Vonnegut Hits Rock Bottom

Many authors have written books that are all part of a longer storyline. Vonnegut’s books seem like they are all on different topics, but they are surprisingly the parts of a longer argument. Every book reads like a reaction to the previous book. It is uncanny. Each book stands on its own and you would never know that the book is the logical extension of the book Vonnegut finished before starting the one you are reading. But the linkage is there.

The installment of this ongoing saga which I just read was Slapstick. Not good. Not good at all. Indeed, it was a mess, rescued only by the fact that Vonnegut’s style of short chapters and brief paragraphs kept the book moving along at a brisk pace. The biggest question raised by Slapstick: Why is this book so awful?

The answer comes in Vonnegut’s previous book, Breakfast of Champions. Here is what I wrote about that book when I read it not too long ago: “What comes next is Breakfast of Champions, which is a broken Vonnegut just hurling what remains of his psyche onto the page….Breakfast of Champions is really just some sort of uber-nihilism. Don’t ask me what “uber-nihilism” means—I just made up the phrase and I have no idea what it means either, but it is the perfect description of this novel. To try to make sense of the book is exactly the sort of thing the book is mocking you for trying to do.”

Now imagine that summary of Breakfast of Champions is correct. What comes next? If you have just hurled what remains of your broken self onto the page in a supreme act of nihilism, what do you have left to use for material for your next novel? Absolutely nothing.

And interestingly, starting with absolutely nothing is exactly what Slapstick does. The plot is beyond idiotic, neither believable as reality nor as an alternate reality or as an imaginary reality; it is just an incoherent mash-up of bits of flotsam.

Wilbur is born and he is really ugly and he has a twin sister who is also really ugly and they are both not intelligent at all but when they are physically close together they form a telepathic link and are geniuses so they spend lots of time in super-close and super-uncomfortable-for-the-reader-who-doesn’t-like-incest physical contact until they are separated permanently and Wilbur goes to Harvard and then becomes President of the United States but then the Chinese, who have made themselves superminiature people, start messing around with the gravitational force of the planet by making it variable on a day-to-day basis which destroys just about everything in the world except New York City which was instead depopulated by a plague which has an antidote contained in fish guts and, after communicating with his sister who died a few years previously when she was on Mars after having been taken there by the a miniature Chinese emissary who traded transport to Mars for the ability to read some of the works that Wilbur and his sister wrote when they were very young, Wilbur goes there (the largely uninhabited New York City) and lives in the Empire State Building with his granddaughter who for reasons unexplained just showed up one day and does absolutely nothing afterwards to explain why she is even in this novel.

If that sounds like a book you might like to read I have done a terrible job relating the plot. Maybe I should have included the pointless stuff about the King of Michigan and his wars against the great lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma.

The plot (to use the word loosely), however, is totally irrelevant to the message of the book. I suppose this is one of the things that happens when you are a novelist. You have a message that could be summarized in a four word sentence, but instead of just publishing the sentence, you write a whole novel to say what could have been said in four words, but even the novel version of the four word sentence would have only been about 5 (or maybe 10 if you use a lot of adjectives) pages long, so you add another 150 pages of filler.

The Message: We all need friends.

The 10 page story written to say ‘We all need friends”: When Wilbur ran for President of the United States, his campaign slogan was “Lonesome No More.” The plan: everyone in the country will be assigned a new middle name which is a word followed by a number between 1 and 20. Wilbur ended up Daffodil-11, for example. Then, by law, everyone with the same middle name as yours is your brother or sister. Everyone with the same word, but a different number is your cousin. After the plan goes into effect, you suddenly have 10,000 siblings and 190,000 cousins. Presto! You are Lonely No More! You have Friends! You may not like all 10,000 of your new siblings, but surely you will like some of them and since they are your siblings, they will have to interact with you whether they like you or not.

That, let me be clear, is the most philosophically deep part of this whole novel and, yes, it sounds like something a lonely 8 year old would dream up.

Why? Why did this novel happen? As a stand alone book, it is perfectly reasonable to wonder that. The book was savagely criticized everywhere when it came out, so you don’t have to take my word about the quality of this book.

However as a follow up to what has come before, the book makes perfect sense. Vonnegut has nothing left. The increasing nihilism of all his previous books has left him with nothing. In the midst of that nothingness, a small lonely voice cries out. The small voice wants to be lonesome no more; that small voice wants to find community again, someone to love. Vonnegut hears that small voice and tries desperately to construct a structure which might allow that small voice to climb out of the abyss. That structure, shaky and horribly put together (how could it be otherwise?) is this novel. The novel fails as a novel, but does it work in giving Vonnegut a path forward? I have no idea yet. The next novel is entitled Jailbird.