A review by darwin8u
Basic Training by Kurt Vonnegut

3.0

A previously unpublished novella by Vonnegut. Basic Training is not nearly as absurdist or fanciful as his later novels. The plot/setting/characters are all structurally congruous and reasonable. Basic Training is basically a quaint bildungsroman that deals with issues of love, authoritarianism, family and heroism. It reminded me a lot of J.D. Salinger's and Carson McCuller's novellas, and wouldn't feel too overshadowed by those authors or out of place in the pages of Harpers, the New Yorker, or the Saturday Evening Post of the 1940s and 1950s.