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.

Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut

   1990; 323 pages.  New Author? : Heavens, no.  Genre : Contemporary Fiction; American Literature; Satire.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

    “My name is Eugene Debs Hartke, and I was born in 1940.  I was named at the behest of my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Wills, who was a Socialist and an Atheist, and nothing but a groundskeeper at Butler University.”

    Thus starts Hocus Pocus, wherein Eugene recounts his life story, with most of the emphasis on the last couple of years, during which he has had some quite severe ups and downs.

    Through a connection with his former CO in Nam, Gene obtained a teaching position at Tarkington College, a private school in Scipio, New York for kids with learning disorders.  Alas, he eventually is fired that position, and takes a similar job at Athena State Prison, just across the lake from Tarkington.

    But a prison revolt leads to bloodshed, and Tarkington College becomes Tarkington Reformatory, upon which Gene is promoted to head warden.  In yet another twist of Fate, he’s now an inmate at the same prison he used to be the warden of.

    And so it goes.

What’s To Like...

    There are no spoilers in the above section; the reader is told all that within the first 4% of the book.  The main plot, and Kurt Vonnegut has never been known to pay undue attention to such a thing, is basically Gene telling you how he arrived at his present state of incarceration. 

    The book is written in the first-person POV (Gene’s), and is mostly stream-of-consciousness with lots of flashbacks.  For unknown reasons, Vonnegut spurned writing out any numbers.  So: “Vietnam was 1 big hallucination” instead of “one big hallucination”.  There are also “code phrases”, such as the titular “hocus pocus” standing for “bullsh*t”.  The Griot™ computer program was way kewl. And it was fun to watch the protagonist as he tries to compare the number of people he killed in Vietnam versus the number of women he’s been to bed with.

    The writing is of course superb, and there’s the anticipated abundance of Vonnegut wit, although for me, it didn’t seem to sparkle as much as usual. Perhaps this was because the themes in Hocus Pocus – the Vietnam war, the social castes in America, the rich vs. the poor class divisions, the broken-down jail system, etc. – are all familiar Vonnegut subjects.

    The book ends with Gene becoming an inmate in his own prison, which is a logical terminus, but I thought it was anti-climactic, since he doesn’t really share any of his experiences from behind bars.  But perhaps that’s covered in another one of his late-in-life books, Jailbird, which is sitting on my Kindle, waiting to be read.  There are some twists at the end, but they aren’t surprising since Vonnegut/Gene tells us of them several times along the story’s way.

    As with all of the author’s books, this is a standalone novel.  Although there are some recurring characters in Vonnegut novels,  he doesn’t do series.  I personally think this is a plus; you don’t miss a thing by not reading them in order.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Absquatulate (v.)  :  to leave abruptly; to flee; to abscond.  (Yankeeism)

Excerpts...

    At least the World will end, an event anticipated with great joy by many.  It will end very soon, but not in the year 2000, which has come and gone.  From that I conclude that God Almighty is not heavily into Numerology.  (loc. 66)

    “Did the letter say why you were named Rob Roy?” I inquired.

    “No,” he said.  “I assumed it must be because she liked the novel by that name by Sir Walter Scott.”

    “That sounds right,” I said.  What good would it do him or anybody else to know that he was named for 2 shots of Scotch, 1 shot of sweet vermouth, cracked ice, and a twist of lemon peel?  (loc. 3680)

Kindle Details...

    Hocus Pocus sells for $6.47 at Amazon.  The rest of Vonnegut’s novels are normally in the $4.99-$9.99 range, but if you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll find that Amazon frequently discounts them, one at a time, to $1.99, which is a fantastic price if you have the patience to wait Amazon out.  I’ve noticed that Amazon quite often discounts books by deceased writers.  I wonder if that’s because the authors are no longer around to protest the pricing policies of their works.

 “Plutonium!  Now there’s the stuff to put hair on a microbe’s chest.”  (loc  2513)

    Kurt Vonnegut was born on 11 November 1922 and died on 11 April 2007.  He wrote 14 novels over the course of his career, plus a dozen shorter pieces of fiction and 9 works of non-fiction.  Hocus Pocus was novel #13, and was published in 1990 when Vonnegut was 68 years old.

    It’s not that this is a bad novel; it’s just that there isn’t anything new for anyone who’s read other books by Vonnegut.  The main themes enumerated earlier will be already familiar to any inveterate Vonnegut fan; they’re just dressed up with different plot details this time out.  Certainly writing about the Vietnam War in 1990 can only be viewed as old hat.

    While reading Hocus Pocus, it occurred to me that Vonnegut might have written this to be kind of his swan song.  For instance, his Elders of Tralfamadore make a cameo appearance, and they have no literary reason to be here.  I even can’t help wondering if the title itself, which we’ve already noted as being code for “Bullsh*t”, isn’t a small, subtle joke by the author to his readers.

    7 Stars.  Hocus Pocus may not be Vonnegut’s best effort, but it doesn’t change my opinion that he is the greatest American author of the latter half of the 20^th century.  Don’t agree with me?  Name a better choice.

Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut

1961; 268 pages. Genre : Contemporary Lit. Overall Rating : B.
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On the surface, Harold W. Campbell is a World War 2 "Lord Haw-Haw", an American who broadcasts propaganda for Nazi Germany to the Allied soldiers fighting in Europe. Only a select few know he is actually a hero, a double-agent transmitting vital war secrets via coded phrases in his radio diatribes.
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What's To Like...
It's Vonnegut; it rocks. There's a fascinating storyline, superior writing, and a bunch of interesting characters, most of whom turn out to be not what they seem.

.Vonnegut gives us the moral on the first page of the introduction : "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." A couple pages later, his dedication to Campbell reads, "a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times."

.There's a brief reference to a great, obscure historical figure - Tiglath-Pileser (pg. 4), and a cameo appearance by one of my favorite words - susurrus (pg. 177). Oh, and I swear each of the 45 chapters ends with a storyline "twist". Try pulling that off every 3 or 4 pages.

.Underneath all the absurdity, Vonnegut examines a fundamental question - what constitutes the "real" you? Is it your innermost being, or is it the summation of the effect your actions have on Humanity?

.If the theme of Slaughterhouse Five is the insanity of war; then Mother Night is its sequel, with a theme of the senselessness of post-war. MN is not quite up there with S-5 and The Sirens of Titan, but it's still a superior book, and highly recommended.

.Excerpts...
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. (pg. 160)

."Any news of my parents?" I said.
"I'm sorry to tell you-" he said, "they died four months ago."
"Both?" I said.
"Your father first - your mother 24 hours later. Heart both times," he said.
I cried a little about that, shook my head. "Nobody told them what I was really doing?" I said.
"Our radio station in the heart of Berlin was worth more than the peace of mind of two old people," he said.
"I wonder," I said.
"You're entitled to wonder, " he said. "I'm not." (pg.187)

Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut

1952, 320 pages. Genre : Dystopian Lit. Overall Rating : B.

   .This was Kurt Vonnegut's first pubished novel, and is set in Ilium, New York, where it follows the misadventures of Dr. Paul Proteus in a 1984-esque world. The back-cover blurb on my book calls it as "a cross between Animal Farm and Alice In Wonderland," and that's a fair description.
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What's To Like...
   This is "applied dystopia". Whereas Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984 all have essentially the same mood, books like Player Piano (satire added) and Animal Farm (um... animals added) at least give the Big Brother story a new ambiance. Also, Vonnegut sticks to a straight chronological timeline here, which is not true in quite a few of his novels. I know chrono-hopping can be confusing to you non-time-travelers out there.
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Best of all are the characters themselves. The good guys have their faults; the bad guys have their endearing traits. Proteus has few, if any, outstanding qualities. Gray is a nice change from the black-or-white characters in most stories.

.What's Not To Like...
    This is not Vonnegut's best effort. He self-rates it a "B", and I'm inclined to agree. It's a good first stab, but it lacks the polish of his later work. The most glaring weakness is the tired, well-trodden dystopian plot. I keep waiting for a book in this genre to come up with something different for a storyline. Anything different.
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When I look into my crystal ball, I see...
As with any book in this genre, it's fun to see which parts of the future the author got right, and which parts he didn't. For brevity's sake, we'll limit ourselves here to some of his hits.
.1.) The Back To Nature Movement. At one point, Proteus decides to "cleanse" himself, and purchases an old farm that doesn't even have electricity. Jaded flower children followed suit 20 years later. With an equal lack of success. Eva Gabor, where are you today?

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2.) Let's sing the company song! Thank God, I never had to do this. But it's big over in Japan, and I have a friend who used to work for Wal-Mart, and claims they started every day off by singing the Wal-Mart song. Whatever that is. Oh, and Wal-Mart used to pick a different person each morning to lead the singing. So the trick was to scrunch down behind other patsies to avoid being called upon.

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3.) The ultimate anathema. In Player Piano, the label-of-death was being called a saboteur. It didn't matter whether you actually were one or not. Today, of course, we call anyone who doesn't go along with us a terrorist.

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4.) Everyone's a doctor. Vonnegut just barely missed on this one. Everyone in the privileged category in Player Piano gets a PhD. Whether it has any use/meaning or not. Nowadays, we don't have garbage collectors; we have sanitation engineers. Secretaries aren't secretaries; they're administrative facilitators. Same sort of thing.

.Bottom line - this is a good book to read if you're already hooked on Vonnegut ( I am), but Slaughterhouse-5, The Sirens of Titan, or Breakfast of Champions are all better introductions to him.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Overall Rating : A+.

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Slaughterhouse-5 is arguably Kurt Vonnegut's most-famous novel. It explores a variety of great themes - free will; the absurdity of war; fatalism; and one of my pastimes - time travel.

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Jason says I can call this a classic, since Vonnegut has now passed on. That's great, since "traditional" classical American Literature is the pits. We'll discuss that at a later date, probably when I review Thornton Wilder's The Bridge At San Luis Rey.

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What's To Like...

It was an easy read. I devoured this book in three evenings. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a likeable, ordinary bloke. The aforementioned themes are dealt with extensively, but in such a way that you don't feel like Vonnegut is preaching at you. Indeed, it's hard to say just what the author's personal viewpoint is on fatalism and free will.

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What's Not To Like...

The storyline jumps around a lot, time-wise. That's natural for a time-traveler, but it may take some getting used to if you've never read any Vonnegut before; and haven't come unstuck in time.

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Characters from previous Vonnegut novels (Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater) come into the story with little or no introduction. This is one of Vonnegut's recurring literary devices, and it drove me nuts some years ago when I trudged through his book on evolution, "Galapagos".

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Listen : Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time...

It should be noted that Slaughterhouse-Five consistently makes the yearly 100 most-challenged books by the self-righteous "let's keep our kids brainwashed" crowd. Ostensibly, this is because there are some cuss words in the book, and because God is not given sufficient reverence by Vonnegut. In reality, I think they fear the anti-war (and Dresden bombing) message in S-5. Vonnegut is qualified to write on this - he was being held as a POW in Dresden on the night the Allies decided to fire-bomb the city just for the heck of it. The consequence of our nastiness (there were no military targets in Dresden) was that 20,000-100,000 innocent civilians perished.

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Of course, the book-banning fundies have never wavered in their drive to tell others what to read, watch, and think. At present, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (both the movie and the book) is the target of their wrath. It is claimed TGC will turn any reader/movie-goer into a Satanist. Of course, everyone who read/watched any of the Harry Potter series is already a witch. I wonder which is worse. I guess I'll find out, since I've just started to read TGC.

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But I digress. Slaughterhouse-Five is a fantastic book by a great American author. Read it today, just to tweak the book-burners. Then give it to one of your ditto-head friends as a Christmas present, and start to de-program him as well. It is worthy of an A+ rating. Poo-tee-weet!