Woke up to the news that Kurt Vonnegut is dead.
Over the next couple of days, I expect we’ll see and hear a fair number of news stories, commentaries, and retrospectives . . . unless something more important pushes him off the slippery mind of the collective media, of course.
I wouldn’t say I was a fan of Vonnegut. I’ve only read a handful of his books and, overall, they didn’t strike a deeply resonant chord with me. For the most part, reading Vonnegut made me feel like I was reading something hastily put together and not quite taking itself seriously enough to be good. I suspect that one of the reasons that Vonnegut early on got labeled by some as a science fiction writer is because of these qualities.
But he did write “Slaughterhouse Five” and that book is really quite something. I first read it as part of a page-to-screen class in college — essentially, an English teacher’s excuse to watch movies under the guise of reading some good books that everyone already read in high school — and it really got its hooks into me.
As I’ve already said, a lot of people will say a lot about Vonnegut over the next few days. Most of it will probably be about “Slaughterhouse Five” so I won’t indulge in an autopsy of my own.
But it’s a great book, sad and funny and strange. It sticks in your head, it makes you wish for a way to step backwards and forwards in time, it makes you realize that you can. It is, in short, worth reading.
At the time I first read it, I was discovering all sorts of things about myself and my writing — to say nothing of the collection of Writers who would, for a time, be an informal pantheon for me.
Vonnegut and Beckett made an interesting, absurd marriage. Looking back over the span of fifteen years or so, I see different but equally interesting parallels between Vonnegut and Auster and how they stretch the ideas of authorship and identity inside their stories.
But all of that is pretension, phantom-limb memories of college English classes (hopefully) long since amputated.
That is to say, it doesn’t matter. Vonnegut is dead.
And, for whatever reason, this makes me sad.