Vonne Gut Reactions: Slapstick, or lonesome no more

Let's see if I can name from memory where we've been so far in this quest...

• Player Piano - interesting idea, moderately interesting book
• The Sirens of Titan - mostly uninteresting book
• Mother Night - first success, least sci-fi book so far
• Cat's Cradle - outstanding, largely cohesive book
• Slaughterhouse Five - excellent, great read
• Breakfast of Champions - darker by far but still well written
• Slapstick - bit of fluff

After checking to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, I find that I had forgotten God Bless You, Mr Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine. Not too bad a bit of progress through Vonnegut's bibliography so far. Easily on pace to finish in the calendar year and with the accelerating pace of summer, perhaps by the time school's back in session August 13 (blech).

I know Galapagos hasn't come up in this reading series yet, but I've read it before, so I'm going to mention it. This novel felt very much of a kind with Galapagos to me. Both are set in a quasi-dystopian future in which American (assumedly Earthin) society has dissolved. The main story of the book is told in reflection by an elder relating how the world that you and I know turned into the world that exists in the book.

Spoilers ahead (in case you hadn't noticed the spoiler-ific nature of most of my Vonnegut reviews)

In Slapstick our narrator is the last President of the United States of America, a mean who began life as a neanderthaloid (something similar to a Mongoloid but with a larger brow and assumedly without the corresponding mental deficiencies - though the doctors and parents assume that Wilbur Swain and his twin sister, Eliza, are mentally deficient at birth and for the first dozen or so years of their lives.The twins are soon shuffled off to a family mansion in Vermont where they live secret lives as geniuses, teaching themselves to read and write, to speak numerous foreign languages, and continuing to pretend to the servants taking care of them - and to their parents on the annual visit to honor the children's birthday - to be illiterate and unable to communicate beyond baby babbled of bluh and duh and the occasional fuffday. When the children do finally reveal their intelligence, they also reveal that this intelligence dulls considerably when they are separated from each other, even going so far as to name their separate, duller identities Betty and Bobby Brown.

The two are separated and put on drastically different paths, Wilbur heading to school and eventually university and medical school where he graduates last in his class of doctors in training. All of this happens while his sister is placed in a mental institution. When the two meet again later in life, they briefly and orgiastically (Vonnegut's description, not my addition) return to brilliance and part ways to see each other only once more before Eliza's eventual death on Mars. (yup, death on Mars - doesn't fit with the rest of the story in the least)

Wilbur is eventually elected President on the strength of his one apparently singular campaign promise to make each person in America part of an extended family by giving everyone a new middle name. These middle names will instantly give every American thousands of new brothers and sisters and hundreds of thousands of new cousins leaving everyone (as the title says) lonely no more.

This doesn't work quite perfectly as plagues - both bacterial and caused by miniaturized Chinese people (but you can, of course protect yourself by eating fish guts - seriously, I'm not making this up, it's all part of Vonnegut's plot in the book) - decimate the world population.

So, what'd I notice?

• After reading Slaughterhouse Five Calen asked me if I knew whether Vonnegut came from a religious background and whether that religious background had been challenged by Vonnegut's experiences in World War II. I think Vonnegut cleared this up pretty well in Slapstick's introduction where he describes his family from a generation or more before his. He explains that his family was of German descent and so tightly bound to Indianapolis that any relatives who left town returned to the bosom but that his generation had lost its German heritage in light of World War I and become more mobile with both he and his brother leaving town and not returning except for funerals. Vonnegut's quote regarding his family is "They were all religious skeptics, by the way." (page 6)
• Throughout the book Vonnegut's literary technique of repeating a phrase - "And so it goes" or "And so on" - is replaced here with a simpler and more nonsensical "Hi ho" which ends well over half of the book's paragraphs.
• Vonnegut dedicates this book to his sister Alice and writes this about her, "Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had lead a blameless life, she had never thought of her awful luck as anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her." Again, nothing that happens is directed from above or from some actors of fate. Our world is the way it is because it's the way it is. (page 13)
• This book is largely free of the recurring characters that Vonnegut had used throughout his previous books - with two minor exceptions. He brings back the lawyerly Norman Mushari, Jr. who we last saw in Rosewater trying to take a little piece of the Rosewater fortune. (page 111) The last President of the United States is also flown back to Indianapolis (or as it's known by then as Daffodiltown) by Captain Bernard O'Hare who we last saw in Slaughterhouse Five. (page 197).

I finished Slapstick and don't know what I'd just read. It's a nice enough read, pleasant, funny read, but it's a diaphanous tale, one that slips right through the fingers upon further examination.

Was Vonnegut bemoaning the loss of connected families? Was he eulogizing his lost sister? Was he turning away from then personal narratives of Slaughterhous and Breakfast? Was he just writing a simple tale to clear his head?

I would say yes to all of those.

Next up, Jailbird...