This book is too big. Vonnegut has come to be known as a satirist, a science fiction author, an observer of American life and perhaps one of the keenest commentators on the Twentieth Century. And he is, which makes this book too big. It’s all there, in this book. Rudy Waltz and his neutered tone (still the steady clacking of a typewriter) is the vehicle for nearly every conceivable thing that can be said about American life in the decades just after WW2. The stupidity of gun violence saturates the book, although guns themselves make relatively few appearances, nuclear disarmament, the simultaneous beauty and pettiness of the art world, drug abuse, the rise of corporate culture, the immigrant story, the length and breadth of a man’s guilt (both what he should and should not be held accountable for), it’s all here and then some, in this tiny little slip of a book. Rudy Waltz looks on it all with the same dispassion, and it is disquieting, and overwhelming. It is too much to say anything coherent about so soon after reading it. I want to talk about how a chain reaction of wealth and happiness is set off because of the only unselfish act Rudy’s father ever committed in his life, but to do that I’d have to explain about Rudy’s father, and Vonnegut needed an entire book to do that. This book is too big, and there is too much to say. So instead I will say nothing at all. Except: read the book. (My copy is this little battered mass-market paperback, a format I generally hate, but that somehow feels okay when it’s Vonnegut, like his work was meant to fit in your pocket and be with you always, easily.)
Next, the last Vonnegut book for a while, Cat’s Cradle.
