Vonnegut

I was lucky to be born in the right time and place to stumble across the novels and stories of Kurt Vonnegut when I hit my stride as a reader and he hit his stride as a writer. There are some things you can't plan and that schools, curricula, and academic advisors can't require. Being set on fire by an incendiary work of art just kind of happens, if you're lucky.

Slaughterhouse Five had that effect on me at a very impressionable time, turning me on to antiwar literature, The New Journalism so-called, and the blurring of genre distinctions between sci-fi, pop, and literary fiction. As a budding would-be journalist myself at the time, this was hot stuff indeed. Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, and Joseph Heller were part of a vanguard of writers my friends and I idolized.

I remember one article in particular, I think it was Vonnegut's review in Harpers of Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, so it must have been the politically nightmarish year of 1972. The review began with a statement something like "Some days I have Hunter Thompson's disease..." the symptoms of which include a mixture of hopelessness, rage, contempt, and disbelief. Another statement in the same review that hit me in the face was Vonnegut's assessment of Thompson's thesis that there had been a sea-change in the two-party system: "It's no longer the Democrats vs. the Republicans, it's the winners vs. the losers, and the fix is on." Subtext: If this is news to you, then guess which side you're on.

I don't mean to romanticize the writer or the historical situation, because it wasn't the first or last time those things could be said about American society. The last two presidential elections prove it. And there were more sophisticated commentators than Vonnegut among the literati. But I can't think of any during my lifetime who put as much heart into their work while seeing through the lies, deceptions, and rationalizations of power, and yet maintained a sense of humor on the whole macabre spectacle of war and money and the vanity of domination.

He was just a guy from Indianapolis, albeit with the advantages of family wealth and privilege that happen to fall to some people and not others. To his credit, Vonnegut didn't take those happy accidents - or any sense of entitlement - seriously. Good buy, Billy Pilgrim.