand?”  (loc. 1416)

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, Slapstick sells for $13.99 at Amazon.  There are a couple dozen of his books available in Kindle format.  They vary in price from $1.99 to $14.99, and some of his more popular works come in several editions, so compare prices.

 

“History is merely a list of surprises. (…) It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”  (loc. 1939)

    I noted only a couple of typos (hypen/hyphen, saving/saying) in Slapstick, which no longer surprises me in anything published by Rosetta Books.  It didn't happen enough to be a distraction, and the bigger issue I had was with the plotline: there wasn’t one.

 

    Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain writes his fictional memoir (is that an oxymoron?), with lots of fascinating trivia, both real (the origin of “Robert’s Rules of Order”) and made-up (“The Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped”), but it never progresses into anything.  The problem isn’t Vonnegut’s writing skills, he’s a master at his craft, but the storytelling is nonexistent.  After a century of living, Wilbur is about to pass away, wiser perhaps from all the amazing things that have happened to him, but not noticeably happier.

 

    For me, Slapstick marks the start of a decline in the quality of Kurt Vonnegut's novels.  Everything before this – Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions – sparkles.  Everything from here on in, at least the ones I’ve read so far – Slapstick, Galapagos, and Hocus Pocus – are ho-hum.

 

    Hi ho.

 

    7 Stars.  We’ll close with a brain teaser from the book.  At one point Wilbur is subjected to an IQ test, with one of the questions being:  How many digits are there to the left of the decimal place in the square root of 692038.42753?  Vonnegut may have been just making this up, but the geek in me just had to solve it.

 

    It took me about five minutes, with no calculator, computer, or pen-&-paper to do so.  Can you?  Answer, and the logic I used, in the Comments section.