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A review by drjerry
Novels & Stories 1963–1973: Cat's Cradle / God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater / Slaughterhouse-Five / Breakfast of Champions / Stories by Sidney Offit, Kurt Vonnegut
3.0
I predict that these novels will not age well.
My own history with Vonnegut's writing is long. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the first novels that I read during my adult life that was not assigned reading. That was almost thirty years ago, and I loved it. It left a deep impression on me, and over the course of the next couple years consumed most of the books Vonnegut wrote up through the 1980s. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was one of my favorites.
The availability of the works that I loved so much in my youth now in Library of America's anthology seemed a good prompt to revisit those. If anything, it has shown me how far my own aesthetic sensibilities have evolved in the intervening years.
Vonnegut came into his prime as a writer during the 1960s when so much of the cultural, artistic, and literary landscape was roiling and he has come to be viewed as a voice of that era. The language is very direct and full of direct references to touchstones of that era or other boundary-pushing writers such as Jacqueline Susann or William Burroughs. In my estimate Vonnegut's most memorable contribution is the ability to craft metaphors, delivered in deadpan narrative, that are humorous to the point approaching grotesque and serve to draw into relief some aspect of human failing, hypocrisy, cruelty, or folly. In my early twenties I found this hilarious and irresistible. Now, not so much.
Another review of this volume captures a lot of what I felt. Re-reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was probably the biggest letdown. What I remember as a page-turner that had me laughing out loud every few pages struck me now as an overly simplistic indictment of American capitalism rendered in a lazily constructed narrative populated with caricatures instead of characters. Cat's Cradle was more interesting in its premise but I could not escape the feeling that the superficial character development was not a failure of Vonnegut's strength as a writer but rather a result of his arrogant conviction of his own world view. Even if I might level some of the same criticisms against Slaughterhouse 5, this one did stand out against the others in this volume for its craftsmanship. Whether its main plot device -- that the hero, Billy Pilgrim, experiences time in discontinuous, randomly ordered segments instead of a continuous, linear flow -- is the result of a head injury suffered in a plane crash or whether he was really captured by an alien race and "freed" from three dimensional existence, it resonates as a poignant metaphor for what it must be like to live with the post-traumatic stress of having witnessed one of the largest single civilian massacres of the second World War.
My own history with Vonnegut's writing is long. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the first novels that I read during my adult life that was not assigned reading. That was almost thirty years ago, and I loved it. It left a deep impression on me, and over the course of the next couple years consumed most of the books Vonnegut wrote up through the 1980s. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was one of my favorites.
The availability of the works that I loved so much in my youth now in Library of America's anthology seemed a good prompt to revisit those. If anything, it has shown me how far my own aesthetic sensibilities have evolved in the intervening years.
Vonnegut came into his prime as a writer during the 1960s when so much of the cultural, artistic, and literary landscape was roiling and he has come to be viewed as a voice of that era. The language is very direct and full of direct references to touchstones of that era or other boundary-pushing writers such as Jacqueline Susann or William Burroughs. In my estimate Vonnegut's most memorable contribution is the ability to craft metaphors, delivered in deadpan narrative, that are humorous to the point approaching grotesque and serve to draw into relief some aspect of human failing, hypocrisy, cruelty, or folly. In my early twenties I found this hilarious and irresistible. Now, not so much.
Another review of this volume captures a lot of what I felt. Re-reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was probably the biggest letdown. What I remember as a page-turner that had me laughing out loud every few pages struck me now as an overly simplistic indictment of American capitalism rendered in a lazily constructed narrative populated with caricatures instead of characters. Cat's Cradle was more interesting in its premise but I could not escape the feeling that the superficial character development was not a failure of Vonnegut's strength as a writer but rather a result of his arrogant conviction of his own world view. Even if I might level some of the same criticisms against Slaughterhouse 5, this one did stand out against the others in this volume for its craftsmanship. Whether its main plot device -- that the hero, Billy Pilgrim, experiences time in discontinuous, randomly ordered segments instead of a continuous, linear flow -- is the result of a head injury suffered in a plane crash or whether he was really captured by an alien race and "freed" from three dimensional existence, it resonates as a poignant metaphor for what it must be like to live with the post-traumatic stress of having witnessed one of the largest single civilian massacres of the second World War.