Vonnegut is billed a "America's greatest satirist", and he may well be. But I find him a gentle and melancholy clown rather than a savage Juvenalian or a mocking Horatian. That his books were attacked as obscene seems almost unimaginable in these days of internet porn, but obscenity and vulgarity were never the real reasons for the attacks. Vonnegut has the gift of telling unpalatable truths baldly, and that's what people disliked and loved him for. In this book he assembles bits and pieces from his occasional output, stitching them together with commentary and narrative, some of it quoted from his Uncle John Rauch's family history. Rauch means "smoke", one wonders how much of his story is just so much smoke and mirrors.
The theme that Vonnegut refines out of the dross and breccia of his and our messy lives is that we are lonely because we have lost our extended family, our tribe. We are highly social animals (some scientists argue that our mathematical ability is a side effect of the ability to remember large sets of people and their relationships - kinship is a pattern, a kinship chart is a graph, graphs are representations of sets, and there you are – arithmetic derives from geometry.) We need family, relatives, friends. Barrack Obama's recent success rested in large part on his ability to evoke the American nation as a family. The Republican emphasis on individual responsibility too easily becomes disdain for those who cannot make it on their own - and we all know that we all, especially the self-styled individual successes, depend on each other for whatever material comforts, security, and success falls to our lot. I think Ayn Rand was stupidly wrong: no one can achieve any kind of material success without the (almost entirely anonymous) co-operation of vast numbers of other people, who operate the systems that produce the goods and services that the individual needs to achieve his success.
Vonnegut goes on to say that we need commonly accepted myths, communal narratives that give meaning to our lives. Alone, we cannot have such myths. (It seems to me that the Horatio Alger story has devolved into one of brutal competition, but Alger's stories were founded on notions of mutual help and co-operation as much as on the doctrine of hard work and honesty.) The solitary individual who tries to find his meaning in power and wealth, in acquisition of goods as the signs of success, will find instead an unbearable loneliness. The nuclear family, with its assumption that two people can be all-in-all for each other, fails abysmally. "And they lived happily ever after" is a cruel fantasy. (Keep in mind that in the fairy tales, the marriage of the commoner and the princess occurs in a well-ordered mutually supportive society, the kingdom that the happy couple will inherit.) I think Vonnegut is right.
Well written in Vonnegut's laconic style, a pleasure to read, if not always a pleasure to contemplate. ***
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