Trevor Busch

For the uninitiated, it might be difficult to describe just what a Kurt Vonnegut novel is actually about.
Typically the plot, characters — and something I can only describe as a Vonnegutian perception of the universe — are so outlandish that they leave many a reader with a puzzled expression and a thirst for a purpose to the writing, if there be one — I myself have finally come to the exasperated conclusion that in most instances, there isn’t.
That being said, somewhere, I’m sure, Vonnegut (who died in 2007) is laughing at the idea that anything he ever wrote had a meaning, or some sort of moral conclusion — laughing all the way to the bank, because his novels often sold in obscene numbers to those who had been convinced that Vonnegut really was “America’s finest black humourist.” And perhaps they read those novels, scratched their heads, and put them on their shelf with the idea that maybe all the critics were drunk that day — or maybe Vonnegut is just their collective joke on the reading public.
Now I’ll admit it’s possible I’m just missing the point. But that leaves me in some pretty good company, because it seems that most people either love Vonnegut (in fact, they’re downright passionate about him), or they loath the man’s writing with a prejudice born of experience.
I would say I fall into the latter category, with a few notable exceptions, which include the novels Mother Night (1961) and Player Piano (1952) — both of which are fine social commentaries on the dangers of moral neutrality and mechanization, respectively. In retrospect, it seems a shame from my perspective these are the first Vonnegut novels I ever read, because everything has been decidedly downhill from there. The novels for which he became most famous, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), are in my opinion a profound exercise in idiocy, served with a big side of the irrelevant. Still, there are those who maintain that Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the finest novels written in the past century. Sentiments like that leave me wondering if they hadn’t read anything but Cracked magazine and Superman comics before they stumbled across Vonnegut’s so-called masterpiece. I find myself constantly baffled by those who seem to discern myriad deep sociological and philosophical messages in Vonnegut’s novels — I don’t consider myself a closed-minded individual, but beacons-from-above, eureka-lightbulb-like moments of clarity? Please. You’d be better off looking in the Sears catalogue.
Again, it could be I just don’t get it. But time after time, I seem to find myself reading another Vonnegut opus with the faint hope the man will have given me something to compare with his earlier novels — but I’m constantly disappointed.
My latest cross-dimensional shift into the Vonnegutian universe consisted of the highly-acclaimed Cat’s Cradle (1963), which apparently cemented his reputation as one of America’s finest writers. One description of Vonnegut in The Atlantic Monthly indicated, “We laugh in self-defense.” Well, they might all be chuckling it up over in New England, but there’s one reader here in Alberta whose defense might have been better served by wadding it up and using it for toilet paper.
While the novel, in truly irreverent Vonnegut style, explores issues like the consequences of science gone wild, hypocritical aspects of organized religion, and ultimately the end of the world — it is done so with such irritatingly inane plot developments and bizarrely unrealistic characters that the messages, if there are any, hardly punch through to the reader. It features a midget protagonist, a religion based almost solely on lies developed by a calypso singer named Bokonon, and reaches its climax in a fictional flea-bitten banana republic somewhere in the Caribbean.
With a disjointed and displaced plot, as well as chapters which one might have to seek a higher power to discover their relevancy to the rest of the body of the novel, Cat’s Cradle (Dial Press, Random House, New York) is another bewilderingly bad outing from Vonnegut. The main theme of the novel I can discern is that human society is built upon lies, and that all of us are liars, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it but accept our fate.
Perhaps what I dislike about Vonnegut’s novels most is what other people most enjoy — his twisted, so-called sense of humour. There is very little of the purely realistic on which to anchor a reader, which in my opinion leaves most of his novels dull, with the occasional borderline laugh, and above all self-congratulatory expositions of poor literary value hovering dangerously close to lavatory quality.
Cat’s Cradle did little to dispel this less-than-glowing description of Vonnegut’s novels on my part. It was a favourite amongst the 1960s counter-culture movement that swept America in that generation, and I’m sure more than a few copies probably turned up at Woodstock or criss-crossed the nation in a Volkswagen.
Maybe if I’d have dropped acid before picking it up, I might have discovered what Vonnegut was getting at. On the other hand — maybe I already have.
But don’t take my word for it. I won’t contest Kurt Vonnegut is probably one of the most respected American writers of the 20th century. Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance, is ranked as the 18th greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
I guess there’s no accounting for taste.